Camp Randall

Camp Randall began as the Wisconsin State Fair grounds in Madison. In 1861 Governor Alexander Randall had them turned into a training and mustering camp for Union recruits, and over the course of the war roughly 70,000 of Wisconsin’s 91,000 soldiers passed through it. Troops drilled there, and the mascots included the eagle Old Abe, whose statue now tops the Memorial Arch. After the Union captured Island No. 10 on the Mississippi in April 1862, about 1,200 Confederate prisoners were sent north to the camp.

It was not built to hold prisoners. Illness spread quickly among the captives, and overcrowding, thin rations and a weak fence made matters worse. Roughly 138 to 140 of the men died, according to the common figures, though sources differ on the exact count; a stone cenotaph at the cemetery lists 132 names. Healthier prisoners were moved to Camp Douglas in Chicago at the end of May, and some who were too ill to go followed later. The dead were buried together at Forest Hill Cemetery, in a plot later known as Confederate Rest. For years a Southern-born Madison woman, Alice Whiting Waterman, tended the graves, and she was buried beside the men she had cared for.

In 1893 the State of Wisconsin bought the land and gave it to the University of Wisconsin, football has been played on the site since 1895, and the current stadium dates to 1916. The memorial park was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971. The ghost lore is more recent. Tailgaters have said they saw men in Confederate uniforms, some with slings and bandages, drifting into the stadium before games on cold mornings and paying no attention to the crowds. Mike Huberty of American Ghost Walks collects such stories, along with a second-hand report from a security officer at a Madison factory who said he chased a figure that vanished. Some people also report headaches near the military burial plots, and a woman in a hooped dress is said to be seen in the cemetery.

None of this stands on firm evidence. ESPN, which carried the story, concedes that there is no cold, hard evidence, and the accounts are mostly anecdotal and second-hand. What the sources do document is the human story: young men far from home who died of disease in a place unprepared for them, and the people who tried to make sure their graves were not forgotten.

Tailgaters report figures in Civil War uniforms and bandages walking through the stadium area on cold mornings; others describe headaches near the military burial plots and a woman in a hoop dress in the cemetery. These are anecdotal, with few named witnesses.

The stadium parking lots and gates, Camp Randall Memorial Park and Arch, and the Confederate Rest plot in Forest Hill Cemetery.

The legend features in ESPN’s list of haunted sports venues, local ghost tours and podcasts, and in the lore of Madison’s Forest Hill Cemetery.