Civil War Ghosts of Atlanta

Jim Miles

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781626191907
• eBook ISBN: 9781625846488
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

The author of the Civil War Explorer series unearths the ghostly legends and lore that haunt Georgia's capital city since the War Between the States.
 
The Atlanta metropolis is one of America's most modern and progressive cities, it's easy to forget that 150 years ago it was the scene of a long and deadly campaign. Union general William T. Sherman hammered relentlessly against Atlanta at Kennesaw Mountain, Peachtree Creek, Ezra Church, and Jonesboro. Months later, as he began his infamous March to the Sea, much of Atlanta was destroyed by fire. Thousands died in the fighting, and thousands more succumbed to wounds and disease in large hospitals constructed around the city. Today, ghosts of Atlanta's Civil War haunt battlefields, hospital sites, cemeteries, homes, and commercial structures, all a testament to the tragic history of the city. Join author Jim Miles as he details the Civil War spirits that still haunt Atlanta.
 
Includes photos!
 
"He's a connoisseur of Georgia's paranormal related activity, having both visited nearly every site discussed in his series of Civil War Ghost titles . . . Miles has covered a lot of ground so far from the bustling cities to the small towns seemingly in the middle of nowhere. This daunting task takes an inside look to the culture and stories that those born in Georgia grow up hearing about and connect with." — The Red & Black

PART I

CIVIL WAR SPIRITS OF COBB COUNTY

KENNESAW

The General and the General’s Ghost

Following his failures at New Hope Church and Pickett’s Mill, Sherman slid back to his railroad supply line at Kennesaw, which was occupied by Federals for six months. Some say the occupiers never really departed.

The prize attraction in Kennesaw is the General, a steam locomotive involved in the Great Locomotive Chase, but it is not the only relic of the Civil War experience in town. According to Barbara Duffey in Angels and Apparitions: True Ghost Stories from the South, residents on North Main Street have reported the acoustic passage of Sherman’s army. It happens late on hot summer nights, when people sit on their front porches after the traffic diminishes. First, all normal sound ceases—no crickets or mosquitoes are heard—and then, the clatter of horse hooves sound in the distance. Dogs bark as a troop of invisible cavalry approaches, the sound growing ever louder, and then, the tramp of innumerable marching men is heard.

A disembodied voice orders the army to halt and someone announces that General Sherman is approaching. In the sudden silence, a single horseman approaches, stops as if inspecting the area and then continues south toward Atlanta. His phantom army continues the march, the sounds of cavalry, infantry and rumbling artillery passing and dimming in the distance. A creeping coldness and fog always follow Sherman’s passage.

Ghosts, including that of actor Fess Parker, are experienced within the Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History in Kennesaw.

Ghosts at the Kennesaw Museum

Kennesaw historian Harper Harris found the old Kennesaw Museum “mighty creepy” at night. “I hear stuff at night all the time,” he told Kathleen Walls in Georgia’s Ghostly Getaways:

I usually keep the radio on and try not to stay that late but in the winter it starts getting dark early. Also when the alarm goes off I have to come in here [the locomotive room] and sometimes I find stuff lying on the floor with no logical reason. You wonder, “How did that get there.” I know I didn’t put it there. And then there’s the noise. It’s not like voices. It’s more like thumping and scratching. One night it was real loud back in that room. I thought someone was in here. I’ve never seen anything but it’s scary here sometimes.

The Great Locomotive Chase was one of the most daring and dramatic events of the Civil War. On April 12, 1862, a group of Union saboteurs stole the locomotive General at Kennesaw (then Big Shanty) and headed north to destroy railroad bridges on the Western & Atlantic Railroad to cut off Chattanooga from Confederate reinforcements and aid in the Federal capture of that vital transportation center.

The General’s conductor, William Fuller, chased his engine on foot, by pole car and on several different locomotives, catching up with the Raiders near Ringgold. His dedication prevented the Federals from doing significant damage to the rail line.

Mere yards from the spot where the General was captured, that locomotive rests in this museum, along with an amazing assortment of other Civil War and railroad displays.

Only recently has the museum acquired a named ghost, apparently the spirit of TV and movie personality Fess Parker, who starred in the famous 1956 Disney movie The Great Locomotive Chase. He played the Federal leader, James J. Andrews.

“Every house, historical site and museum I know of boasts about their resident ghost,” Mike Bearrow, curator of the museum, told Rebecca McCormick of the Monroe Louisiana News-Star. “Anytime we misplaced something or couldn’t find what we were looking for, we blamed it on the ghost of Fess Parker. The problem was, he was still alive at the time.”

Fess Parker died at the age of eighty-five on March 18, 2010, a Thursday.

“When I came in to work Monday morning,” Bearrow continued, “I made my usual rounds to inspect all the galleries, because one of my jobs as curator is to make sure all the lights are in working order.”

Everything seemed normal, until he approached the Fess Parker display. “It was dark, dark in that corner. I don’t mean dim, I mean dark. By the time I got through replacing spot bulbs and florescent tubes, we counted 11 lights that had all gone out at the same time. No flipped breakers. No blown fuses. We all just looked at each other and said it must have taken Parker three days to get from California to Georgia. And now we’ve got the resident ghost we used to only joke about.”

Reporter McCormick saw a coat worn by Parker in the movie and posted the tidbit to her Facebook page via her BlackBerry. Within a minute, a friend in Florida, Joan Ellis, replied that her husband had donated that coat to the museum

“I bought the coat three or four years ago from a Hollywood auction on the Internet,” said Jeffery Ellis, a medical doctor and collector of movie memorabilia. “When I called the museum and told them I had the original jacket worn by Parker in the movie, the curator was like, ‘Yea, yea, okay, whatever, I’m sure you do, maybe we can take a look at it sometime.’”

Two weeks later Dr. Ellis drove to Kennesaw with the coat.

“Inside the jacket pocket was the original label from Hollywood Costume Co. with this information on it,” Ellis said. “‘Fess Parker, Walt Disney Productions, Great Locomotive Chase.’ The guy’s jaw dropped. After additional research by the Smithsonian textile experts, they learned there were actually three jackets used in the movie. This one was the ‘pristine jacket,’ used for inside shots and promotional material.”

A ghost and an eerie coincidence—it doesn’t get any better than that.

This facility is now the Southern Museum of Civil War & Locomotive History.

One of Kennesaw’s old houses was used as a hospital. Men were treated inside while others waited their turn on a big porch that wrapped around the building. To soothe the suffering soldiers, a woman would play the piano and sing softly. Today that ghostly concert plays on within the house, with no corporeal musician at the instrument.

In October 2001, an Internet posting by Lizardblizard50 described a Civil War soldier that haunted his Kennesaw home. He was twice seen “kneeling by my bed, either praying or begging.” The observer was upset because “I don’t know what he wants.”

The Great Locomotive Chase was an exciting part of Civil War history. The famous engine General shares space with phantoms and poltergeists.

The Kennesaw Visitor

As a child, Barbara Healy lived in Kennesaw, about six miles from Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield. On a number of occasions, she described for FATE magazine, they “often heard a knocking at the door or the ringing of the doorbell,” but when they opened the door, “no one was there.”

One night during the winter of 1968, following a snowstorm, Healy and her mother were alone in the house when the doorbell rang. They peeked through the curtains on two windows that flanked the entrance and saw that this time there was someone at the door. The two women cautiously left the security chain on and cracked the door to see “a young man, blond and about 20 years old. He was wearing some sort of military uniform and a long gray overcoat” and “looked disheveled and he was barefoot.” The man wanted to talk to Jimmy, with whom he had served in the war. Jimmy “had told him to come by if he were ever in town.”

Healy’s father, James Lloyd Thomas, a World War II veteran, was called Tommy. Healy’s mother angrily replied to the boy “that he was too young to have served with my father” and firmly shut the door.

Moments later, Healy and her mother looked out the windows again, but the soldier had disappeared. There was no way he could have walked down their long driveway to the street in the interval, and he had left no footprints in the snow. Healy wondered whether it had been the spirit of “a wandering soldier from the fateful battle of Kennesaw Mountain.”

The Kennesaw Mountain Line

Johnston’s Confederates established a long, strong line of fortifications between Marietta and Kennesaw, centered on Kennesaw Mountain. Heavy rains prevented Sherman from working his usual flanking routine, so he prepared his largest attack of the Atlanta Campaign, aimed at a Confederate strongpoint on Cheatham Hill. The assault on June 27 failed miserably. Earlier, a Confederate assault at the Kolb Farm had been shattered. These sites are preserved in Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park, one of America’s most popular Civil War sites.

It is the curse of Kennesaw Mountain to be located in the sprawl of metropolitan Atlanta. Roads, suburbs and commercial development have surrounded the heart of the battlefield, thankfully largely preserved before Atlanta spread. On weekends and holidays, joggers, people on bicycles and many families out for a picnic and time in the sun inundate park grounds. However, solitary visitors and those who linger as darkness falls often experience supernatural Civil War events.

Kolb Farm: A Spirit Remains

Michael Norman reported an extraordinary Civil War ghost story in his wonderful book Haunted Heartland. Because of his service in the U.S. Army, James Tatum and his wife, Katherine, an accountant, had traveled the world. They first retired to Florida but quickly grew weary of the heat. They wisely relocated to more gentle climes, selecting the historic city of Marietta in which to spend their leisure years.

In 1986, the Tatums constructed their home in Kolb Creek Farms, not suspecting that the area had been part of a bloody though largely forgotten Civil War battle. Located near the Kolb farmhouse, a log cabin and landmark of the battlefield, their home, a modern, two-story house, was anything but spooky.

It was a year before paranormal activity was manifested in the structure. At 2:30 a.m. one morning, they awoke to the call of nature. James used the bathroom in the bedroom while Katherine walked a short distance to a facility off the hall. She left the door open and “saw a man walking down the hall in front of the open bathroom door.”

Katherine naturally assumed it was James looking for her and called his name. The figure continued on without reply. She followed the man down the hall, repeatedly calling out, “James,” but she stopped at the top of the stairs. She believed he had gone downstairs searching for her, but when she returned to bed, she was startled to find him already there. He would have had to pass her to return to the bedroom.

Katherine told James about the encounter and asked if it had been him. No, he replied, and yes, he had heard her calling his name. James grabbed his gun and thoroughly searched the house, finding every door and window secure. They were alone in their home.

Katherine found it “almost impossible” to sleep and ran over the incident in her mind. She realized that the man’s passage had been without sound, not what “you would normally hear whenever someone’s walking down the hall.” A bright security light had illuminated the being, and she determined it was definitely a male figure; she believes he was wearing a coat and hat.

The Kolb Farm at Kennesaw Mountain National Military Park was the scene of an intense battle. Residents have witnessed Confederate soldiers haunting their new homes.

“He was a solid figure,” she said. “I couldn’t tell what he was wearing because I was on the dark side of him. He was walking like he was going somewhere, not shuffling. And he was swinging his arms as he went by. Like he had someplace to go.”

Katherine was frightened by the encounter, unable to reach a rational explanation for it. She concluded that the figure “was not of this world.”

The apparition was apparently the ghost of a Civil War soldier, but on which side he fought is unknown. His sudden death left his presence on the land where he met his demise. The Tatums were relieved that he turned out to be a playful ghost.

A month later, James was improving a pull-down ladder to the attic. He put down a drill when called to dinner and then became engrossed in a TV program downstairs. Katherine went upstairs to lie down and rest. Soon, “I heard the drill,” she said. “It was real loud, as though someone was playing around with it, turning it on and off. I thought that my husband was trying to scare me with it.”

Katherine ignored the commotion for a few minutes but then ran into the hallway to confront James. He was not there, and the drill lay where her husband had placed it hours before, cold to her touch.

Katherine raced downstairs to explain the situation to James. Again, he searched the house but found nothing.

Several weeks later Katherine was watching television upstairs, when she heard “what sounded like static electricity,” a popping sound in the air near the center of the room. She turned off the set and walked around the room. Katherine was unable to localize the source but was alarmed when it seemed to advance toward her.

“I backed up clear to the corner and it came right up to my face,” she said.

Katherine ducked beneath the phenomenon and ran to find James, who was unable to detect anything amiss. After this incident Katherine was “quite fearful” of the manifestation in the house.

Within a few days, Katherine and James left for a two-month tour of the Pacific Coast and Alaska, and several weeks after returning, they started packing their recreational vehicle for a visit to Florida. As she placed a casserole in the microwave oven, she felt two tugs on her shirt. Turning around she saw there was no one else in the room—James was outside.

There were two other physical sensations connected with the haunting. Katherine always felt a cold spot in the upstairs hallway, where the “soldier” had appeared, and in a guest bedroom, where “I would feel the hair stand up on the back of my neck.” She felt uncomfortable there, “like I was infringing upon someone else’s room. I don’t linger.”

James’s first supernatural experience in the house occurred early in 1988. He was an early riser, making coffee and reading the paper while his wife slept. If she needed James, she would ring a little angel bell they kept in another guest bedroom.

One morning, James responded to a ring of the bell only to find Katherine asleep, and later, she denied ringing it. Several days later, James was coming upstairs when the bell rang, but it stopped as he reached the last step. He found Katherine asleep and the bell in its proper place. Returning downstairs, the bell rang again. Katherine thought the ghost was teasing him. At breakfast, James told Katherine that he would not respond to the bell unless they had a code. Katherine agreed to ring the bell three times.

Of course, the ghost intercepted the signal. It rang three times, and when James responded, Katherine was asleep, and the bell was still in its separate room. As he left the room, it rang again. James decla...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Civil War Spirits of Cobb County
• Part II: Civil War Ghosts of Metropolitan Atlanta
• Part III: Civil War Reincarnation
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Haunted Places Open to the Public
• Bibliography
• About the Author