Odd Little Ghost Stories

It seems that more strange tales come out of the American Civil War than any other war. Often, these tales are bordering on legend and lack details. Others are solid, but still almost unbelievable.

For example, Stonewall Jackson’s arm is 130 buried miles from the rest of his body. Jackson was wounded after the Battle of Chancellorsville in 1864. While on a scouting expedition, his own men fired on him, wounding him in his left arm and right hand. Jackson’s men carried him to a Confederate field hospital four miles away, where his left arm was amputated at 2AM on May 3, 1863. The limb was set aside and is now buried under a stone marker.

Jackson only survived six more days, and was buried in Lexington, VA. The ghost of a weeping woman wanders the Jackson family plot.

In Fredicksburg, Virginia a small black child, age around three or four, sleeps in one of the local battlefields. He is always seen floating about two feet off of the ground.

Ten Mile House in Arkansas is a beautiful home that was used for Union headquarters, and as a prison for Confederate soldiers. Now it is available for parties. One woman was holding a wedding rehearsal and as she was cleaning up, she noticed a terrible odor in the preparation area. She later found that this section was the jail and that the smell was around often. A decomposed body of a Confederate prisoner was once found in that room.

In Hopewell, Virginia stands an old home where a Union soldier once took refuge. A nurse hid the man inside the basement wall when Confederate soldiers came to see if there were any Union sympathizers in the home. The woman was arrested when the soldiers found Union sympathetic items in the house. The soldier in the wall was not discovered, but he could not get out of his hiding place on his own. He died. To this day, he can be heard scratching the inside of the wall for help. His body was found in 1953, during renovations.

During the Battle of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania Hall at Gettysburg College was used as a hospital. It is said that at times the building’s elevator will mysteriously take the car to the basement instead of the requested floor. When the doors open, the passengers witness a grisly Civil War era hospital scene.

After the Battle of Antietam in Maryland there was a great need for gravediggers. The army paid local residents to do this work. One man was paid to bury 50 soldiers, but was too lazy to do the work. He threw the corpses down the well. Many of the bodies landed in odd positions and were left that way.

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