Speaker 1: Death on the mountain South Mountain, Maryland. The dread in
the air was piable on the South Mountain early on
the morning of September fourteenth, eighteen sixty two, oh Daniel
Wise saw in his eyes of the thousand some North
Carolina Confederates who worked frantically all over his farm. They
set up fire lines dug in behind stone wall that
marked the borders of his land, and carefully placed their
cannons to cover the old sharp Burg Road where it
approached the Fox's Gap mountain pass. Within an hour, Daniel's
once tranquil form was unfamiliar to the old man's eyes.
Rows of cabbage and corn vanished without a trace, trampled
under the Confederate brigade, and replaced by artillery batteries and
walls of rifles bristling with bayonets. Every rifle was cocked
and loaded, pointing southeast across Fox Gap toward the approaching enemy.
Not one of the soldiers said a word to Daniel
Wise while they are transforming his farm into a military fortress,
and Wise knew better to get in their way. Only
after every fighting man was in its proper place did
the commanding Confederate officer approach the overwhelmed farmer. The officer,
a young man, was perfectly kept, dark hair and a
goatee that hung past his collar. Wore a gray military
coat studded with two rows of brass buttons. Gold brigade
wound up his sleeves and shown in the morning sun.
Good morning to you, sir, the officer said, speaking in
a Virginian accent, I am General Samuel Garland, an officer
of the Confederate States of America. My brigade has been
ordered to defend this pass through the mountain against the
approaching enemy, and will do so at any hazard. Let
me assure you that you will be reimbursed for any
damage to your form damage to my form. Wise men
stumbled as he surveyed the trampled mess that used to
be his harvest. In the meantime, Garland continued, I suggest
you and your family leave this area as quickly as possible,
for there are two brigades of blue coats coming up
the old Sharpsburg Road, and we do not intend to
let them pass without a fight. The old farmer didn't
need a second morning, gathering his daughter and son and
let personal possessions he could fit into his wagon. Wise
left his small wooden cabin behind him. He could hear
the opening shots of the battle as the first Union
soldiers cresting the ridge of South Mountain found themselves facing
General Garland's brigade. The fight for a Fox's Gap began
at about nine o'clock in a It was one desperate
engagement in the larger Battle of South Mountain, in which
General Lee's Confederate regard engaged the vastly larger Union forces
under General McGowan. History will remember the fight only as
a lead into the horrific Battle of Annon, occurring three
days later just beyond the South Mountain range. But for
thousands of Union and Confederate soldiers to fight for passage
through the South Mountain Gaps was an end of the road.
Bullets and cannonballs flew back and forth, decimating Union and
Confederate lines. The relentlessness Union advanced on General Garland's position
led to fear's hand to hand fighting along Daniel Wise's
old stone Wall. Men lunged at each other with bayonets,
knives and fists. General Garland himself was shot off his horse,
breathing his last as he demoralized brigade finally broke out
into headlong retreat from the larger Union force. The battle
for Fox's Gap was a short affair, lasting only about
two hours, but it was no less bloody. By the
time the Federals occupied the pass, hundreds of dead bodies
lay thick Overwise's fields. The mountain pass was turned into
a landscape of death, with soldiers shot, stabbed, or blown
into pieces by artillery. Union soldiers were the ones standing
guarily over the battlefield after the smoke had cleared, but
an enor's duty came along with the victory, for though
the field was theirs, so too were the fallen that
covered it, and the task of bearing the dead fell
on their shoulders. It was hard, ugly work, made worse
by the rocky ground at Fox's Gap that made the
digging especially difficult. Eventually, the Union men, demoralized, disgusted and
exhausted by their nightmare detail, decided that they had enough.
Eager finished their burial duty, they gathered the last fifty
eight Confederate bodies and threw them into Daniel Wise as well.
After they were done their grisly work, their Union soldiers
finally moved on a few days later on September eighteenth,
Daniel Wise and his two children were turned home. The
Wise family couldn't have dreamed up a more horrific sight.
The fertile fields that they once knew were now unrecognizable,
made into a surreal harvest of devastation by the numberless
Union burial mounds and Wise's fields. Dead Confederates were buried
in shallow trenches that were dug right up against the
bullet riddle walls of Wise's farmhouse. Death hung over the
entire area, and there was no escaping the stench of rot,
which was just as thick outside Daniel Weiss's cabin as
it was within. But the worst of it lay at
the bottom of the Wye's well, where fifty eight dead
Southerners lay decomposing at the bottom of the dank pit.
The Civil War continued on its bloody course, leaving Daniel
Wise in his ruined farm, to be forgotten in the
backwaters of Maryland's local history. Yet Daniel's tell did not
end there. In fact, it had just begun. As outraged
as he was in the mess that the Union army
left behind, Wise quickly learned that some of the dead
on his farm were as unhappy with their burial arrangements
as he was. According to popular account, Daniel Wise's first
running with one of the Fox GAP's ghosts occurred a
few days after he returned. Wise was sitting on the
porch of his home, smoking a pipe, trying to figure
out what he was going to do about his farm,
when a solid ter a young man appeared in the distance,
walking down the old Sharpsburg rode towards his home. As
Wise watched the man approach, he felt a dull chill
creak up his back. He wasn't sure why, but the
sight of this man filled him with a strange shinse
of dread. Only when the stranger drew closer did Wise
begin to get an idea of what sort of thing
he was facing. At about twenty yards, Wise couldn't help
notice the bone white parlor of the man's skin. A
few yards closer, and Wise could make out the early
blank expression on his face. When the pale man stepped
on to Wise's front yard, the Mariland farmer realized that
he could see right through his visitor. The man before
him was transparent. Daniel Wise nearly fell out of his
rocking chair and fright, who are you, he stuttered, not
sure whether he should have asked what instead of who.
The visitor did not respond, and a terrifying silence settled
over Wiser's yard when the transparent apparition finally did speak,
as his voice sounded cold and empty, like the frigid
fall wind blowing over South Mountain. Our lives were stripped
from us, and we were not given a proper burial.
Be sure that I will return here every night until
we are honored as fallen soldiers. The approchin then slowly
turned until it was looking at Daniel Wise's well, standing
for a minute or two as it grew ever more transparent,
until there was nothing there at all. Frantic and terrified,
Wise ran towards the well, somehow, hoping to speak with
the dead young confederate, perhaps to tell him that he
wasn't the one who had thrown the men in the well,
that he was just as upset about how the dead
soldiers had been treated. The blood red sun was just
about to dip under the South Mountain when he reached
the well, and the old man frantically threw the cover back,
leaning forward into the black pit. Daniel was just about
to holler his plea when the smell of purification hit him,
he barely managed a tortured gag before he crumbled to
his knees, his body unable to take the poisonous stench
of rot. He heard them then, as he was hunched
against the well wall, coughing and spitting. Their moans rose
out of the depths of the well, a tortured chorus
of helplessness and misery. The sound was so horrific that
Daniel was never able to forget it for as long
as he lived. But at that moment all he could
think of doing was closing up the well and getting
as far away from it as he could. Struggling to
his feet, Daniel Wise pushed the lid back over the
well opening and staggered back to his cabin as fast
as his shaky legs could take him. Once inside, he
slammed the door shut behind him, barring the entrance with
thick chair jamming under the door knob. He didn't sleep
a wink that night, his thoughts plagued by the appearance
of the dead confederate and the voices in the well.
Daniel Wise never went near that well again, but the
dead soldier's apparition appeared at the old sharp Berg Road
every night, just as the sun was setting, if Daniel
was outside finishing up his day chores or relaxing with
the pipe on his front porch, the ghost turned off
on to his yard and made his way towards Weiss.
There the dead soldier stood for several minutes, staring blankly
at the Maryland farmer, before gradually fading into nothingness. On
those nights when Daniel was indowards at sunset, the ghosts
went only as far as the gates, stopping there to
stare at the Wise home with the same expressionless gaze
until fading out of sight. For his part, Daniel Wise
never got used to the ghost's regular appearances. Every day,
he felt anxiety creeping in as the sun dipped close
to the South Mountain Ridge and the sky began to
grow dark. Sometimes he tried to ignore the apparition, moving
indoors at the first sign at dusk and drawing his
shutters tight, but Wisely quickly learned that measures were pointless,
for even when he couldn't see the dead Confederate, he
could still sense him standing silently just outside his fence,
looking at the shuttered window of his home with blank accusation.
Wise he was out there gaping in fearful silence at
the walls of his home, imagining the ghosts standing alone
on his doorstep. The old farmer found no respite locked
in doors. Somehow, imagining the presence of the lone phantom
was just as frightening as standing in front of it.
The southern casualties of South Mountain turned life on the
Wise farm bad. Cursed by the daily visits of the
dead soldier, Daniel did everything he could to get the
Confederates in the well a proper burial. He wrote letters
to Washington, complaining bitterly about the mess the Union army
left behind all over his land and the well that
was choked up with corpse. Days turned into months, months
turned into years. Although Daniel Weiss kept up the consistent
stream of correspondence, he did not hear anything back from
the federal government. Never once did he mention the ghosts
in any of his letters. But word of the supernatural
soldier on the old Sharpsburg Road spread through the country.
More than one curious seeker staking out the road at
sunset claimed to see him as he drifted towards Danism.
Even after eighteen sixty five, when North and South settled
into their uneasy peace, locals still claimed to see the
ghosts of the anonymous soldier making his way down Fox's
Gap towards Daniel Wise's farm. The ghosts continued its visits
throughout the eighteen sixties, just as Weiss continued his correspondence
with Washington, demanding that something be done about the bodies.
He finally received an answer. In eighteen seventy four, twelve
years after the last shot was fired at Fox's Gap,
the United States military sent in Army detail to clean
up Wise's farm. They removed the bodies from the well
and exhumed the men buried on his land for proper interment.
Daniel never saw the soldier again, and for the rest
of his years he was content and knowing that his
efforts granted the Confederate dead their final rest. His story, however,
lived on after Daniel Wise passed away. The telle of
the ghostly soldier became a local legend. Wise's house was
eventually flattened, his farm abandoned, and as well buried, but
the burial and reburial with the Confederate casualties at Fox's
Gap is still noted. As one of the Civil War's
most grissly footnotes in the tale of the Old Farmer
and his Nightly Visitor, remains, although it has been over
a century since any phantom footsteps made their way down
the old Sharpsburg Road