Fort Delaware

Pea Patch Island, a marshy mudbank in the Delaware River below Wilmington, was chosen in the 1790s as a natural site to guard the approaches to Philadelphia. Two earlier forts failed on its soft ground – a star fort cracked as it settled and burned in 1831 – before the Army built the present pentagonal fortress between 1848 and 1860 on nearly 5,000 timber piles driven deep into the mud. Designed by chief engineer Joseph Totten, it was one of the largest Third System coastal forts, with granite walls, a moat and positions for more than 160 cannon.

The Civil War turned it into a prison. Confederates were first held in sealed casemates and magazines – their carved names can still be seen in the sally port – and after 1862 in wooden barracks, the “bull pen”, outside the walls. Many of the soldiers captured at Gettysburg were sent here. By August 1863 more than 11,000 men were on the island, and by the war’s end tens of thousands had passed through, including about a dozen Confederate generals and political prisoners. Conditions were better than at many prison camps, but overcrowding, damp and disease killed around 2,500 prisoners; half of the deaths came during a smallpox outbreak in 1863, with pneumonia and dysentery the other great killers.

Most of the dead were buried across the river at Finn’s Point in New Jersey, which became a national cemetery in 1875. A 1910 obelisk there lists the names of 2,436 Confederate prisoners, and a separate monument remembers 135 Union guards who died on duty. The fort was modernised for the Spanish–American War, served as a signal station in the Second World War and was handed to Delaware in 1947; it is now the centrepiece of Fort Delaware State Park, where living-history interpreters recreate garrison life in 1864.

The fort’s ghost stories draw on that history. Staff, reenactors and visitors describe footsteps, voices and figures in uniform in the casemates and dark powder magazines, and the fort has hosted many paranormal investigations. Ghost Hunters investigated twice, including a live Halloween broadcast in 2008, and the British series Most Haunted also filmed there.

Visitors, staff and paranormal investigators describe footsteps and voices in empty casemates, apparitions of soldiers in period uniform, cold spots in the tunnels and powder magazines, and a heavy, watched feeling in the old prison spaces. Few accounts are documented in detail.

The sally port where prisoners’ names are carved, the casemates and powder magazines, and the tunnels within the walls; most stories come from evening events and investigations.

Fort Delaware has featured on Ghost Hunters, Ghost Hunters Academy and Most Haunted, and its Civil War prison history is kept by the Fort Delaware Society, which helps descendants trace prisoners and guards. Finn’s Point National Cemetery is a place of remembrance for both sides.