Fort Sisseton

Fort Sisseton was founded in 1864 as Fort Wadsworth, an army post on the Coteau des Prairies in northeastern South Dakota. It was built in the aftermath of the 1862 conflict in Minnesota and the Dakota Territory, to protect settlers and control routes toward the goldfields. On 29 August 1876 it was renamed Fort Sisseton, for the Sisseton band of the Dakota people, some of whose members served the army as scouts. Soldiers from cavalry and infantry units were stationed there until the army left in 1889; between 1884 and 1888 two companies of the African American 25th Infantry, the Buffalo Soldiers, were among the garrison.

After the army, the post passed to the state. In the 20th century it served as a hunting lodge and cattle ranch, and in the 1930s as a Works Progress Administration camp. It became a State Historical Park in 1959 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973. Fourteen original buildings still stand, from officers’ quarters and a stone barracks to the powder magazine and the guardhouse, and every June the park holds a historical festival with cannon fire and reenactors.

South Dakota’s Game, Fish and Parks department, which runs the park, publishes a page of the fort’s ghost stories. Its best-known figure is a Lady in White, seen at an upstairs window of the old commanding officer’s house, wearing a servant’s nightgown and holding a candle to the wall. The park explains her with a bit of domestic history: in the late 1870s, bedbugs infested the house, and the women who worked there burned them off the walls with candles each night. She is also said to appear on the officers’ row boardwalk during the festival.

Two more stories come from the 1990s, when inmates worked on the restoration. According to the park, one worker using the pay phone beside the old schoolhouse felt a tug at his trouser leg and saw a small boy, a child who appears to children and seems to want to play with them, and he refused to go back to work there. A guard on the phone outside the guardhouse, which the Buffalo Soldiers had built, was tapped on the shoulder and turned to find a soldier in uniform. None of the accounts is documented beyond the park’s retelling, and the park itself presents them as stories visitors enjoy rather than as proof.

A lady in a nightgown with a candle at an upstairs window, a small boy who tugs at clothing and plays with children, a Buffalo Soldier who taps people on the shoulder.

The commanding officer’s house, the boardwalk along officers’ row, the pay-phone spots by the old schoolhouse and the guardhouse, and the parade ground in the evening.

The ghost stories are part of the park’s lore and appear in regional listings of South Dakota hauntings. The annual Fort Sisseton Historical Festival, held on the first weekend in June, brings living history to the parade ground.