Civil War Ghost Trails

by Mark Nesbitt

  Dawn of September 18 around the small Maryland hamlet of Sharpsburg was nothing like the dawn of the previous day. The morning revealed fields that were strewn with some 3,650 silent dead and 17,300 moaning wounded. The two armies sat watching one another: Lee expecting a continuation of the attacks from the previous day, the next of which could be fatal to his army; Mc-Clellan seemingly satisfied he had avoided contact with what he fantasized as Lee’s never-ending reserves. Lee began his retreat into Virginia.

  McClellan boasted a great victory, but his main objective of destroying Lee’s army went unfulfilled. The Union general assured Washington that Pennsylvania was now safe from Confederate invasion, but within nine months, the re-formed Army of Northern Virginia would be crossing the Mason-Dixon line again and marching into the Keystone State.

  Politically speaking, the Union victory at Antietam did two things. First, it stymied Confederate hopes for earning recognition as an independent nation from Great Britain. Though arms would continue to be sold to the Confederacy bearing the “Tower” manufacturing stamp and run through the Union blockade, Parliament’s interest in full financial and military support would wane after Antietam. Second, though Lincoln was disappointed that McClellan let Lee slip away, it gave him an opportunity to turn the war into something greater than the internecine struggle it was. After the victory at Antietam, he could issue the Emancipation Proclamation, making official one of the goals of abolishing, in the United States, the curse of human bondage.

  Antietam Ghosts

  As a national park, Antietam is patrolled by park rangers. While the staff may not be as large as that at Gettysburg or the Grand Canyon, they are as dedicated a group as you can find. Their job is to “protect the resource,” meaning the park grounds, the modern facilities, and the historic buildings scattered throughout.

  The Pry House

  The Pry House had been a hospital during the Battle of Antietam and was witness to all the horrors encompassed therein. Wounds made by the soft lead (unjacketed) .58-caliber minié ball, actually a bullet-shaped cone, were devastating. If you were struck in an arm or leg, the lead projectile would flatten and shatter the bone into fragments. The only thing surgeons could do, with literally thousands of cases produced in a few hours, was amputate the limb. A Civil War hospital like the Pry House was a nonstop amputation factory. Limbs were tossed out first-floor windows until they reached the sill and were then carted away to be buried or burned. When a soldier was struck in the body, incredible damage was done. The soft tissues were known to “evacuate” from the path of the bullet, so the body would tear itself apart trying to get away from the insult. The bullet would carry pieces of the uniform, which hadn’t been cleaned in weeks, into the wound. Gut wounds, with their subsequent peritonitis, were nearly always fatal. Worse, the surgeon would dip his hands into the guts of one man, pronounce him incurable, and then wipe a flesh wound of a slightly wounded soldier, who would die of blood poisoning two weeks later. Antibiotics were virtually unknown at the time of the war, so post-operative infections were rampant.

  The Pry House outside of Sharpsburg was used as a hospital during the Battle of Antietam. Union general Israel Richardson died in one of the upstairs rooms.

  The scene at the Pry House, when Gen. Israel Richardson’s wife Fannie arrived to care for her wounded husband, was no doubt frightening beyond anything she had seen before and utterly overwhelming to the senses. Although the general was considered to be only slightly wounded, infection set in and he took a sudden turn for the worse, and Mrs. Richardson would return to Michigan escorting her husband’s dead body.

  Another woman who was affected by the horror of the Pry House was Mrs. Pry herself, who saw her lovely dining room turned into a makeshift operating room. The Prys, like so many others in the country where battles took place, were ruined by the war. Family tradition has her dying of a broken heart. Apparently, both of the women were so affected by their experiences at the house, they have returned in spirit long after their lives ended.

  In spite of careful patrolling by the rangers, sometime in the mid 1970s, the Pry House caught on fire and burned. Fortunately, the brick exterior walls remained, but the interior, both first and second floor, was completely gutted. During the fighting of the fire, something strange was reported by the firemen. According to a story in a local newspaper by Erin Julius, the Washington County firefighters were there when the fire engulfed the second floor and it collapsed. But because of what they saw at one of the second-floor windows, there may have been some discussion among them as to whether they should re-enter the building. A captain was no doubt consulted and they determined that they saw what was clearly impossible: a woman standing in front of one of the windows on the nonexistent second floor.

  The story could be dismissed as a figment of the imagination, although apparently several firefighters were witnesses to the impossible scene. And a second set of witnesses emerged about a year later.

  The park service eventually restored the interior of the Pry House, but before they did two rangers on patrol went out to the place one night. As they circled through the parking lot they noticed something in the gutted building: the figure of a woman standing at the window on the second floor.

  Apparently there was some discussion as to whether they should check it out for a prowler—a prowler who apparently could levitate—but they decided that they could probably investigate it just as well tomorrow, in the daylight.

  As the park was restoring the house, a strange thing was seen by the maintenance foreman’s wife and three or four of the contractor’s crew. Just after the back stairs were completed, those in the house saw an older woman with long blonde hair come down the stairs, almost as if she had been waiting for them to be completed, and pass between the individuals in the crew. She neither spoke nor acknowledged any of them, but they noticed something strange about her. As she passed by, they realized they could see each other through her translucent form.

  Though she appeared once again to cause a worker to quit the job, she has since manifested herself in a more common way. Footsteps are occasionally heard going up and down the steps, unaccompanied by a mortal form to produce the noise.

  Since the historic renovation of the house, the National Park Service has used it as a medical interpretive center. According to Erin Julius, the director has heard each door slam shut individually. He went around opening them all, and it happened again, one at a time. The gentle breeze could have blown one or two on the same side of the house closed because the wind was only blowing in one direction and not swirling like a tornado.

  Later, the director’s twelve-year-old son came down from the second floor and reported that he had seen a woman in nineteenth-century clothing leave one of the offices by going through the wall.

  There was another story Julius related about a park service interpreter who wanted to spend a night in the barn. Reports from the battle indicate that while the house was used for wounded officers, the barn held injured enlisted men. After dark he was gazing out into a field when he saw a lantern swinging through it. The odd part is that it was moving along where the original road ran from the Pry House.

  Sharpsburg

  The town of Sharpsburg was also filled to overflowing with the dead and dying who have left the psychic impressions of their agony. St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in the town was a field hospital during and after the battle. Periodically, nervous neighbors will be awakened by screams coming from the empty church where similar cries once echoed in earnest as limbs were sawn off and tender torso wounds were probed with cold steel. Some have also seen “ghost lights,” possibly orbs, floating in the belfry.

  A man who started with the National Park Service with me at Gettysburg told an interesting story about the historic house he rented. He was awakened in the middle of the night by footsteps roaming around downstairs. He heard them meandering back and forth and then ascending the stairs to the second floor. He reached into his nightstand and pulled o
ut his “little friend,” as he called it, his service revolver, and walked in the dark to stand behind the wall next to the doorway leading downstairs.

  He heard the footsteps coming up the stairs, but remained calm, waiting for the intruder to get close enough. The footsteps were just about at the top of the stairs when he flipped on the light and took the firing position, pointing the gun downstairs at . . . nothing.

  Bloody Lane

  One evening, a group of reenactors decided they wanted to sleep in the infamous Sunken Road. In spite of the fact that the park is closed after dusk, they managed to sneak their way from their cars, across the darkened fields where thousands once lay in their death throes, to one of the most blood-soaked battlefields in all of military history.

  Perhaps they knew something of the crimson-stained history of the site. Along a road carved into the earth by decades of wagon traffic, Confederate soldiers under the command of Daniel Harvey Hill stayed until the last. A famous photo was made of the carnage: human bodies piled one on top of another so that the bottom of the Sunken Road could not be discerned, giving it the name Bloody Lane. Confederate general John B. Gordon’s experience was probably typical. Shot in the face, he fell unconscious, face-down into his own hat, which rapidly filled up with his blood. He considered himself lucky. A bullet had previously drilled a neat hole in the headpiece and the gory liquid drained out, saving Gordon from drowning in his own blood.

  Whether knowledgeable about the awful history of the site or not, the reenactors were about to get a lesson in history they would never forget.

  One by one, in their uniforms, they lay down, on the earth once drenched with the blood of their ancestors, in the very space once filled by the decaying forms of dead men. One by one they began to leave, muttering about hearing whispers close to their ears, of detecting the moans of the wounded and dying echoing in the shallow depression, and of feeling a sudden cold chill sweep across them. All left but one, who laughed at them and said he would see them in the morning.

  The reenactors gathered at their cars and prepared to spend the night there, still uncomfortably close to the fields of death. Within a few minutes they heard a bonechilling scream come from the area of the Bloody Lane. Across the shadowy battlefield they saw a form stumbling towards them. It was their comrade who had chosen to remain in the lane alone. He was shaking and utterly incoherent. It took ten minutes to calm him. When he did, they heard a story that would chase them as far away from the battlefield as they could get.

  The Sunken Road at Antietam, which came to be known as “Bloody Lane” after being the site of fierce fighting.

  He was lying in the lane, laughing to himself at his cowardly companions. Sure, he had heard the whisperings and the moans and felt the chills, but relegated them to his imagination and hardened his determination to stay while the others left. Lying on his back, he suddenly heard a rustling in the grass next to him. Out of the corner of his eye he saw between his arm and chest, emerging from the earth, a human arm.

  This was finally too much, but as he started to rise to leave, the disembodied arm and hand turned and pressed down with physical pressure on his chest, pushing him back to the ground and holding him there.

  That was when his companions heard him scream and when the phantom arm and hand released him.

  Those seeking an explanation for how an ectoplasmic limb could physically hold a person down must look elsewhere. But it has happened before, and may very well again, especially when one chooses to counterfeit the dead.

  Fredericksburg

  The Battle of Fredericksburg illustrated decisively the futility of military tactics of the past, and the innovation and horror of military tactics to come. It showed the importance of logistics and planning, and how the blunderings of an awkward military bureaucracy can bog down a campaign and decide, weeks before the fighting, the outcome of the battle. It also displayed, once again, the indomitable courage of the American soldier.

  On November 7, 1862, the command of the Federal Army of the Potomac was transferred from Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan to Maj. Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside. Within three days, the new Union commander presented a plan of battle to the government. The whole plan depended upon Burnside getting his army of 120,000 quickly across the Rappahannock River at Fredericksburg in order to strike south towards Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy. Since Confederates had burned all the bridges across the Rappahannock, Burnside needed portable pontoon bridges to arrive at Fredericksburg precisely when his army did, before Robert E. Lee and his Confederates discovered the Federals’ intentions and opposed the crossing.

  The first of the Federals’ “Grand Divisions” arrived across the Rappahannock from Fredericksburg in the afternoon of November 17. The pontoon bridges, however, had not. Lee was now tipped off as to where the Yankees were headed and began to concentrate his army, which would eventually number 78,000, at Fredericksburg.

  The Fredericksburg skyline at dusk.

  The bridges finally arrived November 25. Shortly after moonset, around 1:00 A.M., on December 11, engineers from the Army of the Potomac began dragging the cumbersome pontoon boats down the slope from Chatham, the eighteenth-century mansion on Stafford Heights. Under the cover of darkness and fog on the river, the engineers got the bridges built about halfway across.

  Brig. Gen. William Barksdale’s Mississippi Brigade waited in rifle pits and riverfront dwellings in Fredericksburg and listened to the sounds of construction echoing through the misty night. Barksdale had determined to delay the Federals’ crossing for as long as he could so that Lee could gather his forces together.

  Out in the middle of the river on the unfinished bridges, the unarmed engineers and construction troops heard the bell in the clock tower of Saint George’s Episcopal Church, one of the landmarks of the Fredericksburg skyline, toll 5:00 A.M. Through the rising mist, one of the Federal officers saw a line of human arms flailing up and down: the unmistakable motion of men ramming home charges in muzzle-loading weapons. A few minutes later, an engineer on the end of one of the bridges heard an ominous shout through the fog: “Fire!” and suddenly bullets ripped into the wood of the bridges and tore through the flesh of the men. Union soldiers collapsed upon the unfinished bridge or tumbled, helpless, into the icy river, weighed down by their heavy greatcoats. Those who could fled back in panic to the shore, but there was no safety there. For the rifled musket of the Civil War, the opposite bank of the Rappahannock was easily within range, and men, mules, and horses went down.

  The same thing was happening across from the old city boat landing. Confederates rushed down the old ferry access, “Rocky Lane,” to the end of the docks and fired into the engineers on the bridges already two-thirds across. Work on that bridge ended as the Federals ran for their lives back to the opposite riverbank.

  The Union commanders decided that the Confederates must be routed by artillery, and began a bombardment of the town. By 10:00 A.M., 183 Northern cannons were firing and Fredericksburg was being blasted to pieces. When the gunners were satisfied they had done their job, the engineers returned to the bridges. Just as they began to work, the Mississippians emerged from the rubble and started picking them off again. This sequence repeated itself several times throughout the morning.

  Meantime, although another bridge a mile downstream at the “Lower Crossing” was completed, Burnside refused to allow his troops to cross until the upstream bridges were complete. He feared they would be isolated without support and cut to pieces.

  At the Upper and Middle Crossings, work was still stymied by the pesky rebel sharpshooters. At 12:30 P.M., Burnside ordered all available Union cannons to fire on the town, and for an hour they again pulverized Fredericksburg. In all, some 8,000 shells rained down on the city. Brick buildings suffered, but the shells merely passed through the wooden structures, leaving holes that occupying Confederates used to fire through. Sophia Street, closest to the river, looked like it had been plowed and virtually every window in the city had
been broken out.

  Burnside’s detailed plans, established some five weeks before, were crumbling before his eyes, with his entire army held up by a handful of obstinate rebel riflemen. At that moment, Brig. Gen. Henry Hunt, Burnside’s artillery chief, passed on an idea that one of the engineers had suggested: ferry a few infantrymen across in pontoon boats to drive the persistent Confederates back away from the river so the engineers could finish the bridges.

  Burnside hesitated. Something like that had never been done before in the history of the U. S. Army. Could it be successful, or would Burnside be merely sentencing the men to their own execution in the middle of the river? Burnside wanted only volunteers.

  Col. Norman J. Hall’s 7th Michigan, when asked if they would cross the river in boats to drive out the enemy, responded with three cheers. The waterborne assault was preceded by a massive artillery bombardment beginning at 3:00 P.M. When the fire slackened, the boats would shove off.

  At 3:30, the big guns fell silent and the assault troops of the 7th Michigan rushed to the boats. They had scarcely loaded when the Confederates opened on them again. Under orders not to return fire but to concentrate on paddling or poling across, the men were helpless. The boats took terrific fire until they were two-thirds of the way across, then a curious thing happened. The Confederate fire slowed to a trickle. The steep riverbank below Sophia Street hid the assault craft from the Confederates and the actual landing was made in relative safety.

  But, the worst was yet to come. The landing party rushed up the slope to Sophia Street and began surrounding the houses where the rebels hid. They had been given the order, “No quarter,” or take no prisoners. While some disobeyed the order, others rushed into houses and shot or bayoneted every man inside. In less than a half hour, Sophia Street was cleared.