Haunted U.S. Battlefields by Mary Beth Crain & TROY TAYLOR

Author:Mary Beth Crain & TROY TAYLOR
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Globe Pequot
Published: 2021-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

OLD GREEN EYES

The Battle of Chickamauga was one of the bloodiest of the Civil War, just behind Gettysburg in total casualties. Today the battlefield, which is now Chickamauga-Chattanooga National Military Park, is a haunted haven for ghosts of both human and perhaps nonhuman persuasion. The most famous of the supernatural residents is “Old Green Eyes,” who has been roaming the area since the early days when the Native Americans christened Chickamauga Creek the River of Death.

It was a cold, foggy night, Denise Smith recalled. The year was 1980, the place: Chickamauga-Chattanooga National Military Park in Tennessee. Smith had just gotten off work at the Krystal Restaurant in nearby Fort Oglethorpe and decided to take a shortcut home, through the park. She was driving slowly because of the fog and rain, when, in her words, “I saw something big in the road about eye level, and all I could see were these big green eyes. It was so foggy I couldn’t see a body. I got closer and it just disappeared.”

Smith had just witnessed the apparition of “Old Green Eyes”—a ghostly creature that has been seen since the Civil War, and many say before—on the battlefield at Chickamauga Creek that claimed thirty-five thousand lives in September 1863. Variously described as a tall figure with scraggly hair, a disem-bodied head that floats out of the darkness, and a half-man, half-beast, all the eyewitness accounts of this persistent phantom have one thing in common: the green eyes that glow with phosphorescent malevolence.

Chickamauga Creek is located near Chattanooga, at the Tennessee-Georgia border. It was originally inhabited by the Cherokee Indians, who named it Chick-amauga, or “River of Death.” Indeed, untimely demise seemed to dog the heavily wooded area, whose overgrown vines and numerous thickets became an unofficial burial ground over the centuries for Native Americans, Civil War troops, and many others. In 1898, when Chickamauga became a training camp for soldiers en route to the Spanish-American War, disease repeatedly swept through the camp, decimating more American troops than the war. And the legacy of death has continued to this day; Chickamauga-Chattanooga National Military Park has witnessed more than its share of murder and suicides and is a notorious dumping ground for victims of murders all over the region.

Does a curse really seem to haunt Chickamauga? Union troops would have said yes. The Battle of Chickamauga, fought between September 18 and September 20, 1863, was one of the last Confederate victories of the Civil War. For over a year, Federal troops had been trying to push the enemy out of Tennessee and to capture Chattanooga, “the gateway to the Confederacy.” With its vital railroad lines and key Rebel war industries, Chattanooga was central to Union victory. Control of the region meant open access to Georgia, and the opportunity to divide the eastern Confederacy.

General William Rosecrans and his Army of the Cumberland had the upper hand over General Braxton Bragg’s Army of Tennessee in Chattanooga when Confederate reinforcements under General James Longstreet arrived by train. The

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