The Deadliest Day "The days after the battle are a thousand times worse than the day of the battle - and the physical pain is not the greatest pain suffered. How awful it is.The dead appear sickening, but they suffer no pain. But the poor wounded mutilated soldiers that yet have life and sensation make a most horrid picture." - Major William Child, Surgeon, 5th Regt. New Hampshire Volunteers Much has been written about the ghosts and hauntings of the Civil War, including several books by this author. Understandably, a great deal of ghost lore that arose from the conflict that tore the nation apart between 1861 and 1865 focuses on the town of Gettysburg. There are few locations on Earth where the past seems so directly connected to the present than in that small Pennsylvania town.

Gettysburg sits at the conjunction of numerous roads. Its status as a hub made it almost inevitable that Federal and Confederate soldiers would clash there, as they did over the 4th of July weekend in 1863. More casualties were sustained during those few short days than in the entirety of the Vietnam War a century later: over 50,000. The after-echoes of that clash still reverberate across the rolling fields and through the town today. Phantom soldiers are seen in the streets, the houses (many of which date back to the time of the battle) and on the outskirts of the town. Few places were untouched by the heavy fighting, as fathers fought sons and brother was pitted against brother. Most Civil War historians agree Gettysburg was the high-water mark of the Confederacy; the rush of Confederate troops against the center of the Union line on July 3 at the conclusion of what came to be called Pickett''s Charge was the closest the South ever got to a truly decisive military victory. Their forces, under the command of General Robert E.

Lee, were ultimately defeated and retreated in order to lick their wounds and try again. The war would go on for another two years, and while the Confederates did achieve other battlefield victories during that period, never again was there an opportunity to win the war or even bring it to a halt on their own terms. Given its pivotal importance, it is easy to see why the battle and the township of Gettysburg continue to receive so much attention. However, one does not have to travel far in order to find equally important battlefields to explore -- battlefields that are also said to be haunted. It is widely acknowledged by historians that September 17, 1862, was the single deadliest day in the history of the United States. More than 23,000 men were killed or wounded in a battle fought close to a creek near Sharpsburg, Maryland: a creek named Antietam. By the second year of the war, President Abraham Lincoln needed a victory from his Army of the Potomac. Unfortunately, it was commanded by General George McClellan, who was a superb trainer of troops in camp, and a poor general in the field.

McClellan was loved his men, who nicknamed him "Little Mac." His relationship with Lincoln was nothing short of adversarial, however. The president had been forced to bite his tongue more than once after being openly and flagrantly snubbed by the general, who reveled in another nickname: "Young Napoleon." Short of stature, he was equally grand in ego. McClelland was convinced that he, and only he, knew how best to prosecute the war, and the politicians could either like it or lump it -- an attitude he adopted all the way up to the office of the president himself. McClellan had done an undeniably superb job of getting the army into fighting shape but actually employing it to strong effect against the enemy was another matter entirely. No matter how many men he had at his disposal, McClellan believed (erroneously, as it turned out) that the enemy had more. He dallied in favor of amassing more men, never satisfied with the number of troops at his disposal.

Reluctant to give battle without reinforcements, he ceded initiative to the Confederates time and time again. As Robert E. Lee''s Army of Northern Virginia entered Maryland, McClellan had no choice but to seek him out. The stage was set on September 17 for what looked at first like a decisive clash between North and South. Lee was outnumbered by a factor of almost two to one, bringing just 45,000 troops to the fight against McClellan''s 87,000. Based on the numbers alone, the Battle of Antietam should have been a crushing Union victory. Needless to say, the reality was very different. After studying Lee''s dispositions as best he could, McClellan formulated an attack plan: he would strike at Lee''s left and right flanks, hoping that his opponent would strengthen them by drawing troops away from his center.

Then, with the center of his line weakened, McClellan would hit it with everything he had, hoping to shatter it and break the Confederate formation entirely. As strategies go, it wasn''t an inherently bad one. However, there was enough complexity baked into the battle plan that it required a high degree of coordination between multiple wings of the Union army. A delay at any point of failure could prove disastrous. The first shots were fired on the morning of the 17th when McClellan''s northerly forces under General Joseph Hooker marched into a small field that was contested by Confederate infantry forces. The fighting that took place there was savage, with volleys of massed musketry cutting down rank after rank of soldiers. Entire books have been written about the fight for David Miller''s 30-acre cornfield, a place that saw more death per square foot of land than almost any other field in the entire Civil War. When it was over, the "butcher''s bill" -- an informal term used to describe casualty lists -- numbered a staggering 8,850 killed and wounded.

Visitors to Antietam sometimes report hearing the sounds of battle at this spot, although much less frequently than other parts of the field. This may come as something of a surprise, considering the sheer carnage that was inflicted during the morning''s fighting in and around the tall rows of corn. Beginning shortly after 9 o''clock in the morning, in an effort to break through the center of the Confederate line, Union commanders hurled their men against an ad hoc strongpoint that had been established in a sunken road that ran through a natural depression in the ground. Heavily outnumbered, the Confederate defenders nonetheless dug in their heels, using piled fence rails to provide additional cover. Over the course of three hours, they fought tenaciously for every scrap of ground, fighting off waves of attacks made by their blue-jacketed opponents. General Lee fed what reinforcements he could spare into the fight, bolstering the stressed defensive line as best he could. Noon brought the fifth and final Union attack on the sunken road. The Federal troops finally broke through, threatening to wipe out the entire defensive formation in their makeshift trench.

Rebel losses became so great that the broken Confederate survivors finally withdrew, ceding the sunken road to the enemy. What remained of the shattered Confederate force retreated, falling back in the direction of nearby Sharpsburg. Once the firing had stopped, resulting in a Union victory -- albeit a Pyrrhic one -- the bodies of dead Confederates filled the sunken road, many of them lying atop one another in a jumble of corpses. These corpses would be placed in mass graves close to the spot on the sunken road where they fell, often placed one on top of the other in haste. Ten years would pass before they were exhumed and interred at the dedicated Rose Hell Cemetery in Hagerstown. The lack of a proper Christian burial is often cited as being the cause for a haunting. Both Burnside Bridge and the Sunken Road meet this criterion. The sunken road that the Confederate troops occupied as a defensive position and fought so hard to try and hold has since been renamed.

Considering that it is now called "Bloody Lane," nobody should be surprised that this particular section of the battlefield is said to be haunted by the spirits of some of the approximately 2,000 men in gray who died there. Total casualties on both sides numbered approximately 5,500. On many occasions, phantom Confederate soldiers have been seen in and around the depressed stretch of road. Walking the battlefield today, one is struck by how well preserved this section is. The line is lined on either side by wooden fences, and it is easy to see why it was chosen to form a defensive bulwark by the Confederate officers. The author visited on clear and sunny day and experienced nothing untoward. Numerous other visitors say they have heard the sound of musketry and the screams of wounded and dying men, and the battle cry of the Union regiments who tried to carry the Confederate position by storm. In addition to these auditory phenomena, the distinctive smell of gun smoke sometimes wafts over Bloody Lane on days when there are no re-enactors employing it as part of their living history performances.

Raggedy men dressed in Confederate garb have been mistaken for those same re-enactors.until they vanish into thin air before the astonished eyewitnesses. Explaining the haunting of Bloody Lane takes little effort. Nothing good or positive happened there; all of the intense emotions that arose from the desperate combat on September 17 were negative. Sheer terror, anger, hope, despair, and physical agony were the order of the day. The luckiest casualties died instantly, usually shot in the head or chest. Others lingered on with terrible wounds, slowly bleeding to death, or dying of infection after suffering what pas.