Ghosts of Antietam - Paperback

by Mark P. Brugh (Author), Mark Nesbitt (Foreword by)

Haunting stories of the bloodiest single day in American history.

In 1862, the Antietam Battlefield ran red with blood. Spanning the fields, ridges, lanes, and bridge crossings of Sharpsburg, Maryland--from the East Woods and West Woods to Bloody Lane, Burnside Bridge, and the Antietam National Cemetery--more than 160 years of eyewitness accounts, folklore, and unexplained encounters have emerged from that deadly day.

Nearly twenty-three thousand soldiers were recorded as killed, wounded, or missing, and there are many whose spirits reportedly still linger. One is reportedly a spectral drummer boy, often identified as Private Charlie King of the 49th Pennsylvania Volunteers, who was just thirteen years old when he died. General Mansfield is rumored to eternally travel up Smoketown Road, re-creating his final ride before he succumbed to a mortal wound. A ghostly woman in black haunts the Bloody Lane, and shadowy figures can sometimes be seen around Burnside Bridge and the old Piper farm.

Author Mark P. Brugh explores the powerful intersection of history, memory, and the supernatural across one of America's most storied landscapes.

Author Biography

Mark P. Brugh is a historian, writer, and public interpreter of the American Civil War based in Sharpsburg, Maryland. For more than four decades, he has researched and written about the Battle of Antietam. He is the founder of Sharpsburg Civil War Ghost Tours, one of the longest-running and most respected ghost-tour programs in the region. It is part of his long-standing effort to treat ghost stories not as spectacles, but as another way people have tried to understand loss, place, and history.