Haunted by Memory

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. In a nation forever altered by the war, these ghost stories speak to something far more meaningful than Americans’ taste for spine-tingling entertainment. 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.

In this annotated anthology of Civil War ghost stories, historians John R. Neff and Amy Laurel Fluker offer the first scholarly analysis of the significance of ghosts to the history and memory of the Civil War. Haunted by Memory 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. By 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.

Amy Laurel Fluker is an associate professor at Youngstown State University in Ohio, where she holds the Reeder Endowment in U.S. History. She is the author of Commonwealth of Copromise: Civil War Commemoration in Missouri, among other publications.

John R. Neff was an award-winning educator, associate professor of History, and director of the Center for Civil War Research at the University of Mississippi until his passing in 2020. He was the author of Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation.