CIVIL WAR
GHOST STORIES
&
LEGENDS
Other University of
South Carolina Press Books
___________________
by Nancy Roberts
The Haunted South
Where Ghosts Still Roam
South Carolina Ghosts
From the Coast to the Mountains
Ghosts of the Southern Mountains and Appalachia
The Gold Seekers
Gold, Ghosts and Legends from Carolina to California
North Carolina Ghosts & Legends
Ghosts of the Carolinas
1992 University of South Carolina Press
Cloth and paperback editions published by the University of South Carolina Press, 1992
Ebook edition published in Columbia, South Carolina,
by the University of South Carolina Press, 2013
www.sc.edu/uscpress
22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print editions as follows:
Roberts, Nancy, 1924
Civil War ghost stories and legends / by Nancy Roberts
p. cm.
ISBN 0-87249-851-4 (hard back) ISBN 0-87249-852-2 (pbk.)
1. GhostsUnited States. 2. United StatesCivil War, 1861-1965
Miscellanea I. Title
BF147.U6R6315 1992
133.1097309034dc20 92-10411
Photographs by Bruce Roberts
ISBN 978-1-61117-124-2 (ebook)
Preface
My writing career might never have begun had it not been for the encouragement of writer Carl Sandburg. During his years at Flat Rock, North Carolina, Mr. Sandburg sent me a message saying that he liked a series of ghost stories I was writing for the Charlotte Observer. He suggested that they be published in a book. Such heady encouragement led to my writing twenty-one books, the latest this book of Civil War ghost stories and legends.
Sometimes I think it would make life more comfortablegive me a handy stereotype to fall intoif I could say that I am a Southern writer or a Northern one, but I cannot. Born in Wisconsin of parents who were North Carolinians, I believe, however, that I regard the Civil War from a relatively impartial point of view.
My father was employed by a chemical company not far from Milwaukee. For more than a decade I lived on the shores of Lake Michigan and thought of myself as a Wisconsinite. Later I lived in New Jersey and Delaware, and it was not until my fathers retirement that I moved to North Carolina to join my parents at our family home in Maxton.
I was always aware of my fathers love for history. Driving south from Wisconsin we seldom passed a battlefield without touring it, and so I saw many beautiful sites, including Gettysburg, where fifty thousand men died. My eyes grew moist when dad would read aloud the Union and Confederate losses. Staring at soldiers faces on the frieze of the North Carolina memorial there, I thought of my great-grandfather, Captain Fleming of Raleigh. Had he been among the Carolinians who had fought at this bloodbath on Pennsylvania soil?
I sometimes recall a story, told me in my childhood, of how, in the last months of her pregnancy, Emma Walpole McRae, my great-grandmother, fled Huntsville, Alabama, on horseback just before Federal troops arrived. Her discomfort must have been great on that long ride to North Carolina. Miss Emma, as she was later called, left her home behind forever. I traced with my fingers the engraved name Walpole on a worn gray marble doorstepall that remained of the antebellum house.
Emma Walpole McRaes baby boy, born in eastern North Carolina, was my grandfather. During my childhood years I knew him as the one who presided over the twilight depths of an immense general store fragrant with the odors of hoop cheese, country hams, seeds and fertilizer. The shelves were laden with bolts of fabric and black patent Mary Janes and over the front of the store a sign bore the name McRae Company in tall antique gold letters.
Men like John Sumter McRae were called time merchants. When I moved down from the North in my twenties, the words Fall Terms painted on brick store buildings puzzled me. I watched farmers come in to receive their seeds in the spring, and I saw them return to pay for them in the fall when their tobacco and cotton had been harvested and sold. I had no understanding of the important part merchants like my grandfather played in easing the postwar struggles of the Southern farmer until years later when I read William J. Cashs classic book, The Mind of the South.
The first stirring of industry in this section of the country that theretofore had produced only raw materials was the textile mill. The agrarian South had learned a bitter lesson. A society producing raw materials would always be at the mercy of an industrialized one.
As I grew up, I lived in two worlds. Winter months were spent among bustling Midwesterners, summer months in the company of my Southern friends, as I tried to slow my own energetic ways to fit their more leisurely pace. I am now aware that the emotional threads of the Civil War and Reconstruction period were still part of the climate around me in eastern North Carolina. They were woven into the Souths view of itself and the rest of the country. Less than a century had passed since the War. The long summer days I spent in North Carolina during the 1940s and 1950s were still a time of transition.
As I wrote the stories in this volume the distance between the present and the war narrowed, and I began to realize that the war really wasnt that long ago! In the 1950s you could shake the hand of a soldier who had fought in the Civil War. Many readers of this book, or their parents, can remember that time.
Sometimes tears ran down my cheeks as I wrote and grieved for the men who died on both sides. Who can assess the loss to a nation of so many lives? It seemed that the human tragedy and waste of this war might have happened yesterday. I hope that these stories may bring the War Between the States as close for the reader as they did for me.
Nancy Roberts
CIVIL WAR
GHOST STORIES
&
LEGENDS
Johnsons Island
This three-hundred-acre island, with a view of Canada on one side and Ohio on the other, was selected as the site to build a prison for Confederate soldiers. It was a frigid, forbidding prospect during the winter months. As one Southerner remarked, It was just the place to convert visitors to the theological belief of the Norwegians that Hell has torments of cold instead of heat. It became a prison for officers, and among the well-known prisoners there was Major General Isaac Trimble, who had lost a leg in Picketts charge at Gettysburg; Colonel Charles H. Olmstead, the defender of Fort Pulaski; and Brigadier General J. W. Frazier. During the forty months the prison with its flimsy, temporary buildings was in operation the number of prisoners varied from ten thousand to fifteen thousand men. It was designed for one thousand men. The officer in charge was Lieutenant Colonel William S. Pierson.
Johnsons Island is three miles out in Lake Erie north of
the city of Sandusky and a half mile south of the
Marblehead Peninsula.
