Civil War Ghost Trails

by Mark Nesbitt

  Grant adopted the strategy of launching an attack upon Richmond every time he sent one against the lines at Petersburg. It stretched the Confederacy’s manpower to the limits. In addition, Grant used his 110,000 men to continually creep westward, forcing Lee to burden his 60,000 men with holding ever-lengthening lines.

  Like a noose about to come full circle around the Confederates at Petersburg, the long, blue line eventually outstretched the Confederates. At the end of March 1865, battles along the White Oak Road and in Dinwiddie County relentlessly pushed the fighting front westward. At a major crossroads called Five Forks, the Confederate line finally snapped on April 1, 1865, and Richmond and the lines around Petersburg had to be abandoned the next day. A footrace between the armies ensued.

  During a week of running fights, the Federals finally cut off Lee’s army outside of a little village on the Southside Railroad near Appomattox Station, where Lee was headed, hoping to find supplies waiting. However, hard-riding Union cavalrymen captured the trains at 8 P.M. on April 8 and drove off the Confederate artillery stationed to guard them.

  Believing all that was ahead of them was Gen. Philip Sheridan’s Union cavalry, Lee ordered an attack to the west on the morning of April 9. As the attack matured, Confederate general John B. Gordon soon realized that there was more than just cavalry before him. Grant had force-marched his infantry overnight in an attempt to encircle Lee’s army—and did just that. By 11:00 A.M., with no reinforcements to send to Gordon, Lee called off the attacks and sent out flags of truce. There was only one thing left for Lee to do— speak to Grant about surrender—and, as he said, “I would rather die a thousand deaths.”

  Petersburg and Appomattox Ghosts

  The Dodson Tavern

  The Dodson Tavern on High Street in Petersburg, Virginia, was built about 1753 by John Dodson. Needless to say, because of the long history of the building, many historical figures have stepped through the door and refreshed themselves with food and drink. British redcoats were quartered in the tavern during the American Revolution. Vice President Aaron Burr was a guest at the tavern, as was Confederate general Robert E. Lee.

  In an article titled “Community Spirits,” by Kiran Krishna murthy, published in the visitors’ guide for Petersburg Virginia, he related a story that the owners in 1994 reported items in the house vanishing and then mysteriously reappearing. A visitor to the house once passed a mirror and suddenly stopped, frozen in front of it. There, in the looking glass, was a figure—not the guest’s reflection, but someone else, dressed in garb completely out of another era.

  Another time, a young granddaughter was spending the night. The next morning she asked her grandmother why she kept peeking in on her at night. Of course, the grandmother had not. She then insisted that a woman was watching over her while she slept in an upstairs bedroom.

  One of the owners of the tavern, on her first night in the house, heard the front door open and shut from an upstairs room. Almost immediately after she heard the door, she heard three heavy footsteps behind her and what sounded like a heavy duffle bag drop to the floor. She turned, looked around a corner, and saw no one. It wasn’t until the next day when they met their new neighbors, who asked if they knew the house was haunted, that she began to suspect the real source of the noise.

  In the early days of its existence when Dodson Tavern was a boardinghouse for travelers and occasional ne’er-do-wells, some overnight guests would indiscreetly brag about the large sums of money they were carrying. It was fatal for at least one of them. In the middle of the night, he had his throat cut for the bag of gold he carried. A slave was blamed, perhaps by the perpetrator, for the murder and lynched from a tree behind the tavern. The real thief escaped. The slave’s ghost, seeking to avenge his earthly self, purportedly roams the grounds.

  High Street

  High Street seems to be a mecca, of sorts, for other spirits who, for one reason or another, refuse to move on to a higher plane.

  Individuals passing the 400 block of High Street will periodically see a Confederate soldier still walking the post he was assigned a century and a half before. At another home on the block a female wraith has been known to toss curtains about the room and even unhinge doors. Other residents of High Street have also had bizarre, unexplainable experiences.

  In one instance a pet dog was found upstairs in one of the houses when the owners had locked the creature in a downstairs room before they had left. The lock to the room where the dog was kept was on the outside of the door. Another homeowner was pleased to find coins piled in a corner of one of their rooms, until he realized the supernatural nature of their appearance. He removed the coins, only to find more piled in the corner the next day.

  Near the intersection of Market and High Streets, the Baltimore Row Houses have seen their share of bad luck. Fires and deaths seem to plague that area more than others in Petersburg. A poltergeist must roam the area, for residents have reported hearing doors slam when there is no one present and the wind is calm. Coins are occasionally found in the corners of rooms there, too.

  Center Hill

  Center Hill, an imposing architectural gem of Petersburg, dates back to 1823. After Petersburg and Richmond fell, Abraham Lincoln visited one of his generals, G. L. Hartsuff, at his commandeered headquarters at Center Hill. In 1950, it was opened as a Civil War museum and was eventually turned over to the City of Petersburg to become a tourist attraction. Of course, with the building, the city also received Center Hill’s ghosts.

  Marguerite DuPont Lee, author of Virginia Ghosts, was born in 1862. She moved to Washington with her husband, a Virginian, at age eighteen, and so had an opportunity to gather firsthand many of the stories in her book, first published in 1930. In 1885, she interviewed Mrs. Campbell Pryor, who lived in Center Hill for a decade. She claimed that virtually every evening at dusk, those passing Center Hill could see, seated at the second-floor window above the front door, “a beautifully dressed lady.” The reports came in for many years.

  One morning, her six-year-old daughter sat down for breakfast and asked, “Mother, where is that pretty lady who came and sat on my bed last night? She held my hand and talked to me. I do not see her.” She described in detail what could only have been the spirit seen at the window so many times before.

  Mrs. Pryor told of a melodeon, which stood in one corner of the room they used as a library. She said that very often they would hear the melodeon playing a familiar tune. When they entered the room to see who was playing, the room was empty.

  Her husband slept in a small room on the first floor near his office, but just for a short time. Tucked in for the night, sound asleep, he would be awakened by the bedcovers ripped from his body and thrown into a heap in the middle of the floor. No one was in the room with him.

  L. B. Taylor Jr., the dean of Virginia ghost tales, related the most famous story of Center Hill in his book Civil War Ghosts of Virginia. It is very unusual for ghosts to keep a strict schedule. (The Woman in White at Chatham Manor in Fredericksburg is supposed to appear every seven years on June 21. The Phantom Regiment, for ten years, apparently kept as tight a schedule.) But on every January 24, at precisely 7:30, the door of the home’s library was heard to open and the tramping of marching feet, accompanied by the distinct clank of sabers confirming a military unit, was heard. The unseen soldiers made their way up the stairs and their cadenced footfalls faded into the room above the library. Twenty minutes later, they were heard to retrace their ghostly steps, back down the stairs and into the library where the door was slammed shut. The soldiers were so punctual, the Pryors invited guests to witness the supernatural event.

  Appomattox Court House

  Lee’s retreat from Petersburg to Appomattox is well-documented and can be followed by automobile from Petersburg. With his army in a race for supplies, they passed through a number of small villages and crossroads, like Sutherland Station, Amelia Court House, Jetersville, and Deatonsville, on their way to a devastating battle at Sailor’s Cree
k, where Lee wondered if his army had been “dissolved.” Though their dissolution was to take place less than a week later, it seems they may have gathered together again . . . sixty years later, almost to the day.

  James R. Furqueron in a 1994 article for Guide to Historic Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Petersburg, recalled a discussion an elderly gentleman had with his grandfather near Burkeville, Virginia. In April 1925, the farmer was living in Amelia County, Virginia, and was up early one morning working in a field near Deatonsville. It was just beginning to get light and it was, as he put it rather ominously, “quiet as a tomb.” He was in a hollow on the north side of the road to Rice, Virginia. Suddenly, he got that feeling that he was being observed. Turning, he saw a horseman at the top of the hill just off the road. The fact that a horseman was out that early was not unusual, but, he admitted, there was just something about the man that made him uneasy. The horseman made no sound, but slowly lifted his left arm and gestured to the west. He turned his horse’s head and disappeared over the hill.

  The farmer admitted that the scene frightened him some, but his curiosity got the better of him and he walked toward the hill where he had seen the horseman. At the top of the rise, he looked to see where the man had gone and was shocked by a sight out of time and reason.

  There, before him, as far as the eye could see, was an army filling the road. Soldiers with rifles slung, cannons and caissons with artillerymen riding upon them, wagons and horses, and the red battle flags of the Confederate Army flapping above the column moved before his astonished gaze. He was not more than fifty feet from the undulating column and yet he heard not one sound coming from the multitudes. He watched for ten minutes as the thousands of men passed and although it was a chill April morning, he was bathed in sweat. As he summed it up later, “They kept on a movin’ without a sound, and I knowed it was the passin’ of the dead.”

  Washington, D.C.

  According to John Alexander’s classic book, Ghosts: Washington’s Most Famous Ghost Stories, the capital of the Northern states during the Civil War is the home to literally hundreds of restless spirits from the earliest days of the republic to modern personalities who once lived there.

  George Washington has been encountered by men who are themselves now long dead. John C. Calhoun was visited once by the country’s first president, who warned the secessionist of the dangers of breaking apart the union of states. Washington has also been seen riding his horse toward his home in Mount Vernon.

  From the specters of soldiers of the Revolutionary War and the ghost of Dolley Madison to the spirit of Woodrow Wilson, ghosts have been documented roaming the environs of the nation’s capital. But it’s Civil War ghosts we are interested in here, and they are numerous.

  Daniel Sickles

  Gen. Daniel Sickles was a political general in the Civil War, which means he had enough money and influence to raise his own brigade from New York, the Excelsior Brigade, and be appointed its commander. Although never having had any formal military training, he rose in rank and responsibility, eventually commanding the Army of the Potomac’s Third Corps. At Gettysburg he was at the center of a great controversy.

  He had been in the tactically poor position of occupying low ground with his command in earlier battles, and when he found himself with unoccupied high ground before him at Gettysburg, he took matters into his own hands and advanced his corps to secure a peach orchard on that high ground. In so moving, however, he made two mistakes: First, his line ended up in the shape of an inverted V, meaning bullets and shells fired at one wing would fall into the rear of the other; and second, his line was not long enough to connect with the rest of the Union forces, leaving a gap of about a quarter mile.

  Union commander George Meade was furious when he saw what Sickles had done without orders. Meade was also nearly killed by an exploding shell as Confederates under James Longstreet began their assault upon Sickles’s salient before he could get back into position.

  Sickles’s line eventually was driven back to its original position after suffering many unnecessary casualties. If it wasn’t for the lucky Confederate shell that struck Sickles in the leg, shattering it and forcing an amputation, he might have been court-martialed. Instead, he was hailed as a hero by none other than President Lincoln himself.

  When asked by the surgeon before going under the influence of chloroform what to do with his amputated leg, Sickles told them to save it, and he later donated it to the Army’s National Medical Museum to be displayed there.

  Even before his Civil War adventures, Sickles had a tumultuous life. In 1859, he was a congressman from New York and married to the much younger Theresa Bagioli, daughter of a famous Italian music teacher. While wining and dining other women back in his district in New York was acceptable to the congressman, when he discovered his wife had been seeing one Philip Barton Key, he was enraged. Key was not just some casual fling. He was Washington’s district attorney as well as the son of the author of the “Star Spangled Banner,” Francis Scott Key. He was also quite the ladies’ man of Washington. He had set up an apartment near the Sickles home as a trysting place, and he and Theresa had established a handkerchief-waving signal when the coast was clear.

  When Sickles confronted his wife with the accusation of adultery, she calmly replied, “Oh, I see I am discovered,” and implored him to spare her. Instead he had her write out a confession, explicit in detail as to how many times she and Key had met and how he had “disrobed” her.

  After a week of stewing over his wife’s infidelity, Sickles saw Key waving his handkerchief outside his house and exploded in rage. As Key returned from his visit to the Washington Club, Sickles rushed into the street brandishing firearms and, despite Key’s begging for mercy, shot him three times. Key died soon after.

  Sickles was tried and acquitted using a previously untried defense: “temporary aberration of the mind,” or, in modern parlance, temporary insanity.

  Key, though gone and buried, apparently returns periodically to Lafayette Square, scene of the violence. His shade has been reported for more than a hundred years, with newspapers printing descriptions of the ghost by scores of people who have seen it. He’s also been seen leaving the Washington Club where he visited last, and in Lafayette Square, evidently attempting to complete his rendezvous with Mrs. Sickles.

  Sickles himself had been seen, long after his death in 1914, visiting the leg he lost but saved in the Army Medical Museum. The accounts are the same: a fat, obese, or rotund shadow floating along the hallway. Oh yes, and the shadow is missing its leg.

  Sickles, with his influence after the war, had a wrought-iron fence brought from Washington and installed to separate the National Cemetery at Gettysburg from the Gettysburg Evergreen citizen’s cemetery. That the ghosts of Philip Barton Key or Dan Sickles have never been observed reenacting their tragic and murderous roles near that fence at Gettysburg is surprising; it once surrounded Lafayette Square in Washington and was witness to one of the more infamous crimes of the nineteenth century.

  Henry Rathbone

  The people and events surrounding the Lincoln assassination seem particularly prone to tortured lives and traumatic deaths and, consequently, living on and on as ghosts.

  When Ulysses S. Grant and his wife could not make the date to accompany the president and his wife to a play at Ford’s Theatre, Maj. Henry Rathbone and his fiancée, Clara, daughter of New York senator Ira Harris, were invited by the Lincolns to attend. Perhaps to their eternal regret, they accepted.

  After the sudden, explosive violence of seeing his president shot in the head by the famed actor John Wilkes Booth, Rathbone, in an attempt to stop the perpetrator, was slashed viciously in the arm and about the head with a large knife Booth carried.

  Though he recovered from his physical wounds, something about the night and his inability to protect the president ate at him. Or perhaps he was already prone to whatever mental aberration it is that causes one to lose touch with reality. Nevertheless, the end wa
s tragic.

  Despite his increasing moodiness after the assassination, Clara married him in 1867. It was a fatal mistake.

  Rathbone resigned from the Army and was offered an appointment as U.S. consul in Hanover, Germany. Perhaps in an effort to escape the demons haunting him from that April night in 1865, he accepted and moved with Clara and their three children to Europe.

  But the move proved no panacea and his decline culminated just two days before Christmas in 1883. He shot and killed his wife, tried to kill his children, and finally attempted suicide. When the police arrived to subdue the bloody Rathbone, he tried to explain to them about the people hiding behind the pictures in the room. The rest of his life was spent in an asylum for the criminally insane in Germany. After he died in 1911, his body was committed to a plot next to the wife he killed. In 1952, however, because of lack of family interest and recent activity, the management of the cemetery “disposed” of their remains.

  Apparently, the paranormal theory that a violent demise and an unconsecrated burial may lead to a perturbed and restless spirit also extends to a disturbed burial site. The former Washington home of the Rathbones at Number 8 Jackson Place on Lafayette Square has had a reputation over the years of events that have forced passersby to cross the street rather than walk in front of the house and experience them.

  The most disturbing of the phenomena are, on certain nights, the incessant, heartbreaking sobs emanating from the house. They have been identified as those of a man inconsolable to the seemingly out-of-control life that began at Ford’s Theatre on the evening of April 14, 1865.