Booknotes: Haunted by Memory (with excerpt)

New Arrival:

• Haunted by Memory: Ghost Stories of the American Civil War edited by John R. Neff and Amy Laurel Fluker (U Tenn Press, 2026).

Since this site's inception, a number of Civil War book series published by university presses have sadly either scaled back their offerings or disappeared entirely. On a happier note, though, others have broadened their horizons. One of those is the venerable Voices of the Civil War series from University of Tennessee Press, which has recently expanded beyond its traditional domain of edited letters, memoirs, and diaries into themed anthologies like this one. Roughly halfway to Halloween, we are treated to Haunted by Memory: Ghost Stories of the American Civil War, edited by John Neff and Amy Laurel Fluker.

Most Civil War readers possess at least a passing familiarity with the unique brand of supernatural and psychological horror writings of Ninth Indiana veteran and staff officer Ambrose Bierce, but apparently the postwar public's taste for such things was more widespread than many of us realize. From the description: "As America’s bloodiest conflict, it is no surprise that the Civil War gave rise to a golden age of ghost stories. Popular publications were filled with accounts of ghosts―ghosts that appeared in the heat of battle, in the fretful quiet of picket duty, and in the miserable confines of hospitals and prisons. Civil War ghosts continued to haunt the troubled peace that followed, revealing that even so deadly a conflict left unresolved issues in its wake."

The era's ghost stories were not just spooky entertainment for the reading masses. More from the description: "They provide powerful evidence of how a wounded country tried to put the trauma, grief, and anxieties inflicted by the Civil War to rest. By telling ghost stories, Americans created narratives that honored the dead, explained the unexplainable, and gave their experiences a broader sense of identity and purpose."

At over 400 pages, Neff and Fluker's Haunted by Memory addresses haunted tales in a great variety of formats. "(T)he first scholarly analysis of the significance of ghosts to the history and memory of the Civil War," this volume "includes hundreds of examples of ghostly tales that appeared in newspapers, periodicals, and books between 1861 and 1932. These tales both satisfied and fed popular demand for news, entertainment, and ghostlore, and became powerful tools of cultural memory." In addition to compiling the material, the editors establish historical and cultural context through a lengthy introduction and provide extensive chapter notes. Those annotations "provide important historical context, explanatory detail, and biographical information." Though the task proved not to be entirely possible, the goal was to "provide an annotation for all individuals named in the stories" (pg. xxi).

In sum: "(b)y bridging the study of the Civil War, folklore, and memory, this collection expands the parameters of cultural history and reveals how the supernatural became a lasting part of the commemorative landscape of the American Civil War."

The publisher has also kindly provided an excerpt for CWBA readers to consider (press the 'read more' button to view it in its entirety):

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Haunted by Memory: Ghost Stories of the American Civil War

excerpted commentary from Chapter 1: An Age of Spooks

John R. Neff and Amy Laurel Fluker

Understanding how ghost stories became a popular form of cultural expression in the Civil War era requires an understanding of the war’s nearly incomprehensible death toll. Still the deadliest war in US history, it claimed the lives of at least 800,000 combatants. Taken as an equivalent proportion of the US population in the early twenty-first century, that amounts to 8,000,000 lives. But, as historian J. David Hacker reminds us, even that number is a best-guess estimate. It does not account for civilian deaths, particularly among the enslaved, and only roughly accounts for African American soldier dead.ⁱ In short, the Civil War was far deadlier than historians will ever be able to fully appreciate.

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The extent of grief in the postbellum era was so overwhelming that it exerted a palpable force. No one described this atmosphere more eloquently than novelist Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. She reflected:

At that time, it will be remembered, our country was dark with sorrowing women. . . . Toward the nameless mounds of Arlington, of Gettysburg, and the rest, the yearning of desolated homes went out in those waves of anguish which seem to choke the very air that the happier and more fortunate must breathe.

Is there not an actual, occult force in the existence of a general grief? . . . It is like a material miasma. The gayest man breathes it, if he breathe at all; and the most superficial cannot escape it.ⁱⁱ

No surprise, then, that the war’s survivors were haunted by it. As the Indiana Plymouth Tribune observed in 1907: “The war is still present, a vivid reality and yet a memory. And it is not strange that from its bloody happenings have grown some superstitions, some curious fireside tales that ill assort with our arrogant workaday disbelief in ghosts and the unusual.”ⁱⁱⁱ

What is perhaps most interesting about the ghost stories collected in Haunted by Memory, however, is that they reveal that hauntings were not only a postwar phenomena. Veterans testified that ghosts were a part of the experience of Civil War soldiers in combat. Take, for example, the story of Private Henry Moode, who was confronted by the apparition of a Confederate soldier he recognized—having accidentally stumbled over his dead body just moments before. Or, the tale of the “mounted ghost” that terrorized Union pickets on duty near Blaine’s Crossroads. In the chaos of combat and confronted on all sides by the inescapable realities of death, Civil War soldiers manifested ghosts. Or, perhaps, ghosts manifested themselves.

The daily lives of Civil War soldiers, however, were not constantly characterized by terror and death. There were idle moments, too. At such times, soldiers called upon the supernatural as a form of entertainment. The men of the 116th Pennsylvania, for example, filled time during the siege of Petersburg by trading accounts of comrades who returned from the grave to visit their families.

Even when recounted as pastimes, ghost stories offer insights into nineteenth-century American culture. The ghosts of the 116th, like many others described in the stories included in Haunted by Memory, embodied an age-old theme in the Anglo-American tradition of supernatural tales: that of the purposeful ghost. The purposeful ghost appears not merely to frighten the living, but with the intention of achieving some end.

Oftentimes, the ghost returns because it is bound to an unfulfilled promise. Many Civil War soldiers felt the bonds of camaraderie they formed in combat might transcend death. Faced by the suddenness of death in battle and the likelihood they would be denied the opportunity to say final farewells, soldiers sometimes vowed to return from beyond the grave to visit their brothers-in-arms. They believed such visitations might bring closure to grieving friends and provide proof of “the state of the soul after death.” At least, that was the hope of two unnamed comrades from the 2nd Iowa Cavalry, who reportedly made such a promise to one another while on picket duty before the Battle of Farmington. The ghost of “Copleston” appeared to his friend in the prison barracks at Camp Chase to fulfill a similar promise and to relate the details surrounding his death.

In yet another tradition associated with the purposeful ghost, spirits sometimes returned seeking justice or vengeance. Two stories relate to wartime homicides, but the most notable is the story of Private John Rowley. Rowley swore before a US military tribunal that he was being tormented by the spirit of his comrade, Jerome Dupoy, whom he confessed to murdering. The haunting of Rowley serves as a reminder that not all violent deaths came at the hands of the enemy.

The stories also reveal how quickly Civil War sites became associated with hauntings. At locations where specific incidents of the war occurred, the past intruded on the present and stirred memories of the horrors of the war. Battlefields, in particular, emerge from the stories as unsettling places. Take, for example, the specters of Savage’s Station who cried for water from beyond the grave. Or, the ghostly regiments that stalked the cliffs at Pittsburg Landing.

The belief that battlefields were haunted undoubtedly stemmed from the knowledge that not only were they sites of deaths, but of bad deaths. The Civil War shattered the cultural construction of the “Good Death.” That is, a manner of death that followed a specific set of rituals designed to reinforce family bonds, provide assurances of Christian salvation, and offer closure to the grieving.^iv The Civil War bestowed precious few “Good Deaths,” leaving survivors with little consolation. They had no formula to follow when it came to mourning the sudden, violent deaths of loved ones far from home. Their grief was compounded by fears that their loved one’s remains were unidentified, unattended—or worse—unburied.

The tale of the “Ghost at Post 1” powerfully illustrates not only the unsettling realities of death in the Civil War, but also the cultural significance of ghost stories. In this case, the ghost’s purpose is multi-faceted. In the text, the repeated appearance of a Confederate apparition led the men of the 6th Illinois Cavalry on an investigation that resulted in the recovery of his forgotten remains. After providing the unknown Confederate a decent burial, the ghost never returned.

Beyond the text, however, the “Ghost at Post 1” serves a larger symbolic purpose. It is important to note that this particular story appeared in the National Tribune. Founded in 1877, the National Tribune played a pivotal role in the construction of Civil War memory among Union veterans.^v It actively encouraged veterans to submit their recollections of the war to its regular column “Fighting Them Over”—where the tale of the “Ghost at Post 1” appeared. Collectively, the column constituted a history of the war that was shaped by and meaningful for veterans.^vi

The story of the “Ghost at Post 1” must therefore be understood in the context of Civil War memory. It reflects the popular turn towards reconciliation that dominated Civil War commemoration in the late nineteenth century. In this period, aging white veterans increasingly relished recollections of the war that emphasized the common bravery of volunteer soldiers on both sides and minimized the moral and political opposition over racial slavery that drove them into conflict.^vii The “Ghost at Post 1” concludes with a particularly meaningful act of reconciliation. By respectfully tending to the remains of the unknown Confederate soldier, the men of the 6th Illinois Cavalry quite literally put the spirit of sectional antagonism to rest. Death, in this case at least, symbolically restored the common humanity of erstwhile foes.

There is one final and compelling thread that can be traced through the selection of stories in Haunted by Memory: that is the importance of women’s experiences to understanding the impact, prosecution, and subsequent interpretation of the Civil War. When, for example, Sarah Whiteside showed a Boston newspaper correspondent the spot where fifty soldiers had once been buried in her garden, she offered chilling testimony of how the war blurred the line between the battlefield and the home front and, in particular, how it violated the domestic world of women. Her story reminds readers that women’s experiences were not ancillary to the war, but rather central parts of the story.^viii

The fortunes of armies in the field rose and fell with those of the “Nameless Heroines” of the war, as one unknown contributor to the Anaconda Standard termed them. Women both inspired and compelled men to enlist. At the same time, painful and worrisome separations from female friends, relatives, and loved ones drove some men to desertion. The anonymous soldier in “The Corporal’s Story” claimed to have been so distressed by news that his wife was seriously ill that he put a plan to desert into action. Before he was missed, however, a female apparition frightened and shamed him into returning to camp.

Perhaps most powerfully, however, these stories call us to reframe our understanding of the destruction inflicted by the war. Particularly, the psychological damage, devastation, and death wreaked on women.^ix Elizabeth Stuart Phelps observed keenly the omnipresence of “sorrowing women” across the nation—“whose misery crowded the land.”^x In keeping with the popular gothic tropes of the day, writers often romanticized women’s grief. See, for example, A. L. Soule’s account of the death of “Miss Blaine,” who he said succumbed to a broken heart following the death of her lover in the cavalry. Another correspondent claimed the ghost of a woman led him to the grave of Robert H. Lane, who was killed in the Battle of Chantilly. He later learned the ghostly woman was Lane’s fiancé, who also died of a broken heart.

As the most divisive and deadly event in US history, the Civil War forever altered the lives of its survivors and the cultural landscape of the nation. It encouraged Americans, who already embraced the supernatural as an important element of their culture, to popularize ghost stories as a means of examining the unsettling legacies of the war. Whether they brought readers any degree of closure is hard to say, but their prevalence indicates the extent of suffering the Civil War inflicted.

i J. David Hacker, “A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead,” Civil War History vol. 57, no. 4 (December 2011), 307–348.

ii Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Chapters From a Life (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1896), 96–97.

iii Plymouth [In.] Tribune, February 7, 1907.

iv See John R. Neff, Honoring the Civil War Dead (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2005); Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Vintage, 2009).

v Crompton B. Burton, “‘Let Every Comrade Lend Us a Hand’: George E. Lemon and the National Tribune in James Marten and Caroline E. Janney, Buying and Selling Civil War Memory in Gilded Age America (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2021), 68, 69. See also Brian Matthew Jordan, Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War (New York: Liveright, 2014), 75–79; Steven E. Sodergren, “‘Exposing False History’: The Voice of the Union Veteran in the Pages of the National Tribune” in Brian Matthew Jordan and Evan C. Rothera, eds. The War Went On: Reconsidering the Lives of Civil War Veterans (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020), 137, 139.

vi Steven E. Sodergren, “‘Exposing False History’: The Voice of the Union Veteran in the Pages of the National Tribune” in The War Went On: Reconsidering the Lives of Civil War Veterans, eds. Brian Matthew Jordan and Evan C. Rothera (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020), 143–144.

vii Neff, Honoring the Civil War Dead, 5; Caroline E. Janney, Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 5–7; Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 162; Paul H. Buck, The Road to Reunion, 1865–1900 (New York: Vintage, 1927), 310, 318–319.

viii See Stephanie McCurry, Women’s War: Fighting and Surviving the Civil War (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019).

ix Lisa Tendrich Frank, “The Union War on Women” in The Guerrilla Hunters: Irregular Conflicts during the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017), 174–175.

x Phelps, 97.