Along the east wall of the cemetery lie dozens of gravestones which, according to local legend, soldiers dug up and displaced. They changed the dates of many on the headstones with their bayonets; one man living to the ripe old age of 421, his neighbor living 544 years, and another man’s son was born 1000 years before his father. The reality is that many graves were exhumed and moved during Savannah’s many yellow fever and malaria epidemics when deaths exceeded the available space in the “Old Burying Ground.”