January 9, 2025 • 18 mins
George Noory and author Courtney McInvale explore stories of ghosts haunting Civil War battlefields, why ghosts stay at the sites of war tragedies, and her own encounter with the ghost of an infamous Civil War general.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Courtney mcinvale is with US, founder of Seaside Shadows, an
award winning tour company recognized as one of the top
three ghost tours in America by USA Today's ten Best
Reader's Choice Awards. Courtney's tours lend true history with folklore
and the supernatural, and she's also a noted author, including
(00:25):
Civil War Ghosts of Georgia Volumes one and Volumes two. Courtney,
welcome back. Have you been.
Speaker 3 (00:32):
I'm good? How have you been?
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Happy New Year? All is good?
Speaker 3 (00:37):
Oh? Good? Happy New Year to you too. I can't
believe it's already twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
You know, I was looking at these statistics for the
Civil War. How sad? Up to six hundred and ninety
eight thousand people died during that crisis. Unbelievable.
Speaker 4 (00:54):
Yeah, And it's like such a huge number because the
population two was so much smaller than it is now,
so it was such a large chunk of the population.
There was nobody that was unaffected during that time.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
What inspired you to write your book Civil War Ghosts
of Georgia Volumes One and two?
Speaker 4 (01:14):
Sure, so being a new England girl. It doesn't make
sense right out the gate, but with my father being
from Georgia and raising me on Southern history, it was
something that was always sort of within me, and I
had my own experiences with ghosts and things on battlefields.
But for volume two, it had to follow up volume one,
(01:35):
which was mostly battlefields and regiments, because I also like
to extract personal stories, delve deeper into legends and folklore,
write about some of the burial places, and that's what
Volume two follows volume one up with.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
How did you key in on some of the shortain
areas in the book.
Speaker 4 (01:56):
So a lot of it was personal exploration and visiting
and interviews and traveling all around Georgia for a long
period of time, so a lot of it had to
do with that, but also reading a lot of first
hand accounts from the war newspaper articles finding out where
these people were actually fighting, living, dying and being buried.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
Thirteen thousand of the soldiers that were confined to Andersonville, Georgia,
died from disease, malnutrition, overcrowding. It was horrible.
Speaker 4 (02:32):
It was It was called a hellhole on earth. It
was formerly known as Camp Sumpter, but all the soldiers
called it the hell holes.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
Tell us more about some of the ghostly legends of Andersonville.
Speaker 4 (02:46):
Sure, So, Andersonville it's pretty noted because it had someone
who was in charge of it that was the only
person in the Civil War actually charged with war crimes
that was found guilty and who was a secuted, and
that was someone named Henry weirs And Henry Weirz has
ghost st our scenes throughout Andersonville and actually throughout d
(03:08):
C where some of his court trials were. Some think
not resting easy because of all the orders he made
that led to the inhumane treatment of the people buried there.
But I always thought one of the most compelling things
that came out of Andersonville, other than you know, Clara
Barton Endurance Atwater and their spirits who affected because they
(03:31):
were able to identify those buried there. I think one
of the mower compelling ones is actually of a priest
who used to get people's final rights there. And there
was a ghost story that was well documented for years
of a man who was visiting the prison and as
he was walking down the road he saw sort of
a shadowy figure and it was a rainy day, so
he tried to avoid the strange looking man, and then
(03:53):
suddenly the strange looking man who had once been in
front of him was behind him, tapping him on the shoulder,
and he put his hand on his head and said, sir,
I need to administer.
Speaker 3 (04:03):
Your last right.
Speaker 4 (04:05):
And the man became so frightened he began to run
and he ran through this man and he thought, you know,
I better not finished visiting the prison today.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
This was very spooky.
Speaker 4 (04:16):
I don't know what just happened to me. When he
goes to the prison the next day, which is now
a national park, he told one of the employees there
what has happened and they said, oh, you met father Whylan.
You Unofficially, we can't tell you he's here, but he is.
And he was one of the only priests that would
not leave the site and from administering last rights, because
(04:37):
a lot of priests did due to fear of disease
or just the sorrow of what was happening, and he
was one of the ones who didn't.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
Corney, what is it about tragedy that creates some of
these ghostly stories.
Speaker 4 (04:53):
I think a lot of it is, like you said,
the tragedy of a life cut short, a life unfulfilled,
a legacy that didn't get to be left behind, the
fear of being forgotten. So many of these men that
died during the Civil War were ranging in ages eighteen
to thirty, a lot of them on the younger end.
(05:15):
So they didn't get to live the lives that you
or I may get to live. And so there's the
tragedy of that, of the what could have been, And
there's also this sort of tragedy to how they died
that might keep them in a spot. The violence of it,
the quickness of it, the unexpectedness of it. To us,
(05:37):
it seems, oh, you go to war, don't you expect this?
But they really didn't. During the Civil War wasn't proposed
to them this way. They really thought it was going
to be short lived, quick and more political. It wasn't
until they were really in it that they realized the
gravity of it.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Well with Courtney Mackenvale, our website is linked up at
costcosdam dot com. We're talking about our latest work, Civil
War Ghosts of Georgia Volumes two. Will also be talking
about some of her new England tours later on in
the program. How did you assemble the stories? How did
you find them?
Speaker 4 (06:13):
Yeah, So my favorite way to find stories is actually
going through old newspapers and journals of the people that
were in the nineteenth century and reading the memoirs of
any of the soldiers that did survive. So a lot
of stories came from a man named General John Gordon
who wrote a whole chapter on near death experiences and
(06:36):
his own near death experiences. There were a lot of
stories that came from old accounts of the Oakland Cemetery
in Atlanta after the Atlanta Campaign, and the Atlanta History
Center there has a lot of information on that, and
then visiting a lot of these old sports will also
provide a lot of information. The people there will just
(06:57):
tell you about the ghosts that they see there and
where they came from.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Now, there was a train wreck in Burnsville, Georgia. Tell
us about that story.
Speaker 4 (07:08):
One of the most fascinating stories that I uncovered. And
I actually found this one through my cousin. So I
have a lot of family that lives down south and
they're kind of like me. They like to find the
history and mystery. And when I was visiting doing Civil
War things, my cousin said, Hey, Courtney, you know, not
far from here, there's this area where supposedly all these
Confederate soldiers side in a crash, and I thought, why
(07:30):
were they, you know, going from there? Well, they were
leaving the battle at Jonesboro and they were headed we think,
down to Andersonville with some Union prisoners. But just the
way they were traveling made us kind of suspicious with
how they were hiding things.
Speaker 3 (07:43):
And they didn't write much about the.
Speaker 4 (07:45):
Cars that the Confederate gold that notable legend could have
been on that train. Nevertheless, they're going around a curve
named Lavender Curve in this really rural area and another
train that's just carrying sort of goods and things is
into them, and it's one of the most catastrophic Civil
War train crashes that is ever recorded. While the strangeness
(08:08):
comes in that all of these Confederate soldiers are found
bloodied on the side of the railway. Those locals are
burying them or trying to heal them in a barn,
but not a single record is kept of who actually died.
And all these little white crosses are put in a
nearby cemetery, but they figure out the bodies aren't actually there,
(08:28):
and then when it gets reported to the newspapers. The
newspapers that were actually uncovered were found mysteriously burnt or
the full documentation not there, so we never fully knew
who was on the train or what was on the train,
just some neighborhood accounts of how grievous and bloody this
train wreck was.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
Do you go on tours in Georgia?
Speaker 4 (08:51):
We're starting in Georgia this year in spring of twenty
twenty five. We're aiming to open around Memorial Day weekends.
We're going to be opening another branch of Seaside shattow
Is called Southern Shadows, and we're actually starting in Chickamauga, Georgia,
where the second deadliest battle of the Civil War actually
took place, and hopefully following up there in Making Georgia after.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
That fascinating work. You've been doing this for how many
years now, Cortney.
Speaker 4 (09:22):
So I actually started giving tours back in twenty thirteen.
So later on this year it will be our twelfth
year of Haunted History tours. But I think I've been
into history and mystery my entire life.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
And then in twenty fourteen, one of your books came
out called Haunted Mystic, Right, Yes.
Speaker 4 (09:43):
That's about the very first town where we still operate
tours in Mystic, Connecticut, not far from where I grew up.
So all the old Sea captains, Revolutionary War soldiers, things
like that. That's the focus of Haunted Mystic and the
tw tours here in Connecticut now.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
Tell us about Savannah, Georgia, and it's Haunted history.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
Sure.
Speaker 4 (10:08):
So Savannah is fascinating. And in fact, when I was
writing Civil War Ghoes of Georgia, Volume two, I had
quite a few segments on Savannah. So my publisher he said,
you know, we should have a full section on Savannah.
There's just so much and people will want to visit
all of these spots. So Savannah is fascinating, and that
(10:29):
it is where Sherman, General Sherman marches to the sea
and sort of they hand him the keys to Savannah
and he gives Savannah the city to Lincoln as a
Christmas present during the Civil War after he causes this
path of destruction across Georgia. But Savannah is a place
that's full of hospitals, full of old bars where soldiers
(10:52):
used to hang out, full of cemeteries for Civil War soldiers,
and full of three forts that are all haunted by
this time, Piero and sort of endured attacks, whether they
were from ironclads or whatnot. And so the amount of
ghosts in Savannah from the Civil War alone is immense,
and then just adding on the propensity for Savannah spirits
(11:14):
on top of that just sort of quadruples it.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
Partney, were some of these hauntings were they scary or
were they just puzzling?
Speaker 4 (11:25):
I think it depends really on who you ask. I
think some of them are scary in the sense that
we don't really know all the facts about we haunting them.
For instance, there's a place called Sport James Jackson, and
they have a spirit of a private garrity who is
(11:46):
kind of a shady character who shot his own officer.
He claims he didn't recognize in the dark. And when
people see the ghosts of this private garrity, who later
washed up on the shores of the Fort dead, they
say he's very mean, condescending to people that are visiting
the fort, walks around with a rifle. People don't feel
(12:06):
safe around him. So I think, you know, just like
with regular people, there can be good or bad people,
there can be good or bad spirits. As far as
scary There's also Fort McAllister where one of the spirits
is headless, and that's Major Galley, and I'm sure that's
quite spooky, though poor thing just had his head taken
off by a cannon, which also happened, so it really,
(12:29):
I guess, is all in the eye of the beholder.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
In Georgia you have Rose Hill, Marietta Confederate Cemetery. Why
are they so significant?
Speaker 3 (12:41):
Those are some of.
Speaker 4 (12:42):
The cemeteries that had the most burials of Civil War
soldiers and especially unknown soldiers. I would probably also add
onto their Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta. A lot of these
have tens of thousands of unknown graves, people who were
un identified not brought home, which was their biggest fear
(13:03):
in the nineteenth century. They're also unique if you visit
a Confederate cemetery because those were established by women. The
women of the South were very upset that they're dead
weren't brought back home, so they actually went out and
got a lot of them and formed organizations that retrieved them.
They created something called a decoration Day, which later the
(13:24):
US adopted as a memorial Day, but they were the
first to start doing that in the spring, so that's
always significant. But I think Oakland Cemetery and their Unknown
Dead is known for paranormal the most because they have
what's called the role Call of the Dead, where they
swear if you visit there in the evening hours, which
I know you're not supposed to, but if you do,
(13:46):
you may actually hear the soldiers calling names, and if
you stay there long enough, you'll hear your own name
being called in them summoning you to the role call.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
There's a lot of ghost stories from some of the
forts out there, like McAllister, Pulaski, Fort James Jackson. How
significant are they.
Speaker 4 (14:07):
Yes, so they're significant in that they're in Savannah, which
is sort of the coastal area of Georgia, and they
have significance from the beginning to the end of the war.
So in the very beginning you have the Confederacy which
is in charge of some of these sports, but very
quickly the Union takes over some of them. In Pulaski, though,
you actually have Confederate soldiers who are imprisoned, some known
(14:29):
as the Immortal six hundred, who were also starving to death,
just like the Union brethren that were down in Andersonville.
A lot of them sort of eating rats and cats
and trying to survive in their own home state. A
lot of them, the immortal six hundred, would not sign
that they would join the North, and so it was
almost kind of like hunger strikers, but also prisoners. Fort
(14:52):
McAllister was attacked several times by Union Iron class under
William Sherman, and that led to the beheading of Major
Galley on that site, and also the killing of beloved Tomcat,
who the soldiers loved and who would live on the
fort with them, and they say his ghost is there.
And of course James Jackson is the one I mentioned
before where Private Garrity accidentally shot his own officer and
(15:15):
then mysteriously showed up deceased himself on the shores.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
Of sports Courtney. How would you compare the hauntings in
Georgia as opposed to like Gettysburg Garantium.
Speaker 4 (15:28):
I think George's actually just as high up there in
the haunting realm of Gettysburg and Antietam, But for some
reason it was overlooked in a lot of ways. When
we look at haunted history Gettysburg, we know three days
deadliest battle, over fifty thousand casualties, of course there's been
Hollywood films and books written about it because of the
(15:50):
high casualty count and just the nature of that battle
being a turning point in the war. Antietam also went
down in history as the deadliest day, and that early
on in the war when people really didn't know what
they were getting into, and they showed the gravity of it.
Speaker 3 (16:05):
But Georgia has Chickamauga, which is.
Speaker 4 (16:08):
The second deadliest battle of the Civil War, second only
to Gettysburg. As I mentioned, they have the Atlanta Campaign
with tens of thousands of deaths. They have Sherman going
through there and burning the place, and Georgia has one
of the highest shows of force in the Civil War
as far as soldiers go in general. So I think
in a lot of ways, because Georgia was considered the
(16:29):
Western theater, and sometimes folks talk about that less, it
gets overlooked, but it's absolutely comparable with Gettysburg and Antietam.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
You had an encounter with a Confederate general by the
name of John Hood who died at the age of
forty eight years old eighteen seventy nine.
Speaker 4 (16:47):
What happened, Yes, So I am kind of a history nerd,
and so I always have affection for certain soldiers in
generals over others, and I've always been fascinated and had
an affection toward John Belhood.
Speaker 3 (17:01):
I just thought he was kind of a soldier.
Speaker 4 (17:03):
That got a bad rap, even though he was really,
you know, dedicated to what he did and he did
what had to be done as far as he was concerned.
So I always hoped that I might encounter his spirit.
And one of the ways I was kind of looking
for it is in the Battle of Chickamauga, he actually
had to have a leg amputated, and supposedly in Salton, Georgia,
his leg is bury there, and of course that's controversial
(17:26):
and we're not sure, but that's stuff that I like
to go and find out. Well, I've always gone and
investigated these sites, but one day when I wasn't actively investigating,
I was just out on the Chickamaga battlefield. I went
to the area where he had been shot, the shot
that led to that amputation. I was laying out there
actually reading his book Advance and Retreat. My husband met
(17:49):
me there later and was sitting with me. It was
the middle of the afternoon. This was just a couple
months ago, and we were the only people there, and
there were no sidewalks or pathways. When around two pm
we heard someone say hello. Now I heard it, but
I didn't want to say anything until my husband said
he heard it as well, and he said, did you
just hear hello? I said I did, And we looked
(18:11):
around and we didn't see anyone. And I kept reading
and suddenly I got to a point in the book
where General Hood wrote that it was around two pm
and the exact spot where I had been sitting, that
he had been struck by the mini ball in his
by And I thought, oh, my gosh, is it coincidence
that we just heard him say hello, or someone say
(18:33):
hello at that exact moment.
Speaker 3 (18:35):
Could it have been him?
Speaker 4 (18:36):
And then later that night we went closer to the
spot and I took a few pictures, and sure enough
we got an image of a man on a horse,
just as Hood had described, he would have been near
that spot.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one am Eastern, and go to Coast to coastam dot
com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Courtney mcinvale is with US, founder of Seaside Shadows, an
award winning tour company recognized as one of the top
three ghost tours in America by USA Today's ten Best
Reader's Choice Awards. Courtney's tours lend true history with folklore
and the supernatural, and she's also a noted author, including
(00:25):
Civil War Ghosts of Georgia Volumes one and Volumes two. Courtney,
welcome back. Have you been.
Speaker 3 (00:32):
I'm good? How have you been?
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Happy New Year? All is good?
Speaker 3 (00:37):
Oh? Good? Happy New Year to you too. I can't
believe it's already twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
You know, I was looking at these statistics for the
Civil War. How sad? Up to six hundred and ninety
eight thousand people died during that crisis. Unbelievable.
Speaker 4 (00:54):
Yeah, And it's like such a huge number because the
population two was so much smaller than it is now,
so it was such a large chunk of the population.
There was nobody that was unaffected during that time.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
What inspired you to write your book Civil War Ghosts
of Georgia Volumes One and two?
Speaker 4 (01:14):
Sure, so being a new England girl. It doesn't make
sense right out the gate, but with my father being
from Georgia and raising me on Southern history, it was
something that was always sort of within me, and I
had my own experiences with ghosts and things on battlefields.
But for volume two, it had to follow up volume one,
(01:35):
which was mostly battlefields and regiments, because I also like
to extract personal stories, delve deeper into legends and folklore,
write about some of the burial places, and that's what
Volume two follows volume one up with.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
How did you key in on some of the shortain
areas in the book.
Speaker 4 (01:56):
So a lot of it was personal exploration and visiting
and interviews and traveling all around Georgia for a long
period of time, so a lot of it had to
do with that, but also reading a lot of first
hand accounts from the war newspaper articles finding out where
these people were actually fighting, living, dying and being buried.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
Thirteen thousand of the soldiers that were confined to Andersonville, Georgia,
died from disease, malnutrition, overcrowding. It was horrible.
Speaker 4 (02:32):
It was It was called a hellhole on earth. It
was formerly known as Camp Sumpter, but all the soldiers
called it the hell holes.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
Tell us more about some of the ghostly legends of Andersonville.
Speaker 4 (02:46):
Sure, So, Andersonville it's pretty noted because it had someone
who was in charge of it that was the only
person in the Civil War actually charged with war crimes
that was found guilty and who was a secuted, and
that was someone named Henry weirs And Henry Weirz has
ghost st our scenes throughout Andersonville and actually throughout d
(03:08):
C where some of his court trials were. Some think
not resting easy because of all the orders he made
that led to the inhumane treatment of the people buried there.
But I always thought one of the most compelling things
that came out of Andersonville, other than you know, Clara
Barton Endurance Atwater and their spirits who affected because they
(03:31):
were able to identify those buried there. I think one
of the mower compelling ones is actually of a priest
who used to get people's final rights there. And there
was a ghost story that was well documented for years
of a man who was visiting the prison and as
he was walking down the road he saw sort of
a shadowy figure and it was a rainy day, so
he tried to avoid the strange looking man, and then
(03:53):
suddenly the strange looking man who had once been in
front of him was behind him, tapping him on the shoulder,
and he put his hand on his head and said, sir,
I need to administer.
Speaker 3 (04:03):
Your last right.
Speaker 4 (04:05):
And the man became so frightened he began to run
and he ran through this man and he thought, you know,
I better not finished visiting the prison today.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
This was very spooky.
Speaker 4 (04:16):
I don't know what just happened to me. When he
goes to the prison the next day, which is now
a national park, he told one of the employees there
what has happened and they said, oh, you met father Whylan.
You Unofficially, we can't tell you he's here, but he is.
And he was one of the only priests that would
not leave the site and from administering last rights, because
(04:37):
a lot of priests did due to fear of disease
or just the sorrow of what was happening, and he
was one of the ones who didn't.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
Corney, what is it about tragedy that creates some of
these ghostly stories.
Speaker 4 (04:53):
I think a lot of it is, like you said,
the tragedy of a life cut short, a life unfulfilled,
a legacy that didn't get to be left behind, the
fear of being forgotten. So many of these men that
died during the Civil War were ranging in ages eighteen
to thirty, a lot of them on the younger end.
(05:15):
So they didn't get to live the lives that you
or I may get to live. And so there's the
tragedy of that, of the what could have been, And
there's also this sort of tragedy to how they died
that might keep them in a spot. The violence of it,
the quickness of it, the unexpectedness of it. To us,
(05:37):
it seems, oh, you go to war, don't you expect this?
But they really didn't. During the Civil War wasn't proposed
to them this way. They really thought it was going
to be short lived, quick and more political. It wasn't
until they were really in it that they realized the
gravity of it.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Well with Courtney Mackenvale, our website is linked up at
costcosdam dot com. We're talking about our latest work, Civil
War Ghosts of Georgia Volumes two. Will also be talking
about some of her new England tours later on in
the program. How did you assemble the stories? How did
you find them?
Speaker 4 (06:13):
Yeah, So my favorite way to find stories is actually
going through old newspapers and journals of the people that
were in the nineteenth century and reading the memoirs of
any of the soldiers that did survive. So a lot
of stories came from a man named General John Gordon
who wrote a whole chapter on near death experiences and
(06:36):
his own near death experiences. There were a lot of
stories that came from old accounts of the Oakland Cemetery
in Atlanta after the Atlanta Campaign, and the Atlanta History
Center there has a lot of information on that, and
then visiting a lot of these old sports will also
provide a lot of information. The people there will just
(06:57):
tell you about the ghosts that they see there and
where they came from.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Now, there was a train wreck in Burnsville, Georgia. Tell
us about that story.
Speaker 4 (07:08):
One of the most fascinating stories that I uncovered. And
I actually found this one through my cousin. So I
have a lot of family that lives down south and
they're kind of like me. They like to find the
history and mystery. And when I was visiting doing Civil
War things, my cousin said, Hey, Courtney, you know, not
far from here, there's this area where supposedly all these
Confederate soldiers side in a crash, and I thought, why
(07:30):
were they, you know, going from there? Well, they were
leaving the battle at Jonesboro and they were headed we think,
down to Andersonville with some Union prisoners. But just the
way they were traveling made us kind of suspicious with
how they were hiding things.
Speaker 3 (07:43):
And they didn't write much about the.
Speaker 4 (07:45):
Cars that the Confederate gold that notable legend could have
been on that train. Nevertheless, they're going around a curve
named Lavender Curve in this really rural area and another
train that's just carrying sort of goods and things is
into them, and it's one of the most catastrophic Civil
War train crashes that is ever recorded. While the strangeness
(08:08):
comes in that all of these Confederate soldiers are found
bloodied on the side of the railway. Those locals are
burying them or trying to heal them in a barn,
but not a single record is kept of who actually died.
And all these little white crosses are put in a
nearby cemetery, but they figure out the bodies aren't actually there,
(08:28):
and then when it gets reported to the newspapers. The
newspapers that were actually uncovered were found mysteriously burnt or
the full documentation not there, so we never fully knew
who was on the train or what was on the train,
just some neighborhood accounts of how grievous and bloody this
train wreck was.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
Do you go on tours in Georgia?
Speaker 4 (08:51):
We're starting in Georgia this year in spring of twenty
twenty five. We're aiming to open around Memorial Day weekends.
We're going to be opening another branch of Seaside shattow
Is called Southern Shadows, and we're actually starting in Chickamauga, Georgia,
where the second deadliest battle of the Civil War actually
took place, and hopefully following up there in Making Georgia after.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
That fascinating work. You've been doing this for how many
years now, Cortney.
Speaker 4 (09:22):
So I actually started giving tours back in twenty thirteen.
So later on this year it will be our twelfth
year of Haunted History tours. But I think I've been
into history and mystery my entire life.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
And then in twenty fourteen, one of your books came
out called Haunted Mystic, Right, Yes.
Speaker 4 (09:43):
That's about the very first town where we still operate
tours in Mystic, Connecticut, not far from where I grew up.
So all the old Sea captains, Revolutionary War soldiers, things
like that. That's the focus of Haunted Mystic and the
tw tours here in Connecticut now.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
Tell us about Savannah, Georgia, and it's Haunted history.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
Sure.
Speaker 4 (10:08):
So Savannah is fascinating. And in fact, when I was
writing Civil War Ghoes of Georgia, Volume two, I had
quite a few segments on Savannah. So my publisher he said,
you know, we should have a full section on Savannah.
There's just so much and people will want to visit
all of these spots. So Savannah is fascinating, and that
(10:29):
it is where Sherman, General Sherman marches to the sea
and sort of they hand him the keys to Savannah
and he gives Savannah the city to Lincoln as a
Christmas present during the Civil War after he causes this
path of destruction across Georgia. But Savannah is a place
that's full of hospitals, full of old bars where soldiers
(10:52):
used to hang out, full of cemeteries for Civil War soldiers,
and full of three forts that are all haunted by
this time, Piero and sort of endured attacks, whether they
were from ironclads or whatnot. And so the amount of
ghosts in Savannah from the Civil War alone is immense,
and then just adding on the propensity for Savannah spirits
(11:14):
on top of that just sort of quadruples it.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
Partney, were some of these hauntings were they scary or
were they just puzzling?
Speaker 4 (11:25):
I think it depends really on who you ask. I
think some of them are scary in the sense that
we don't really know all the facts about we haunting them.
For instance, there's a place called Sport James Jackson, and
they have a spirit of a private garrity who is
(11:46):
kind of a shady character who shot his own officer.
He claims he didn't recognize in the dark. And when
people see the ghosts of this private garrity, who later
washed up on the shores of the Fort dead, they
say he's very mean, condescending to people that are visiting
the fort, walks around with a rifle. People don't feel
(12:06):
safe around him. So I think, you know, just like
with regular people, there can be good or bad people,
there can be good or bad spirits. As far as
scary There's also Fort McAllister where one of the spirits
is headless, and that's Major Galley, and I'm sure that's
quite spooky, though poor thing just had his head taken
off by a cannon, which also happened, so it really,
(12:29):
I guess, is all in the eye of the beholder.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
In Georgia you have Rose Hill, Marietta Confederate Cemetery. Why
are they so significant?
Speaker 3 (12:41):
Those are some of.
Speaker 4 (12:42):
The cemeteries that had the most burials of Civil War
soldiers and especially unknown soldiers. I would probably also add
onto their Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta. A lot of these
have tens of thousands of unknown graves, people who were
un identified not brought home, which was their biggest fear
(13:03):
in the nineteenth century. They're also unique if you visit
a Confederate cemetery because those were established by women. The
women of the South were very upset that they're dead
weren't brought back home, so they actually went out and
got a lot of them and formed organizations that retrieved them.
They created something called a decoration Day, which later the
(13:24):
US adopted as a memorial Day, but they were the
first to start doing that in the spring, so that's
always significant. But I think Oakland Cemetery and their Unknown
Dead is known for paranormal the most because they have
what's called the role Call of the Dead, where they
swear if you visit there in the evening hours, which
I know you're not supposed to, but if you do,
(13:46):
you may actually hear the soldiers calling names, and if
you stay there long enough, you'll hear your own name
being called in them summoning you to the role call.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
There's a lot of ghost stories from some of the
forts out there, like McAllister, Pulaski, Fort James Jackson. How
significant are they.
Speaker 4 (14:07):
Yes, so they're significant in that they're in Savannah, which
is sort of the coastal area of Georgia, and they
have significance from the beginning to the end of the war.
So in the very beginning you have the Confederacy which
is in charge of some of these sports, but very
quickly the Union takes over some of them. In Pulaski, though,
you actually have Confederate soldiers who are imprisoned, some known
(14:29):
as the Immortal six hundred, who were also starving to death,
just like the Union brethren that were down in Andersonville.
A lot of them sort of eating rats and cats
and trying to survive in their own home state. A
lot of them, the immortal six hundred, would not sign
that they would join the North, and so it was
almost kind of like hunger strikers, but also prisoners. Fort
(14:52):
McAllister was attacked several times by Union Iron class under
William Sherman, and that led to the beheading of Major
Galley on that site, and also the killing of beloved Tomcat,
who the soldiers loved and who would live on the
fort with them, and they say his ghost is there.
And of course James Jackson is the one I mentioned
before where Private Garrity accidentally shot his own officer and
(15:15):
then mysteriously showed up deceased himself on the shores.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
Of sports Courtney. How would you compare the hauntings in
Georgia as opposed to like Gettysburg Garantium.
Speaker 4 (15:28):
I think George's actually just as high up there in
the haunting realm of Gettysburg and Antietam, But for some
reason it was overlooked in a lot of ways. When
we look at haunted history Gettysburg, we know three days
deadliest battle, over fifty thousand casualties, of course there's been
Hollywood films and books written about it because of the
(15:50):
high casualty count and just the nature of that battle
being a turning point in the war. Antietam also went
down in history as the deadliest day, and that early
on in the war when people really didn't know what
they were getting into, and they showed the gravity of it.
Speaker 3 (16:05):
But Georgia has Chickamauga, which is.
Speaker 4 (16:08):
The second deadliest battle of the Civil War, second only
to Gettysburg. As I mentioned, they have the Atlanta Campaign
with tens of thousands of deaths. They have Sherman going
through there and burning the place, and Georgia has one
of the highest shows of force in the Civil War
as far as soldiers go in general. So I think
in a lot of ways, because Georgia was considered the
(16:29):
Western theater, and sometimes folks talk about that less, it
gets overlooked, but it's absolutely comparable with Gettysburg and Antietam.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
You had an encounter with a Confederate general by the
name of John Hood who died at the age of
forty eight years old eighteen seventy nine.
Speaker 4 (16:47):
What happened, Yes, So I am kind of a history nerd,
and so I always have affection for certain soldiers in
generals over others, and I've always been fascinated and had
an affection toward John Belhood.
Speaker 3 (17:01):
I just thought he was kind of a soldier.
Speaker 4 (17:03):
That got a bad rap, even though he was really,
you know, dedicated to what he did and he did
what had to be done as far as he was concerned.
So I always hoped that I might encounter his spirit.
And one of the ways I was kind of looking
for it is in the Battle of Chickamauga, he actually
had to have a leg amputated, and supposedly in Salton, Georgia,
his leg is bury there, and of course that's controversial
(17:26):
and we're not sure, but that's stuff that I like
to go and find out. Well, I've always gone and
investigated these sites, but one day when I wasn't actively investigating,
I was just out on the Chickamaga battlefield. I went
to the area where he had been shot, the shot
that led to that amputation. I was laying out there
actually reading his book Advance and Retreat. My husband met
(17:49):
me there later and was sitting with me. It was
the middle of the afternoon. This was just a couple
months ago, and we were the only people there, and
there were no sidewalks or pathways. When around two pm
we heard someone say hello. Now I heard it, but
I didn't want to say anything until my husband said
he heard it as well, and he said, did you
just hear hello? I said I did, And we looked
(18:11):
around and we didn't see anyone. And I kept reading
and suddenly I got to a point in the book
where General Hood wrote that it was around two pm
and the exact spot where I had been sitting, that
he had been struck by the mini ball in his
by And I thought, oh, my gosh, is it coincidence
that we just heard him say hello, or someone say
(18:33):
hello at that exact moment.
Speaker 3 (18:35):
Could it have been him?
Speaker 4 (18:36):
And then later that night we went closer to the
spot and I took a few pictures, and sure enough
we got an image of a man on a horse,
just as Hood had described, he would have been near
that spot.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
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