Haunted by Memory: Two Civil War Ghost Stories

ECW welcomes back guest author M.A. Kleen.

The simple people of the South believed firmly in ghosts. From childhood, Jimmy had learned to fear uncanny manifestations. His perplexity had already grown into fear. He now became frightened. Little would it take to precipitate him into headlong flight. Suddenly, he heard the noise again from the parlor. – “The Soldier Boy’s Ghost: A True Story”

Ghost stories have a long tradition of reflecting humanity’s most primal fears and fascination with the unknown and unknowable. This was certainly true during and after the American Civil War, when veterans and civilians struggled to make sense of that conflict and its horrific toll in lives lost and property destroyed. More than just ghostly encounters on the battlefield, the following stories show how the Civil War haunted the minds and spirits of those who survived it.

The Soldier Boy’s Ghost

This story, written by Mrs. B. C. Peters of Oak Hill in Fayette County, West Virginia, appeared in the September-October 1932 issue of Confederate Veteran.^[1] It is ambiguously supernatural, a melancholic meditation on defeat and the slow, painful march home, on how the war’s aftermath affected both veterans and civilians left behind.

As the final days of the Civil War unfolded, a frail young Confederate soldier trudged westward along a country road, recently discharged from a hospital in Petersburg. Just 21 years old, he had the face and weariness of a man twice that age. For four long years, he had marched through some of the bloodiest battles of the war, surviving only because, as his captain once joked, he was too thin to hit.

Now wounded, barefoot, and cloaked in his dead brother’s oversized uniform, he was headed home to the mountains, though he wasn’t sure home would still be there. His journey was marked by pain, hunger, and haunting memories. After tossing his ruined shoes into a stream, he rested beneath a tree, only to be awakened by a violent storm.

Later, footsore and famished, he stumbled upon a grand, but seemingly abandoned country mansion. Finding the door unlocked and no answer to his knocks, he entered and discovered a home filled with signs of recent life: a blazing fire, fresh food in the kitchen, even yeast dough rising on the table. Still, not a soul answered his calls.

Then came the footsteps from the upstairs room. The soldier, clutching his musket, searched the house top to bottom, but found no one. The sounds repeated, measured footsteps, pausing midway, sometimes stamping as if to announce themselves.

Overcome by dread, his courage finally gave way, and he fled through a back window, racing barefoot through the night until he collapsed on a hillside above the house. From that vantage, he watched and waited, expecting to glimpse a ghost, but none appeared.

Come morning, the fear seemed foolish. Laughter replaced terror as hunger gnawed again at his belly. It must have been a young woman, alone, he decided, trying to scare him away. Emboldened, he returned to the mansion, only to find the kitchen freshly cleaned and more food prepared, as if his visit had been expected. He quickly packed some food, said a silent word of thanks, and turned down the garden path, pausing only once to cast a final glance at the mysterious house.

On its surface, this is a snapshot of a strange, sad moment on a weary Confederate soldier’s journey home at the close of the Civil War, but beneath that, it offers commentary on war’s psychological toll, the dissolution of the Southern home front, and the lingering ghost of a dying cause. The story draws from Southern Gothic tradition to portray cultural collapse through the lens of the supernatural.

The soldier, once youthful and proud, is reduced to a limping shadow of his former self. He’s malnourished, injured, exhausted, and alone, burdened by memories of home and horrors of battle. His terror at the mysterious footsteps and flight from the house, despite no visible threat, reflects how deeply the war has unmoored his sense of safety and reality. The eerie atmosphere mirrors the disorientation of a man who has known nothing but conflict for four years.

The mansion itself, warm, inviting, but eerily empty, serves as a metaphor for the old South. The soldier encounters a place rich in the trappings of wealth and gentility yet seemingly inhabited only by echoes. As Union armies advanced, populations shifted, women were left alone to protect their property, slaves escaped to freedom, and plantations sat empty.^[2] The house isn’t haunted in the traditional sense, but the unseen walker, always just out of reach, may represent the spirit of a vanished way of life.

Soldiers and Ghosts

Ambrose Bierce’s “A Baffled Ambuscade” first appeared in the November 1906 issue of Cosmopolitan under the heading “Soldiers and Ghosts.”^[3] The story, loosely based on Bierce’s own experiences as a first lieutenant on the staff of Gen. William Babcock Hazen in the Union Army of the Cumberland, blends the harsh realities of war with the uncanny.

In the aftermath of the battle of Stones River, Union and Confederate forces glared at one another from opposite outposts. The road connecting the two, a stretch of turnpike hemmed in by forest, became a no-man’s land punctuated by cavalry patrols, skirmishes, and the occasional report of artillery.

One night, Maj. Seidel, a seasoned Union officer, led a squadron on a reconnaissance mission under cover of darkness. But something was off from the start: one of the videttes, Trooper Dunning, had gone forward on his own, against orders. Shots were heard in the distance.

As the column advanced slowly, muffling noise, Seidel halted at the edge of a dense cedar wood and rode forward to reconnoiter alone. Unknown to him, a small group of his men trailed behind. There, in a moonlit clearing, he saw the missing Dunning standing motionless next to the body of a man sprawled across a dead horse.

Dunning raised a hand in warning and pointed toward the forest. Reading the gesture as a sign of a nearby enemy, the major quietly turned back, alerting his men that Dunning had fought and survived and would soon rejoin them. But Dunning never returned.

At dawn, the Union column advanced into the cedar woods and came upon the grim scene. Dunning lay dead beside the horse, a bullet square in his forehead. He had been lifeless for hours, well before the major encountered him. Yet the major had seen a figure in the moonlight. A later inspection confirmed that a Confederate ambush had indeed been lying in wait just beyond the tree line.

Like much of Bierce’s fiction, this story reflects the Civil War not as a grand clash of ideologies or armies, but as a series of intimate, haunting moments where men are isolated, disoriented, and left to navigate the blurred edges between life and death.^[4] It emphasizes how little separates the soldier from the grave, how quickly heroism dissolves into tragedy. The major could have easily shared the same fate as Dunning. It was only a weird encounter that saved him.

The story can also be seen as an allegory for the confusion and unreliability of wartime perception. The major believes he sees Dunning, but perhaps,in the darkness, he saw only what he wanted to see. Bierce, a veteran of brutal battles like Shiloh, often explored how war distorts reality. Here, he subtly questions whether soldiers can ever truly trust their senses.

Both “The Soldier Boy’s Ghost” and “A Baffled Ambuscade” examine the Civil War through the eyes of individual soldiers caught in quiet, intimate, and deeply personal moments. These are not tales of patriotism, grand armies, or larger-than-life figures; they are stories about loneliness and fear, of being swept up in events outside of your control.

Both stories use claustrophobic settings to place us inside the thoughts of soldiers shaped by war’s personal toll. War lingers in the roads, woods, and buildings, leaving behind a kind of psychic residue that manifests in eerie, unexplained ways. They remind us that the true weight of conflict is not always reflected in casualty numbers; it is borne in the hearts and minds of the survivors. In this way, both narratives use the supernatural to speak to the emotional and psychological cost of war.

M.A. Kleen is a program analyst and editor of spirit61.info, a digital encyclopedia of early Civil War Virginia. His article “‘A Kind of Dreamland’: Upshur County, WV at the Dawn of Civil War” was recently published in the Spring 2025 issue of Ohio Valley History.

Endnotes:

^[1] Mrs. B. C. Peters, “The Soldier Boy’s Ghost: A True Story,” Confederate Veteran 40 (September-October 1932): 346-349.

^[2] Paige Gibbons Backus, “‘Total War’: The Civil War’s Effect on the Home Front,” American Battlefield Trust, May 12, 2021. https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/total-war-civil-wars-effect-home-front

^[3] Ambrose Bierce, “Soldiers and Ghosts,” Cosmopolitan Magazine, Vol. 42, Issue 1 (November 1906): 37-38.

^[4] Jim McWilliams, “Ambrose Bierce’s Civil War,” The New York Times Disunion Blog, December 17, 2013. https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/17/ambrose-bierces-civil-war/