Chickamauga Battlefield

On 18–20 September 1863 the Union Army of the Cumberland under William Rosecrans and the Confederate Army of Tennessee under Braxton Bragg met along West Chickamauga Creek in the woods and farm clearings of north-west Georgia. It was the largest battle fought in Georgia and the Union’s most significant defeat in the Western Theater. A misunderstood order opened a gap in the Union line just as James Longstreet’s corps attacked, routing a third of Rosecrans’s army; George H. Thomas’s stand on Horseshoe Ridge, or Snodgrass Hill, earned him the name “the Rock of Chickamauga” and saved the rest. Over three days some 34,000 men were killed, wounded, captured or missing – the second-highest toll of the war after Gettysburg.

In 1890 Congress made the battlefield, together with Chattanooga’s Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, the country’s first national military park, largely through the efforts of Union veterans Henry V. Boynton and Ferdinand Van Derveer. It was dedicated in 1895 and filled with hundreds of regimental monuments and cannon. During the Spanish–American War of 1898 it served as a huge training camp, where disease swept through the crowded volunteer regiments.

The battlefield’s best-known legend is “Old Green Eyes”. In the most common version he is a Confederate soldier killed in the battle – sometimes only a floating head – who wanders the fields at night with glowing green eyes, searching for his body. Other versions describe a creature said to have haunted the area long before the war, and folklorists point to an account in Susie Blaylock McDaniel’s Official History of Catoosa County of a strange encounter near the battlefield in 1876. Ghost-lore retellings add that a park ranger named Edward Tinney described meeting a green-eyed figure in the park in 1976, though the interview they cite has never been traced. Local storytellers add a Lady in White searching for her dead, and the sounds of battle, horses and cries on the field.

The legend became popular enough that the Associated Press and the Chattanooga Times Free Press reported the park closing its secondary roads on Halloween night to keep would-be ghost hunters from roaming the grounds after dark. The novelist Cherie Priest made Old Green Eyes a character in her 2006 book Wings to the Kingdom.

A pair of glowing green eyes or a green-eyed figure seen in the fields and along the roads at night; a woman in white wandering the battlefield; and moaning, cries, gunfire and galloping horses heard where no one is present, according to local storytellers and visitors.

Across the battlefield’s fields, woods and roads, and around Snodgrass Hill (Horseshoe Ridge) where the last stand was made; nearly all reports come at night, when the park is closed.

Old Green Eyes is one of the best-known legends of the Chattanooga region, retold in local media every Halloween, in ghost-tour books and podcasts, and in Cherie Priest’s novel Wings to the Kingdom. The park itself focuses on the history of the battle and its soldiers.