The area where so many died in Black Hills became a memorial. In the years after the battle, local Crow people avoided the area at night. They called the superintendent of the park “ghost herder.” The Crow believed that when the superintendent lowered the flag at night, the spirits of the soldiers and warriors rose from their graves and walked among the living. When the flag was raised in the morning, the dead came back to rest … until the next night.
Much of World War I was fought in the trenches of the Western Front, a four hundred-mile stretch of battlefields through France to the coast of Belgium. The Allied and Central Power armies dug these long, deep ditches and then fought from the relative safety of underground. Occasionally an army would surge into the open space between the trenches, known as “no-man’s-land.” More often than not, that surge would get them killed. It was dangerous to recover the dead, so the bodies would often be left lying there.
Millions of soldiers lived for years in the trenches, which filled with mud when it rained and froze to ice when it was cold. Overrun with rats, lice, and fleas, the soldiers were never clean or dry and it was hard to sleep. Artillery would explode nearby, burying soldiers alive in the pits. So many bodies mixed in the bombed earth that hands, heads, and feet would poke out of the ground.
“We are all used to dead bodies or pieces of men, so much so that we are not troubled by the sight of them,” wrote one Canadian soldier. “There was a right hand sticking out of the trench in the position of a man trying to shake hands with you, and as the men filed out they would often grip it and say, ‘So long, old top, we’ll be back again soon.’ ”
Frank Iriam, a sniper in the First Canadian Division, described how frightening it was to be alongside these fallen soldiers on the Western Front. “You could feel the pulse of the thousands of dead with their pale hands protruding through the mud here and there and seeming to beckon you,” he wrote in his memoir. “You could feel the presence of something not of this earth. Akin to goblins.” And Iriam was not the only soldier haunted by their spirits.
Canadian soldiers examining a skull on Vimy Ridge.
Another Canadian soldier wrote to his mother, “One night while carrying bombs, I had occasion to take cover when about twenty yards off I saw you looking towards me as plain as life.” Shocked, he crawled toward this vision of his mother. A German shell suddenly exploded where he had previously been. “Had it not been for you, I certainly would have been reported ‘missing,’ ” the soldier wrote. “You’ll turn up again, won’t you, mother, next time a shell is coming?”
When the British Empire declared war against the Central Powers, Canada entered the war with them. Both armies fought for years without making significant advances. One area that saw a lot of action was Vimy Ridge, a long, high hill in northern France. The Germans had captured it early in the war and built an extensive tunnel system underground. Unsuccessful attempts to recapture the hill in 1914 and 1915 by the British and French led to hundreds of thousands of deaths.
The Canadians were tasked with making another attempt in the fall of 1916. They spent months strategizing, preparing, training, and stockpiling supplies leading up to the early April attack. They dug pathways underneath the German tunnels and filled them with mines that would explode. For more than a week before the battle, the Allies bombarded the ridge with over a million shells.
The battle was scheduled to begin on April 9, 1917, at 5:30 a.m. Frederick George Scott, a British priest, later wrote in his memoirs, “At five-fifteen the sky was getting lighter and already one could make out objects distinctly in the fields below. The long hand of my watch was at five-twenty-five. The fields, the roads, and the hedges were beginning to show the difference of colour in the early light. Five-twenty-seven! In three minutes the rain of death was to begin. In the awful silence around it seemed as if Nature were holding her breath in expectation of the staggering moment. Five-twenty-nine! God help our men! Five-thirty! With crisp sharp reports the iron throats of a battery nearby crashed forth their message of death to the Germans, and from three thousand guns at that moment the tempest of death swept through the air. It was a wonderful sound. The flashes of guns in all directions made lightnings in the dawn. The swish of shells through the air was continuous, and far over on the German trenches I saw the bursts of flame and smoke in a long continuous line, and, above the smoke, the white, red and green lights, which were the S.O.S. signals from the terrified enemy.”
The barrage was perfectly timed so that the artillery hit and then the Canadian troops rushed in before the German soldiers had time to regroup. Canadian Corps commander Sir Julian Byng advised his troops, “Chaps, you shall go over exactly like a railroad train, on time, or you shall be annihilated.” Most of the ridge was taken by noon on the first day. Harry A. Chalmers wrote in a letter, “Well it’s some sight to see a battlefield after the thing is over. There is not a square inch of ground [that has not] been touched by shell fire. It’s just a mess of shell holes, barb wire and torn trenches. The most awful mess I ever seen … The sights around the field are terrible looking. I hope I don’t witness anything like it again.”
The trenches at Vimy Ridge.
Will Bird had joined the Canadian forces after the death of his brother Stephen in 1915. During the Battle of Vimy Ridge, he was sent out one night to lay barbed wire with a few other men. They didn’t finish until after midnight, so they couldn’t return to their trenches. Instead, they shared a small shelter known as a “bivvy” with a few soldiers from another company. He had been asleep a few hours when he felt someone pulling him out of the bivvy. He later wrote in his memoir, “In an instant I was out of the bivvy, so surprised I could not speak. I was face to face with my brother, Steve, who had been killed in 1915! … Steve grinned as he released my hands, then put his warm hand over my mouth as I started to shout my happiness. He pointed to the sleepers in the bivvy and to my rifle and equipment. ‘Get your gear,’ he said softly.”
Bird grabbed his equipment and walked quickly through the sleeping troops, trying to keep pace with his brother. He ran up close and asked, “Why didn’t you write Mother?” His brother replied, “Wait, don’t talk yet.”
Bird began to wonder how his brother had found him and why he didn’t have any gear. He briefly stopped to pick up some gear he had dropped, and then he had to run to catch his brother, who was ducking into a passageway. When he got to the passageway, he couldn’t see Steve. He called his brother’s name, but there was no response. He searched the area but couldn’t find him. So Bird sat down against a wall, figuring his brother would find him. He fell asleep.
“Suddenly I was shaken awake,” Bird later wrote. “Tommy had me by the arm and was yelling. ‘He’s here! Bill’s here!’ I stumbled up, dazed, looked at my watch. It was nine o’clock.
“ ‘What’s made you come here?’ Tommy was asking. ‘What happened?’
“ ‘What’s all the row about?’ I countered.
“ ‘You should know. They’re digging around that bivvy you were in. All they’ve found is Jim’s helmet and one of Bob’s legs.’
“ ‘Legs!’ I echoed stupidly. ‘What do you mean?’
“ ‘Don’t you know that a big shell landed in the bivvy? They’ve been trying to find something of you.’ ”
When Bird returned to the spot where he had been sleeping, he found “there was a great cavity in the embankment and debris was scattered over the whole area.”
William Longstaff’s Ghosts of Vimy Ridge.
The Battle of Okinawa was one of the last and bloodiest of World War II. A combination of US Army and Marine forces landed on the tiny Japanese island on April 1, 1945. For the next eighty-two days, it was a muddy bloodbath. Halfway through the battle, on May 7, Germany surrendered, ending the war in Europe. However, the fighting continued in the Pacific.
Marine Dale Hansen was in the thick of it on Hill 60 when, armed with a rocket launcher, he crawled over and then destroyed an enemy bunker. His rocket launc
her was destroyed, so “he seized a rifle and continued his one-man assault. Reaching the crest of a ridge, he leaped across, opened fire on six Japanese and killed four before his rifle jammed. Attacked by the remaining two Japanese, he beat them off with the butt of his rifle.” These heroics helped his company secure Hill 60. However, Hansen was shot and killed three days later by a Japanese sniper, never knowing that he would receive the Medal of Honor for his actions.
But this wasn’t the last Okinawa would see of Private Hansen. His blood-spattered ghost would later visit the Marine camp that eventually bore his name.
The small island of Okinawa, 350 miles off the coast of Japan, was essential to the United States’ planned attack on the Japanese mainland. In preparation for the landing, 1,500 ships from the US Navy bombarded the beach with tens of thousands of shells, rockets, and units of napalm, which burned all the plants and trees. The Japanese air force attacked these ships, sending in their kamikaze.
Ray Anderson, a sailor in the navy, remembered when one of those deadly suicide planes began to dive-bomb his ship. “Firing our guns we hit the plane so the pilot barely missed the mast of our ship … [He] flew about 10 feet over my head … exploding in the sea about 50 yards from the ship and lifting the bow of our ship partially out of the water, leaving me soaking wet from water that came over us … Hundreds of beautiful tropical fish floated to the surface.” During the battle, waves of kamikaze killed nearly five thousand US Navy men, wounded another five thousand, sank thirty-six ships, and damaged nearly four hundred more.
On Easter Sunday, the first of more than 545,000 American troops attacked the seventy-mile-long island, expecting to have to fight the Japanese for every inch of beach. But it didn’t initially happen. For a few days, the troops moved from the beaches to the interior of the lush island with little resistance.
That ended on April 6, when they reached Japanese troops waiting for them in well-fortified caves and positions that ran the width of the island. The fighting from then on was so fierce that it took the US forces nearly six weeks to advance only four miles.
US forces landing on the island of Okinawa in April 1945.
Throughout the battle, it rained almost nonstop, sometimes ten inches of water in a day, turning the ground into mud. Marine William Manchester later recalled that the bombardment had burned away all the tropical plants, writing, “What was left resembled a cratered moonscape. But the craters were vanishing, because the rain had transformed the earth into a thin porridge—too thin even to dig foxholes [trenches for safety]. At night you lay on a poncho as a precaution against drowning during the barrages. All night, every night, shells erupted close enough to shake the mud beneath you at the rate of five or six a minute. You could hear the cries of the dying but could do nothing … The mud beneath our feet was deeply veined with blood. It was slippery. Blood is very slippery. So you skidded around, in deep shock, fighting as best you could.”
During the nearly three-month battle, as many as one hundred thousand people who lived in Okinawa died. Many were killed by US bombs or while fighting as part of local reserve units. Many others hid in caves and refused to surrender. Zenichi Yoshimine, a child at the time, recalled, “We were taught that the Americans … were monsters and beasts, and not humans. So, if you were caught by them, you would have your ears and nose cut off, be blinded, and be run over by the tanks.” Without food and clean water, many of those hiding would die of starvation or malaria.
The marines making their way through Okinawa.
Many Okinawans who died in the war were students recruited to fight for the Imperial Japanese Army. Teenage boys joined what was called the Blood and Iron Imperial Corps. “We wanted to be of use to the country as quickly as we could,” recalled the only survivor of a signal corps unit. “We were consumed by a burning desire to offer our lives in defense of the nation. We had no fear of death whatsoever.” Female students in the Himeyuri Student Corps served as medical assistants, often dealing with terrible wounds and amputations with little training. One of these assistants, Yoshiko Shimabukuro, later told reporters, “We only had basic training in how to put on bandages, but the wounded soldiers they brought in were beyond help. They had legs ripped off, their intestines were falling out, faces missing. We simply had no idea what to do.” There were 221 students and 18 teachers of the Himeyuri Corps, with an additional 84 assigned to the medical units. By the end of the battle, 217 of them were dead.
US marine Hart Spiegel of Topeka, Kansas, tries to communicate with two Japanese child soldiers captured during the Battle of Okinawa.
After eighty-two days of fighting, the United States finally took the island on June 22, 1945. The plan originally had been to use Okinawa as a launch point to reach Japan. But the vicious battle had convinced the American government that it would be better to use the atomic bomb on Japan to end the war instead.
After World War II ended, American forces remained in Okinawa. On a dark, foggy evening in 1954, Corporal William Fetters was stationed on guard at one of the military bases. Out of the mists walked a marine, asking if Fetters had a light for his cigarette. Fetters complied and noticed blood on the man’s uniform. Before he could ask what was wrong, the man turned and disappeared into the night. Though he was rattled, Fetters assumed he was just tired and was seeing things.
Weeks later, Fetters was on duty again, working with a Japanese sentry. After a rain, who came walking out of the darkness but the same marine! Again he asked, “Got a light?” before disappearing. With someone else there as a witness, Fetters knew he wasn’t crazy. More sightings of the smoking marine happened over the next few months.
The next year, all the camps within the base were renamed for marines who had won the Medal of Honor. Fetters attended the ceremony, where he recognized one of the portraits—it was his late-night visitor! Dale Hansen, who had been so heroic during World War II, was still haunting the island a decade later.
Many people visit battlefields to better imagine what happened during the wars that were fought there. They also want to pay respect to the soldiers who lost their lives. That’s why visiting can be a powerful reminder of the horrors. It can also be a deterrent against going to war in the future.
As Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman wrote, “I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.”
General William T. Sherman at Federal Fort No . 7.
These battlefields are the site of so much death that it is no surprise that so many are haunted. It would be more surprising if they weren’t! These poor spirits are stuck on Earth, forced to replay their terrible deaths over and over. They don’t mean any harm; they just haven’t accepted that they are dead.
So if you ever encounter a battlefield ghost, hope that you are the last to ever see it. These spirits deserve a little peace after so much war.
1. Demon Fire: Battle of Dan-no-ura, Japan, AD 1185
Tashiro, Osamu. The Samurai Handbook. Gakken, 2019.
2. Take No Prisoners: Battle of Culloden, Scotland, April 16, 1746
Strachan, Linda. The Dangerous Lives of the Jacobites. Kelpies, 2019.
3. Headless Horseman: Paoli Massacre, Pennsylvania, September 21, 1777
Tarshis, Lauren. I Survived the American Revolution, 1776. Scholastic Inc., 2017.
4 . General “Mad Anthony” Wayne’s Restless Ghost: Pennsylvania, December 3, 1796
Wayland, MJ. 50 Real American Ghost Stories. Hob Hill Books, 2013.
5. Blown to Bits: Siege of Fort Erie, Canada, August 15, 1814
Raum, Elizabeth. The Dreadful, Smelly Colonies: The Disgusting Details About Life in Colonial America. Capstone, 2011.
6. Victory or Death!: Battle of the Alamo, Texas, March 6, 1836
Hale, Nathan. Alamo All-Stars. Amulet Books, 2016.
7. A Harvest of Death: Battle of Gettysburg, Penns
ylvania, July 1, 1863
Tarshis, Lauren. I Survived the Battle of Gettysburg, 1863. Scholastic Inc., 2013.
8. Custer’s Doomed Stand: Battle of Little Bighorn, Montana, June 26, 1876
Walker, Paul Robert. Remember Little Bighorn. National Geographic Children’s Books, 2015.
9. Ghosts of the Western Front: Battle of Vimy Ridge, France, April 12, 1917
Hale, Nathan. Treaties, Trenches, Mud, and Blood. Amulet Books, 2014.
10. “Got a Light?”: Battle of Okinawa, Japan, May 1945
Giorello, Joe. Great Battles for Boys: WW2 in the Pacific. Wheelhouse Publishing, 2016.
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