Civil War Ghosts

This collection of fictional sightings creates the potential for a few nightmares a la Stephen King. -School Library Journal

A Union Lieutenant keeps his promise to return to his sweetheart in Brooklyn and waltz to "The Blue Danube," even in death. In rural Virginia, a group of privileged pranksters suffer for dismissing the legend of the ghost who guards a Confederate shot tower. In a small town in South Carolina, a washer woman goes mad when she hears an army of the dead march through the streets night after night, at the stroke of midnight.

After a war where passions were so intense, where so many died before they could finish the business of living, is it any wonder that stories of ghosts persist 130 years later? Some of these stories were written at the time of the Civil War, and some decades later. They vary from the interior horror of Ambrose Bierce's “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” to the deceptively nostalgic tone of Mary Elizabeth Councilman's “Shot-Tower Ghost.” Some center on Union soldiers, others on Confederates.

But what unifies these stories is the horror of the losses we sustained, a horror that cannot be measured in numbers or dollars but can only be conveyed in the language of our nation's imagination. These eerie stories teach readers about resourcefulness, courage and responsibility.