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Storyteller's Cabin |
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Part One - Ghost Hunting |
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Part Three - The Hunt |
I was especially interested in a small town located near the Pickett's Mill Battlefield called New Hope. It was here that one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War took place. And to understand my story, you must understand the carnage that took place there.
It was May 1864, and General Sherman had begun his relentless march toward Atlanta. His men were hungry and battle weary, but knew that to destroy Atlanta would mean destroying the heart of the Confederacy and finally bringing an end to this horrible war. Standing in Sherman's way was a stubborn Confederate Army led by Joe Johnston. Johnston's men resisted the Union onslaught, forcing Sherman into flanking maneuvers. But like a bloody chess game, Johnston countered each of Sherman's moves, slamming his army into the Union forces day after day.
It was during one of these flanking maneuvers that Sherman's men marched into the area of New Hope Church. What they didn't know was that Confederate forces were lying in wait with sixteen cannons and some 5,000 men. As the Union troops struggled through the thick underbrush into the clearing, they were suddenly hit by a vicious firestorm of artillery. Confederate guns and cannons blasted away at them from behind makeshift log walls. The Union soldiers were sitting ducks.
As the battle raged on, legend has it that a vicious thunderstorm blew into the area - a storm unlike anything the men had ever seen. The skies turned black as night. Lightning flashed and thunder boomed around the battlefield, sometimes drowning out the relentless artillery barrage. Wounded Union soldiers desperately crawled through the torrential rain into a ravine to escape certain death from the Confederate guns. And it was said that, even with the storm and battle raging around them, one could still hear the agonizing moans of the wounded soldiers rising from the ravine.
From that day forward, the Union troops gave a new name to the ravine near New Hope Church - "Hell Hole."
Like other battlefields, New Hope was rumored to be haunted. It had a reputation amongst learned Civil War historians as being a creepy and unsettling place. But I had heard plenty of ghost stories about the battlefields in Virginia, and they had never stopped me before.
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