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CHAPTER 1
PART I THE GHOSTS OF CHICKAMAUGA
THE RIVER OF DEATH
CHICKAMAUGA BATTLEFIELD
During the summer of 1863, William Rosecrans's Union Army of the Cumberland outflanked Braxton Bragg's Confederate Army of Tennessee and sent the Southerners reeling from central Tennessee into northern Georgia. Bragg stopped there and set a trap, reinforced by a corps from the Army of Northern Virginia under James Longstreet. The two-day struggle at Chickamauga resulted in the second-bloodiest battle of the Civil War and a tremendous Confederate victory that left Rosecrans staggering back to Chattanooga. In the Cherokee language, Chickamauga means "river of death," a terribly appropriate name.
This large battlefield has spawned many ghost stories. Although usually serene during the day, all psychic hell breaks loose after dark. At night, visitors and park rangers alike hear shots, screams and sounds of phantom men running and cavalry charging; have feelings of being watched; and see spectral figures fighting through the thick vegetation. Old Green Eyes prowls for more cadavers, and the Lady in White searches for her fiancé.
The Original Chickamauga Ghost Story
"Did you ever see a ghost?" he asked. "They used to see them on the Chickamauga battlefield just after the war." This first reported ghost from the battlefield was sighted in 1876, as related by Jim Carlock, an early citizen of the Post Oak community, in Susie Blaylock McDaniel's The Official History of Catoosa County. Following a centennial celebration in Chattanooga, Carlock and several other men were riding in a wagon, while a man identified only as Mr. Shields rode alongside on a horse. That portion of the battlefield was deserted, with no houses, and they spotted a figure that measured ten feet in height and had a "big white head." For some unknown reason, Shields rode up to the apparition and hit it, which caused a baby to cry. The ghost, described as a black woman with a load of clothes balanced on her head, shouted, "Let me alone!"
Wild Phantom Cavalry
In the fall of 1976, near the anniversary of the battle, Buck Dugger was running an U.S. Army ROTC training program. Early one morning, he heard the sound of many horses approaching. "You could hear the horses; you could hear the breathing," he said. "You could hear them riding by, and what amazed us was that it was not an easy ride like someone riding through a tranquil park. It was someone riding hellbent for leather." He and his comrades assumed that there was a riding stable nearby and thought no more of it.
Twenty years later, Dugger was back at Chickamauga as a National Park Service (NPS) employee. He learned that there had never been stables in the area where he had heard the horses, but cavalry had been active there during the battle. He also heard other ghostly sounds. "When I was working up close where the trains area would be, the mixture of sounds included wagons and livery and other things, a lot of clanking sounds," he said. "We were along the battle line; it sounded like the hoofbeats were a lot faster, a lot harder."
Psychic Hotline
Late one night, Dugger was installing a new phone system in offices at the battlefield museum. The superintendent's telephone speaker came on "with a dial tone just blaring in his office," he related. When he turned it off, the speaker on the phone in the next office, that of the purchasing agent, activated. He also turned that off, but phones continued to ring in sequence until Dugger had made a circuit of the offices and had returned to his own. All was quiet for a second, but then his phone came on and he suddenly felt very strange. He determined that there had to be a rational explanation. "I'm sure that's what it is," Dugger said. "Because I still have to work here at night, so that's the only thing it can be because I don't believe in ghosts." Despite his rationalizing, the phones were not connected, so they could not have been activated in such a manner.
The Ghoul: Old Green Eyes
Famed ghost hunter Dale Kaczmarek conducted the first in-depth ghost research at Chickamauga. Edward Tinney, chief historian at the battlefield park and a World War II veteran who worked here from 1969 to 1986, told him the legend of Old Green Eyes. The preferred origin of that ghost is that it was a Confederate soldier whose body was destroyed by an artillery shell. Only his head was left to be buried, and it regularly bobs across the battlefield at night, particularly on Snodgrass Hill, moaning piteously while frantically searching for its body.
"History says ghosts in the battlefield such as the Green Eyes tale began happening soon after the war," Tinney said. One employee maintains that the beheaded soldier was a Confederate killed by his Federal brother.
An alternate theory is that Old Green Eyes is a ghoul, a supernatural corpse-eating creature predating the settlers, and perhaps even the Indians. Native American myths describe large, hairy creatures that would make off with children at night. Rumors persist that during lulls in Confederate attacks against Snodgrass Hill, the entity was seen inspecting the recently deceased, choosing the best for its feast. Many bodies were never recovered.
Whichever story you prefer, Old Green Eyes is Chickamauga's most frequently reported haunt, often seen around dusk — two big glowing eyes that approach the unwary, the creature groaning mournfully.
Tinney claimed that he was "not a superstitious man" but freely admitted, "I've seen Green Eyes. You know he's watching. We all know he's watching us. It's enough to make the hair stand up on the back of your neck."
Tinney encountered Old Green Eyes several times. He was hiking a park trail on a foggy night in 1976 when he had a close encounter with a human-like shape that was not human and came within twenty feet of him. "When it passed me," he told Richard Winer in 1981, "I could see his hair was long like a woman's. The eyes — I'll never forget those eyes — they were glaring, almost greenish-orange in color, flashing like some sort of wild animal. The teeth were long and pointed like fangs. It was wearing a dark cape that seemed to be flapping in the wind, but there was no wind. I didn't know whether to run or scream or what."
Tinney was out early that morning, 4:00 or 5:00 a.m., on the anniversary of the battle, walking along a park road to check on reenactment groups camped on the grounds. "As I was walking down, the moon was still out, and you could see just the same as daylight. I noticed someone coming toward me. I thought it might be one of the reenactors but not knowing for certain I moved over to the other side of the road and the closer it came the more apprehensive I get. Because it didn't look normal. It didn't look human."
When just a few feet away, "It turned to me. I turned to it. When it turned to me, it began to smile." The grin on its face, Tinney stated, "said drop dead." As soon as they passed each other, a car came around the bend, headlights blazing through the fog. Tinney walked backward to keep an eye on the figure, which "never looked back at me. After it got parallel with me, it looked forward, and it just kept looking up the road. It dissipated, it vanished. What happened to it?" The creature did not cross the road to his side, as he would have seen it. It did not go into the woods on the other side because the underbrush was impenetrable. "Now where did he go?" Tinney asked. He did not know what it was, but it was definitely not of this world.
"Whatever this was had to be alive at one time because it walked," he thought. "This walked, just like you and I." Other witnesses swear that if the apparition makes eye contact, it will stare a person down until it passes out of sight. "Wherever there has been great suffering," Tinney said, "people are always seeing strange things."
Dead Man's Battlefield
Ranger Charlie Fisher never saw Old Green Eyes, but he attributed two separate one-car wrecks in the park during the 1970s to drivers distracted by the creature. Both cars struck the same tree. The monster has been spotted briefly by several rangers on night patrol, the green eyes passing in front of their vehicles and disappearing into a perpetual mist. It has been reported that each night, a mysterious fog rolls over the Chickamauga battlefield, a phenomenon that is absent outside park grounds.
Yet another legend of Old Green Eyes comes from a battlefield monument dedicated to the 125 Ohio Infantry. The men fought so bravely at Snodgrass Hill that their divisional commander, Thomas Wood, named them the Tiger Regiment, and they were called "Opdycke's Tigers" for their commander, Colonel Emerson Opdycke. The 125 Ohio lost seventeen killed, eighty-three wounded and five missing at Snodgrass Hill.
Atop the monument is a prowling stone tiger carved from stone. The green eyes are said to belong to the wild animal that patrols the hill at night, seeking the regiment's casualties, its emerald eyes glowing menacingly at visitors.
Kaczmarek felt "very queer at Snodgrass Hill ... I did not spend a lot of time on the hill because of this overpowering feeling."
Ghost Horses
Two friends, Kriss and Mark, took a short vacation to Chickamauga on the anniversary of the battle. Although they found the woods, fields and trails of the battlefield rainy, foggy and dark, the men decided to explore an area near Snodgrass Hill. On a trail through the forest, "we heard a loud stomping noise," they informed the website ghoststudies.com, "like a big horse stomping on dry earth," although the ground was saturated with rain. They continued the exploration and "heard the stomping noise again, and a snort. Really loud, and very close." Before quitting for the night, they heard artillery and rifle fire.
Band Practice
Doug Albritton is a scoutmaster in north Georgia who takes Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts camping on the Chickamauga battlefield. In order to tire them out one summer evening, he organized a game of capture the flag, dividing the youths into teams and planting a flag and lantern at the top of Snodgrass Hill. The defenders soon heard the sounds of drums and flutes atop the elevation, according to Georgiana C. Kotarski in Ghosts of the Southern Tennessee Valley. Fearing that a trick was being played, a Scout reported the phenomenon to Albritton. He sent the younger boys to camp and ascended the hill with the older lads. They heard "Civil War–type music" near the cabin. At the log structure, the music ceased, and he heard the sound of a dozen people running for the woods.
The eleven members of the Snodgrass family were home when fighting broke out during the war, but as their home was transformed into a Federal field hospital, they fled for a wooded ravine. There they listened to the roar of battle, the silence of victory and, finally, a Confederate band that played joyfully. Perhaps those were the sounds heard that late summer evening.
Kotarski told of John Hodges, who was cruising the park in 1964, searching for Green Eyes with a Ford convertible full of fellow high school seniors. Parking near the Wilder Tower, they walked into a field, where a light abruptly winked into existence. The light, six feet off the ground and bluish-green, approached through trees and underbrush and split into two lights at a distance of one hundred yards. At that point, the boys conceded the field, leaping into the car and racing away to a loud sound like a shot. The noise turned out to be a rod that cracked beneath the car. Only extreme heat could have caused it, a mechanic believed. John's brother, Jim, a witness and later a tackle at Memphis State University, said, "It scared the pee out of me."
On the night of October 20, 2001, four members of the Foundation for Paranormal Research (FPR) visited Chickamauga to search for Old Green Eyes at Snodgrass Hill. Jennifer McElhannon wrote that the team, including Olivia Newton and Terry Dimbrell, "felt surrounded and sad" with emotions, "enough to fill your mind for a lifetime."
They interviewed a ranger who had been patrolling the park after closing hours one night and received reports of trespassers. Investigating, he drove to the area and found two adults and two children running at full speed. He stopped the family and found them in a hysterical state. While walking through a field, they suddenly became alarmed for no discernible reason and then experienced what they thought was a scent of alcohol. The four looked around and saw nothing but decided to exit the area rapidly. As they ran, an arm appeared from nowhere and scratched one of the adults. The ranger confirmed that the man's shirt was torn, and several scratches were still bleeding. When the ranger searched the area where the incident had occurred, he found nothing visible, but he did experience a horrible stench that could not have emanated from a drunken vagrant.
The ranger pointed out the Opdycke-Tiger monument as the place haunted by Old Green Eyes. The team took many photos and was rewarded with a number of mists and orbs captured by different cameras. Orbs bounced around in different directions, including a small one that shot rapidly across large areas. A golden orb was photographed around the Opdycke-Tiger monument, and a separate frame showed a mist surrounding it.
The Lady in White
Another denizen of Snodgrass Hill is a woman dressed all in white. Many say that her beautiful attire is the wedding gown that she never got to wear in life because her fiancé was killed on this wilderness battlefield. She was buried in the gown and floats across the battlefield night after night, torch held high, searching the fields and woods for him, most often in September and October, but she disappears if witnesses get too close. On the night after the last day of battle, women searched the field for the bodies of loved ones, their lantern lights bobbing erratically as their cries of despair mingled with the screams and moans of the wounded. The lights and cries are still detected by some. Another version has a woman in a white dress singing lullabies to an infant cradled in her arms. That vision is usually observed at dusk and during reenactments of the battle, which occur off-site due to National Park Service rules.
One popular story postulates that a local woman, Abigail Reed (a bridge on the battlefield is named for her family), was engaged to John Ingraham, who joined the Confederate army and served in the First Georgia. After the battle, she found him dead on the battlefield, where he was buried. Probably the only true part of the story is Ingraham's grave on Alexander Bridge Road, the only marked grave on the battlefield. Ingraham, killed late on September 19, was buried by two friends, Charles and James Reed, on their family's property near where the private died.
John Fogarty described a woman who regularly visits Ingraham's grave and purports to converse with his spirit, "which hovers about, soaking up the attention." Fogarty's girlfriend was "seriously creeped out" near the Poe Cabin in the summer of 2000, when she noticed "someone moving through the grass behind her, [she] whirled around to see who it was, and actually saw the grass being stepped on, as if some unseen human was walking toward her. She said, 'Are you friend or foe?' and the thing turned away from her and paced into the woods."
The Power of the Tower
Many ghost stories at Chickamauga center on the eighty-five-foot-high stone observation platform called the Wilder Tower, constructed in 1903 by veterans of Colonel John T. Wilder's brigade. Many men died here at the battle, and during the Spanish-American War, a U.S. Army training camp was located on a hill behind the tower, where more soldiers died of typhoid fever and other diseases. Ranger Jeffery Leathers told Dale Kaczmarek that the structure's cornerstone originally contained a number of souvenirs. When the cornerstone was opened during bicentennial events in 1976, it was found to be empty, despite showing no evidence that it had been previously disturbed. The artifacts had simply vanished.
Ranger Charlie Fisher said that in about 1970, several youths were prowling around the Wilder Tower in the dark. One climbed a lightning rod fourteen feet up, squirmed through an observation slit and then continued up the stairs to the top. He yelled to his friends below, who were drinking beer. A few moments later, the friends heard a scream of terror, and the daredevil leaped through another slit and fell twenty-five feet to the cement below. He was permanently paralyzed and has never revealed what had so frightened him. However, Blue & Gray magazine claimed that he was spooked by noises originating from the buddies throwing empty beer cans against the metal door at ground level.
Another tower story has a young mother dropping her infant from the top and then instantly jumping after it. Photos taken around the tower often manifest unexplainable abnormalities.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Civil War Ghosts of North Georgia"
by .
Copyright © 2013 Jim Miles.
Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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