Civil War Ghost Trails

by Mark Nesbitt

  It was a clear sunny day in the Wilderness Battlefield and the corn rows were still standing. I was meeting two special guests that day, two descendants of Confederate general James Longstreet. We met and toured the house and grounds. I had explained the home’s use as a hospital in the 1863 Battle of Chancellorsville, as well as its Union occupation in 1864. We then took the short walk to the cemetery past the garden and through the high corn rows out along the grassy path. There we began to speak to the lack of headstones as the family kept a Bible with locations and names of the deceased.

  I then began to speak of the one and only headstone. This was the stone marker denoting the location of Confederate general Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson’s amputated left arm he lost from a friendly-fire incident in 1863. Jackson was wounded on the evening of May 2, as he reconnoitered after his famous flank attack. He was brought back to a field hospital just north of the Wilderness tavern. After his amputation, Jackson’s chaplin, Beverley Tucker Lacy, the brother of Ellwood’s owner J. Horace Lacy, wrapped Jackson’s arm in a cloth and walked the quarter mile or so to the small cemetery, where he carefully buried it.

  Several years later, in 1903, the present stone was placed to mark the site of Jackson arm. This is still the only marker found in the cemetery.

  As the three of us were discussing the eerily similar stories of both Jackson’s and their famous ancestor Longstreet’s woundings— both were shot nearly to the day a year apart and both by friendly fire—two horses appeared out of the cornfield, stopped, and looked at us over the old rail fence. One horse was bareback while the other was in full saddle. Several things were odd about this besides the strange timing. Noting that General Longstreet recovered from his wounds and would return to the war effort but that Jackson died several days later after his wounding, the dress of the horses seemed to have more meaning.

  It was interesting that one man would die and one would live while one horse was bareback and the other fully saddled as if waiting for its rider to return and gallop off to another battle.

  The horses stayed a mere thirty or forty seconds and then ran off. They were not seen by any other visitor at the site nor did anyone seem to be looking for a couple of strays.

  Local lore has a visitor to Ellwood many years ago shooting himself in one of the upstairs rooms. Perhaps that accounts for the experience one Fredericksburg man wrote about online:

  We drove out to the spot I remembered and parked the car up the small pull off in the road and cut the lights . . . Well [,] up the path we went, gripping the flashlight and following the lighted beam that was lit before us. It led us to a large cornfield that at night pretty much freaked me out. We trudged on further into the lengthy rows of field till we arrived at the backside of the house. It was there that I turned off the flashlight and turned on the gear. I aimed the laser temp reader [a ghost-hunting tool] on the side of the house and gained readings, but no spikes to raise my attention levels. It was then that we heard it, a loud BANG inside the house. We both jumped and laughed quietly as we huddled together and then heard a noise that sounded like something sliding over a hollow wood floor. At this point we were on the east side of the house and decided to turn on the flashlight because we were afraid we were going to either fall over something or get jumped by the Chupacabra. I turned it on and the initial spot of light was at the ground displaying my sneakers in the glow. As I raised it up my eye caught a flash of light up in the small attic window. As the years went by I might have convinced myself that the flash was the reflection of my flashlight beam illuminating the dated glass of that small attic window. I moved the beam over to that window and was lowering it down the house when I heard the bang again and directed my light toward the large firstfloor window in front of me. I caught a faint flash of shadows in that window rushing from left to right and quickly and instinctively followed the movement with the light till it planted its glow on the other first-floor window to the right. It was there that in a moment’s notice we both saw the same thing. It was a man possibly in his 70s with wispy facial hair and dressed in a blue coat. In that quick moment of discovery I took off running. Without saying a word . . . I ran faster than I knew I could . . . around the side of the house, through the cornfield and down the path towards the car. I failed to notice that my friend was right next to me running equally as fast. We jumped into the car and started it and as we were heading up the road I asked what he saw. He described the same thing I witnessed in detail . . . he described the same thing I experienced. In the days after, I was trying to research what the Ellwood Manor was and how possibly we saw what we saw. It wasn’t a homeless man living in the home, it wasn’t park service occupying the dwelling . . . we just experienced the paranormal at the Ellwood Manor and an experience to tell for a lifetime.

  The Phantom Fires of the Wilderness

  A lifetime resident of Spotsylvania County told the story of strange lights that have been seen on the western edge of the Wilderness from Route 15 between Culpeper and Orange. She called them the “Phantom Fires of the Wilderness.” Their source is unknown and when people go to examine them, there is no evidence that there ever were fires there—no burned wood, no scorched earth, no smoldering charcoal. (There have been other reports of phantom fires at Gettysburg and other battlefields.) Called “ghost lights,” or “spook lights,” they are well known in paranormal circles. As modern motorists drive along Route 15 near the Wilderness, could they be getting a glimpse back in time at the campfires of an army that had long ago marched to its dissolution and whose soldiers have decomposed along with it?

  Haunted Houses in the Wilderness

  The area called the Wilderness was literally a wilderness for hundreds of years before the nineteenth-century battle there. Trees there had been harvested to make charcoal, and so by the time of the battle, much of the area was secondary growth and tangled, matted forest floor. A few main roads ran through it and a railroad was attempted, but the Wilderness refused to be tamed.

  Today, it pretty much remains a wilderness, except for a few private developments within the national park boundaries. The modern homes built within these developments should be nice, quiet places in the woods, but reports from residents reveal that they are not a quiet as they should be.

  A woman related to me some stories about her modern home built within one of the developments that abuts the battlefield. In fact, she said, there are some of the original Civil War–era trenches, where soldiers fought and died, running across her backyard. Periodically in the evening, she will look up from her work inside the house and see through her windows vague, shadowy, humanlike forms moving across her lawn. They seem to appear out of nowhere and fade back into whatever world they came from. It has happened often enough that the family has almost become used to it.

  A former law-enforcement officer, whose work is so well respected that he has been asked to appear on television, lives with his family near the Wilderness Battlefield in a beautiful, spacious, modern home. As if to remind us, however, of their ability to transcend time and space, the ghosts reveal themselves seemingly anywhere they choose.

  One evening, the family had just finished dinner. Dishes were cleared and the table readied for breakfast the next morning. Casually looking down the hall, the wife was startled. There, in their modern hallway, was a man dressed in a disheveled military uniform. She knew it was a uniform of the Civil War era. The soldier was moving across the hall. She thought he appeared to enter one of the rooms, because passing through the wall was impossible. She and her husband investigated and found no one in any of the rooms along the hall, and so the impossible became the only explanation.

  EVP and Dowsing Rod Findings

  My wife Carol and I have visited the Wilderness Battlefield a number of times over the years. While researching this book, she took her dowsing rods to one of the temporary cemeteries there. A year before, I watched (and recorded on my cell phone) as she explored with her dowsing rods an abandoned church graveyard outside
of Fredericksburg. It was fall and the gravesites were invisible under the carpet of leaves. As she walked along, the rods began to cross. Suddenly, she dropped a few inches as she stepped into one of the abandoned graves. She backed out and the rods uncrossed. She stepped into the grave several more times; each time the rods crossed. Later we read that dowsing rods will cross at the feet of the dead. Why, I don’t know.

  And why would the rods cross over empty graves? The only answer that seems possible is that there is still some energy left there from the human body that once occupied it.

  As Carol walked among the graves, we could barely see some of the depressions. The graves were not very deep to begin with, yet each time she approached one, the rods would begin to cross. As she stepped into the grave, they crossed completely.

  During an investigation of the Wilderness on July 18, 2005, I captured some EVP. In the first recording I asked some questions of the Stonewall Brigade, including who was your commander. The brigade commander was James A. Walker, but the EVP doesn’t sound like that name. Perhaps the entity who answered was from one of the individual regiments in the brigade. Interestingly, the 27th Virginia was commanded at the Wilderness by a nineteen-year-old man who was killed by a bullet to the head. He had just received his promotion that morning. His name was Philip Frazer. To me, the answer to who commanded the men sounds like “Frazer.”

  Another EVP caught at the Wilderness is very loud. Sometimes the entities whisper and sometimes they are so loud you cannot understand what they are saying. The loud EVPs, to some, are frightening; they think the entity is angry, but this isn’t necessarily true. Remember, the entity is not communicating in the normal way, vibrating air through a flesh-and-blood voice box. The physical means to produce sound has decomposed years ago. If they are using electromagnetics with which to communicate, their ability to modulate their communication is more difficult.

  Spotsylvania Court House

  If not for the fires in the Wilderness, Robert E. Lee might have lost the next major battle with Ulysses S. Grant, and the American Civil War could have ended a year earlier.

  Unlike preceding commanders of the Union Army, Grant turned southward instead of retreating from Lee’s Confederate Army after a defeat, an indication of the type of war that would be fought from now on. His objective was a crossroads that would allow his army to round the Confederate’s right flank and move between them and Richmond, forcing Lee into the open to fight a battle where Grant chose. The crossroads Grant was after was Spotsylvania Court House.

  Lee was under the impression that Grant, like his predecessors, would withdraw toward Fredericksburg to regroup and resupply. He was in no hurry, then, when he ordered Richard Anderson’s division to begin their march toward Spotsylvania Court House at 3:30 on the morning of May 8. But the Wilderness, like some untamed entity, intervened once again in the affairs of men.

  The smoldering pines and the sickening smell of the roasting bodies of men and horses drove Anderson to begin his march several hours earlier than ordered. He didn’t halt his column until the last of his men cleared the fouled air. Anderson had inadvertently stolen a march on Grant. When he learned of the Union Army approaching the Spotsylvania crossroads, he was in a position to counter their move.

  He sent two brigades toward the crossroads to drive back Union cavalry there and two more over Laurel Hill to intercept the Union infantry of Maj. Gen. Gouverneur K. Warren’s Fifth Corps, advancing down the Brock Road. As Anderson’s men crested the hill, they were met by none other than the famed Confederate cavalry commander, Maj. Gen. J. E. B. Stuart himself, who took command of the rebel foot soldiers. “Run for the rail piles,” Stuart ordered. “The Federal infantry will reach them first if you don’t run.” In what has been called one of the Confederate cavalry’s finest days, they held off Union infantry at Laurel Hill and Federal cavalry at the courthouse until more of their own infantry could arrive.

  Warren, stung by accusations of tardiness and a reluctance to fight in the Wilderness, was determined to press forward this time. Thus, in a hurry, he sent his troops into battle as they arrived on the field and so ended up fighting in piecemeal fashion, one brigade at a time attacking entrenched Confederates.

  Between 11:00 A.M. and 1:00 P.M., the opposing artillery dueled, but with little effect. By 1:30, Meade had ordered Sedgwick’s corps to assist Warren. They did not arrive on the Laurel Hill battlefield, however, until early evening, having marched the Piney Branch Road past the burning bodies of the dead who had fought there earlier. When they finally got organized for their assault, they faced a Confederate line that had all day to dig in. The attack was repulsed.

  As more of the Confederate Army arrived on May 9, their line soon resembled an inverted V, with a pronounced bulge at the apex, which the soldiers named “The Mule Shoe.” Their apprehension about the position came from the fact that it could be enfiladed on either side: Bullets and shells being fired at one side would fall in the rear of the other, and a breakthrough on one side of the Mule Shoe would necessarily end up in the rear of the other side. But it did offer Lee the advantage of an interior line, whereby troops could be shuttled quickly across the area behind the lines from a safe point to an endangered one.

  One of the heroes of Gettysburg was soon to fall. Maj. Gen. John Sedgwick, commander of the Federal Sixth Corps, had been warned of the persistent rebel sharpshooters in the area across from the Spindle Farm, where some artillery was stationed. Heedless of the warnings, he thought the sharpshooters too far away to be of any harm: “They can’t hit an elephant at that distance,” he assured some of the men who were dodging the bullets. Suddenly, there was a sickening, dull thud, and Sedgwick turned slowly and fell into one of his aides, a bullet hole just below his left eye. One of the most popular general officers in either army was dead.

  The main action that day was on the Confederate right flank on the Fredericksburg Road. Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside sent two divisions of his Ninth Corps south on the road from Fredericksburg to Spotsylvania Court House. They were held up, however, by Philip Sheridan’s cavalry beginning their ride toward Richmond. Resuming their march, they ran into Confederates at the Ni River and the ensuing battle lasted until after noon. The only result was to deny the Union Army the valuable Spotsylvania Court House crossroads again.

  At about 6:00 P.M., May 10, Union colonel Emory Upton, just twenty-four years old, received permission to attack the Confederate position on the west face of the Mule Shoe. His tactics were unique: instead of lining his men up shoulder-to-shoulder according to accepted tactics of the day, he formed twelve regiments in a column, giving each a specific assignment once they penetrated the Confederate line. The “battering ram” tactics worked for a while. Upton’s men pierced the rebel line almost to the McCoull House, but Confederate artillery stopped Upton’s supporting troops and a counterattack pushed him back to his starting point. But Grant took notice. If a dozen regiments could break the Confederate Mule Shoe line, what could two corps do?

  Preparations were made for Maj. Gen. Winfield Hancock’s Federal corps to assault the “Mule Shoe” salient at dawn on May 12. Lee inadvertently assisted.

  During the night of May 11, Lee began to believe that the Union Army was pulling out of its earthworks and retreating back to Fredericksburg. In order to counter the move, Lee ordered his artillery out of the Mule Shoe and started it on the road. Panicked commanders in the Mule Shoe, hearing Hancock’s men preparing for their assault in the predawn, begged for the artillery to return. Lee countermanded his order to the artillery. But it was too late.

  Some 20,000 Federal troops rammed into the salient, capturing prisoners and gathering booty before finally losing their momentum. By 9:30 A.M., a Confederate counterattack restored almost all of their Mule Shoe line. By then, the Federal 6th Corps had been committed to the fight and the fighting reached a crescendo of horror unsurpassed in the annals of military history.

  For nearly twenty hours, in the pouring rain, the two armie
s battled each other, in most instances from no more than a yard or two apart. Fighting over the earthworks, men brained each other with rifle butts, stabbed at one another through the gap in the log breastworks, fired blindly over the parapets at the massed enemy, and trampled the dead and wounded alike into the mud-filled trenches beneath their feet. Men leapt upon the works, firing rifles handed to them until they were shot down, only to be replaced by others. It was called the fiercest hand-to-hand fighting of the war by an officer who struggled there.

  Dead bodies were piled up for the living to lie behind as a shelter from the bullets. The 14th North Carolina began an advance, led by one Tisdale Stepp—who was firing, loading as he advanced, and singing “The Bonnie Blue Flag” at the top of his lungs. His serenade was short-lived. A Confederate musket behind him accidentally discharged, putting a bullet into the back of Stepp’s skull and abruptly ending his song. The adjutant of the 30th North Carolina was so close to the enemy that he was pulled by the hair over the breastworks and captured. Even men who hunkered as close to the works as they could get were killed. The Union impetus was so great that the men in the front line literally ran themselves onto Confederate bayonets and were pitched overhead like bales of hay into the ditch at the breastworks.

  Federal general Francis Barlow’s aide watched as another officer tried to get his attention by waving. A shell took off the top half of his head just above the jaw like a razor. As the aide passed the body, the tongue was still moving, as if the officer were trying to convey something of the other world into which he just passed.

  Confederate color-bearer Sgt. Alexander Mixon of the 16th Mississippi leapt the works with his flag, climbed the works, was driven back once, and then wounded the second time he tried. On the third try his luck ran out. A bullet pierced his head. The works grew slippery with rain, mud, and blood; Confederates, during brief lulls, pulled bodies from the trenches and flung them outside.