Little Bighorn Battlefield

On 25 and 26 June 1876, along the Little Bighorn River (the Greasy Grass to the Lakota) in southern Montana, Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer’s 7th Cavalry attacked a very large encampment of Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho families. Custer and the five companies he led were killed on the ridge now called Last Stand Hill, while Marcus Reno’s and Frederick Benteen’s battalions survived a separate fight a few miles away. The Army lost 268 men; the best estimates of Native dead range from about 30 to 100. For the Lakota and their allies it was a victory in defence of their families and way of life, and also the prelude to a brutal federal response. The Lakota and other Plains peoples call it the Battle of the Greasy Grass.

The ground was set aside as a national cemetery on 29 January 1879 to protect the graves of the 7th Cavalry, and in 1881 soldiers raised a granite memorial on Last Stand Hill. The site was renamed Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument in 1991, and Congress required a memorial to the Native participants. The Indian Memorial, which the National Park Service calls the Spirit Warrior Memorial, was built from 2001 to 2003; one opening in its circular wall faces the 7th Cavalry monument, which the National Park Service says welcomes the soldiers’ spirits. The monument is a place of mourning and remembrance for Native families as well as a historical landmark.

Ghost stories gather mostly around the Stone House, the superintendent’s residence built in 1894 beside the cemetery. A 2024 feature in Cowboys & Indians relates that staff living there have described lights switching themselves on, doors that wouldn’t open and then did, and shadowy figures that vanish. It tells of a newly appointed ranger who said he saw a headless, legless soldier in his upstairs bedroom in the summer of 1986. It also retells how Christine Hope, who worked at the battlefield in 1983, saw a man with a long handlebar moustache at a table at about 2 a.m., and later identified him from a photograph as Lt. Benjamin Hodgson, killed in the battle. Most such accounts are anonymous, as witnesses did not want to be identified with ghost reports.

An older Crow tradition is often quoted alongside them: that the people who kept the cemetery were called “Ghost Herders”, because the flag they raised and lowered was seen as a signal for spirits to rise at dusk and return to their graves at dawn. Other tales add screams on the field, apparitions of warriors and soldiers, and two men who claimed to be carried back to the day of the battle. These stories come from travel writers and tourism features, not from the National Park Service, whose pages do not mention ghosts. Visitors should treat the field as the memorial it is, stay on the marked trails, and leave the markers undisturbed.

Reports from staff and visitors include lights switching on, doors resisting then opening, shadowy and headless figures in the Stone House, a moustached officer said to be Lt. Hodgson, screams heard on the field, and the sense of being transported to the day of the battle. Most accounts are anonymous or second-hand.

The Stone House beside Custer National Cemetery is the focus; other reports come from Last Stand Hill and the open ridge and, in the folklore, from the evening, when the flag was lowered.

Custer’s Last Stand has inspired countless books, paintings and films. The ghost stories are a minor strand, told in regional and military ghost features rather than by the park. The site is also interpreted through Native voices, including the Indian Memorial and the Lakota and Cheyenne accounts of the Greasy Grass fight.