Old Green Eyes: the US Civil War's Strangest Ghost

[dannye_chase]

 

Hey, y’all, it’s Weird Wednesday! Where on some Wednesdays, I blog about weird stuff and give writing prompts.

Today: Old Green Eyes: the U.S. Civil War’s Strangest Ghost

Welcome on this Weird Wednesday! Today we’re off to Chickamauga, Georgia, to look for something weird in the woods.

In 1863, Union and Confederate soldiers met on a battlefield near Chickamauga, Georgia. The two-day battle had nearly 35,000 casualties—the second-highest in the US Civil War, second only to Gettysburg. The Confederacy won the battle, but ultimately lost the war. Today the site is part of Chickamauga & Chattanooga National Military Park.

If ghosts are created by trauma and tragedy, then battlefields would make for heavy hauntings. Civil War battlefields are no exception—Chickamauga’s got the usual phantom sounds of canons and fighting, ghostly lanterns of grieving family members come to find their dead soldiers, and even a White Lady searching for her lover. But then there’s one guy that just doesn’t fit.

Old Green Eyes is pretty much just that—green eyes, floating in the woods. Sometimes he’s got a body, and sometimes that body is human-like, but most of the time, he’s just a pair of glowing eyes. And nobody seems to know what the guy is doing there. What on earth does he have to do with the Battle of Chickamauga? Or anything else?

Naturally, Old Green Eyes is a fan favorite among ghost hunters and Civil War buffs. He’s even got his own festival. So let’s take a look at some theories about this unique ghost and scare up some glowing writing prompts.

Check out the blog post for the whole story and some writing prompts, such as:

Creature feature. Some accounts of Old Green Eyes do give him a body—just not a human one. Supposedly, he’s appeared as a cougar, while others say the green eyes belong to a horse with a ghostly rider. The second one is easier to explain on a Civil War Battlefield—horses and soldiers both died there. But the big cat is just weird. There could conceivably be a present-day, live cougar in the Georgia woods, either migrating from a population in Florida or escaped from a zoo. Or maybe there was a cougar present during the battle and it was killed and became a very unexpected ghost. Explanations aside, what effect would a large ghost cat have at the site? Is it scarier than a human ghost or more cuddly? Does it have a reason for still hanging around the woods? Does it still get hungry?

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