“We are a band of brothers and native to the soil, hm, hm, hm, hmm . . . And when our rights were threatened, the cry rose near and far, hurray, for the Bonnie Blue Flag that bears a single star.”
Good lord, thought Paul, they must be having one of those battle reenactments out there today, and this fellow thinks that I am part of it. From his dress, Paul assumed that the man was an officer. His hat was black cloth with small gilt buttons on the sides; strands of gold braid met in the front in a four-leaf clover without a stem. He wore it with the leather visor pulled down, almost as if he were trying to protect his face. At his belt were not only a carbine and pistol but a stout sword as well.
“What kind of carbine is that you’re wearing?”
“It’s an Enfield .577. What do you have?”
“Me? Nothing. Man, I’ve just seen them in books. I never shot one, or a pistol, either. A sword? I wouldn’t know what to do with that.”
The stranger raised his eyebrows in surprise. “You had better go over to the Carter house then, or into town. This is no place for you tonight. That fool Hood thinks he’s as brilliant as Lee, but he’s sending my men to be slaughtered!”
Then he seemed to be talking to someone by his side. The officer’s voice rose in anger. “They have three lines of works, and they are all completed.”
If there was a reply, Paul didn’t hear it. But he did hear the officer’s voice once more, and above the rustle of autumn leaves, the words floated back to him strong and clear.
“Well, Govan, if we are to die, let us die like men!”
With that, Paul saw the stranger, who had never bothered to introduce himself, fling his cap furiously into the air and then ride off. From the distance came the shout, “Charge men! Charge! Do you hear me, do you hear . . . ” And the sound of the voice faded away in a maelstrom of shot and shell, musketry and cannon. Then smoke, or was it mist, seemed to lie all about him. Paul thought he heard a regiment band strike up the strains of “Annie Laurie.”
A few seconds later came the most awesome sound that Paul had ever heard. A veritable chorus of men’s voices shattered the air with the fierce, blood-curdling attack cry that Union troops had quickly learned was the Rebel Yell.
Paul Levitt did what many raw recruits had done when they heard that yell: He began to run. As he ran, his heart pounded. He seemed to be surrounded by the fire of thousands of small arms and the roar of shells. Death pervaded the very atmosphere. He thought he was heading back to his car but, losing his sense of direction, he found himself stumbling about in the graveyard not far from the house. It was a cemetery provided by Carnton shortly after the battle, because a day later more than 1,700 Confederate men lay dead in the fields near this home.
Finally, Paul made his way back to his car. What was it his friend Carter had said? That “on this ground the rows of dead once stood six men deep, so close they could not fall.”
Paul slept poorly, for all night long he dreamed that he was in the midst of one furious charge after another. But early the next morning, he was out at the house again. If he had been part of some supernatural experience or seen a ghost, as he believed he had, he wanted to understand it.
He was fortunate to arrive on a day when Bernice Seiberling was there. Mrs. Seiberling, a delightful, gray-haired lady with a thorough knowledge of the history of Carnton, had long been guiding visitors through the house.
“I would imagine that a house with this much history has some ghost stories connected with it,” Paul said tentatively, as a way to introduce the subject.
“Oh my, yes,” said Mrs. Seiberling, not reluctant to share stories of some of the spirits. And she began to talk about a former cook at Carnton during Civil War days and the ghost’s ways of getting attention.
“I had been aware of her for quite a while, for I would hear glasses clinking in the kitchen as if someone were washing dishes. Then I began to hear her in other areas of the house. One day I had a tour going, and it sounded as if rocks were being thrown at the windows and breaking them.
“Most of the noises were coming from one room. When we reached it, we found a framed picture of the house lying face up on top of the heater, its glass shattered in a million pieces. It was as though someone had carefully placed it there. One of the men on the tour took his camera and made a picture of it, for, he said, ‘It’s impossible for that picture to have fallen in such a way.’
“On another occasion,” Mrs. Seiberling continued, “I was here alone on a cold winter day and kept hearing a noise in a small enclosed porch at the back of the house, so I went to investigate. We keep a box of old glass panes on a shelf there. I found two panes of the thin old glass, unbroken, one lying on each side of the door. The box, of course, was still on the shelf. It’s as though the spirit has a sense of humor and likes to play tricks on me. We had all heard things but had no idea what was causing them until one day a descendant of the Carnton family said, ‘You know there was a murder in this house, don’t you?’
“It seems that one of the field hands murdered a young girl
