The Civil War was a time of terrible bloodshed. It pitted brother against brother, family against family, and it was the foundation of a new America which finally promised freedom for all. But beyond the battlefield, there are stories, strange and unexplainable, stories of missing fortunes, ghosts and men who simply vanished. Tonight, we're diving into five of the strangest mysteries of the American Civil War. This is a study of strange. Welcome back to the show.
I'm Michael May. And tonight, I'm diving right into the story. So let's begin with one of the most haunting sightings in military history. A ghostly figure who appeared to some Union soldiers just before the Battle of Gettysburg. That's right. The ghost of George Washington at Gettysburg. It was the evening of June 30th, 1863, the night before the bloodiest battle in American history.
General Daniel Sickles, a hot tempered and often reckless officer, was stationed near Emmitsburg, Maryland, along with his soldiers. The Union Army was on edge. They knew that Confederate forces under General Robert E Lee were marching to the north, and tension was thick enough to cut with a bayonet. That night, in the dim glow of campfires and oil lamps, several Union soldiers reported seeing something they could not explain.
A tall spectral figure was moving among the tents, slowly and deliberately. In the silhouette was imposing a man in full military dress. But his uniform was not of the present time. He wore a tricorn hat and a long coat from the revolutionary era. His white hair was pulled back like a wig, and his boots were unnervingly silent as he stepped in the dirt. At first, no one spoke. Assuming they were imagining things, stressed out, tired as they were.
But then a young Pennsylvania infantry man, Private Joseph Winter, stepped forward, feeling compelled to challenge this intruder who goes there. He called the figure turned slowly, and as the fire light flickered, the soldier saw his face, a face that every schoolboy knew from history books and paintings and from money. The face of George Washington. The young private dropped his rifle and froze. Washington's eyes even glowed with something supernatural.
And then the ghost of George Washington vanished. Years later, a lieutenant Colonel, Theodore Lyman Wood, recalled this in a letter. There were those who swore upon their honor that they had seen General of Old standing among the tents, surveying the field before them. A vision, perhaps, or an omen of fate itself. And that was a letter to his wife, published in 1899. The next day, July 1st, 1863, the first shots of the Battle of Gettysburg rang out in over 50,000 men, with die.
So is this account real? Did the ghost of George Washington really visit the battlefield of Gettysburg? Now, like all ghost stories, there are a lot of accounts, and each of them differ slightly than the others. But there's enough of a legend here that some really do believe that George Washington was seen by many soldiers that night. Mystery number two, the lost Confederate treasure. The Civil War was over. Richmond had fallen. Lee had surrendered at Appomattox on April 9th, 1865.
The Confederacy was collapsing, but one mystery, one that has inspired treasure hunters, conspiracy theorist, historians, documentaries, TV shows, books, all sorts of things involves missing money. What happened to the Confederate gold? The Confederate dollar was valueless during the war, but its treasury at its peak had millions in gold and silver and foreign currency.
Though by the war's end it had dwindled to an estimated half 1 million to $1 million, or roughly 20 to 30 million in today's money. The last confirmed sighting of the treasure was April 2nd, 1865. On that April night, as Union forces under General Ulysses S Grant closed in on Richmond. Jefferson Davis, his Secretary of War, John C Breckinridge, and several members of his cabinet fled south. With them was George Trenholm, the Confederate Secretary of the Treasury.
Trenholm was a Charleston financier and was tasked with protecting what remained of the South's wealth. The treasure was loaded onto wagons and a company, Jefferson Davis, and his cabinet. It first moved to Danville, Virginia, but Danville was not safe for long as Union troops advanced nearby. Davis and his men fled again, heading deeper into the south through North Carolina to Charlotte and finally into Georgia by May 10th.
Davis was captured in Erwin Ville, Georgia, but the treasure, however, was nowhere to be found. So where did it go? That's the big mystery. I'll quickly add here there are more theories and stories and people involved with this mystery than I can go into now in this episode. Some people that are passionate about this mystery have spent their lives researching it, so there's no way I could ever cover it, in its entirety here today.
But if you want me to take a deeper dive into this mystery, I love treasure stories. Send me a message at. A study of strange at gmail.com and let me know. All right, so let me go over some of the series behind the missing gold theory. Number one, secret burial in Wilkes County, Georgia. This legend states that Confederate gold was buried in Wilkes County, Georgia.
The Confederate paymaster named Captain Michael J. Clark, later recalled in a sworn affidavit that the treasure was split up in Washington, Georgia, where Jefferson Davis held his final council. According to Clark, part of the gold was used to pay soldiers their final wages, and the rest was loaded onto a train bound for April, South Carolina. But some believe a portion was buried in Wilkes County, stashed away before the Union could get their hands on it, saving it for a rainy day.
You know the South will rise again and all that kind of stuff. In 1893, the Macon Telegraph published a story claiming local farmers had unearthed a small cache of Confederate gold coins near Washington, Georgia, supporting the idea that some of the treasure was hidden to be later recovered and used. Theory number two. The gold was stolen and not by Union forces, but by the very men tasked with protecting it.
And May 1865 Confederate General Basil Duke, cavalry officer, and a small detachment of men were seen escorting a wagon filled with gold and silver near the Chattahoochee River. The group was headed south, supposedly to protect the treasure from capture, but none of that money was ever seen again. Some historians suspect Duke and his men took the gold for themselves, using it to escape the war and rebuild their lives in Mexico, where South America or the Bahamas or other Caribbean islands.
Theory number three the Knights of the Golden Circle. This is the wildest theory and the one that links the Confederate gold to the mysterious secret society and social club known as the Knights of the Golden Circle, the CXC. The KGB is a shadowy pro-Confederate organization of a very real group, by the way, even though they're quote unquote, a secret society. Now, I wanted to create a new country to continue what they believed is their right to slavery.
They were going to center this new country in Havana. Some believe that after the Confederacy's defeat, the group went underground, hording money and weapons and hidden caches across the south, waiting for the right moment to strike. And that's just one amongst many legends and series about this group.
Now, this theory that the Knights of the Golden Circle have the gold gained traction when John Wilkes Booth personal papers were discovered in the 20th century, allegedly containing coded references to the KGB and the missing Confederate gold treasure hunters have since scoured parts of Georgia and Alabama and Texas looking for signs of buried CXC vaults. But if they exist, they remain undiscovered. Theory for the Union. Stolen? Or did they? Of course.
Another possibility is that the Union found and confiscated the gold but never admitted to it. In June of 1865, Union Colonel Robert H. G. Minty reported recovering a wagon train carrying Confederate assets near Washington, Georgia. However, only $40,000 worth of gold was accounted for, far less than what is thought that the Confederacy had. So where'd the rest go?
A Chicago Tribune article in 1872 claimed that Union officers had divided the spoils among themselves, smuggling gold north and quietly laundering it into the American banking system. To this day, treasure hunters continue to search for missing Confederate gold. And here's just a few sort of postscript bits about this mystery. In 1956, a group of amateur diggers in Georgia found a rusted Confederate, like lock box. And it had a gold coin, and it dated to 1861.
In 1998, deep sea explorers investigating a sunken Civil War blockade runner off the coast of Florida discovered several gold bars stamped with the seal of the Confederacy. And in 2018, using ground penetrating radar, a team led by historian Bob Brewer claimed to have discovered evidence of a hidden Creek vault in rural Texas. The landowner, so far as I can tell, has refused excavation efforts, so the gold may still be out there. Mystery number three the vanishing of the Keystone State.
This mystery is actually partly solved now, but with that partial solving, I will call it, it actually left a bigger mystery. The Keystone State was a side wheels steamer ship which was built in the 1840s. It was 288ft long, could hold 800 passengers and 6000 barrels of cargo. And it served in the Great Lakes at the beginning of the Civil War in 1861, it disappeared in Lake Huron.
The Keystone State left Detroit on November 8th, 1861, with official Manifest Records listing the cargo as farm equipment and machinery intended for Milwaukee. She was last seen off Port Austin, Michigan, struggling in a storm, but no distress signals were ever received. Its disappearance was a real mystery for 150 years. No one knew what happened to it. Did it sink? Visit stolen? If it did sink, where was that and why? And that's what I'm calling the mystery part one.
In this part of the mystery was solved in July of 2013, when treasure hunter David Trotter found the wreck at 175ft down, 50 miles northeast of Harris Field, Michigan. The wreck showed signs of violent destruction, evidence of a catastrophic boiler explosion. Some have theorized that Confederate saboteur might have targeted the ship, hoping to disrupt the Union's supply lines. But from what I can tell, that theory is pure speculation. Now the mystery part two.
There's no farm equipment found in the wreckage. So what was the Keystone State carrying? Was the ship actually carrying gold or military supplies, secretly moving both to help the Union Army? This theory is supported by historians who believe that that very well might have been what was going on. And after all, farm equipment is not often shipped during the winter months across the Great Lakes. Mystery number four the ghosts of Fort Monroe in Hampton, Virginia.
Fort Monroe is a fortress unlike any other. Constructed in 1834, it remains the largest stone fort ever built in the United States. It was nicknamed the Gibraltar of the Chesapeake, and it was in use until 1946 and was a crucial stronghold during the Civil War. One of the few forts in the South that never fell into Confederate hands. But beyond its military history, Fort Monroe has a darker, more haunting role to play today.
Soldiers, prisoners, and even high ranking generals once walked its stone corridors. And with this much history, if ghosts are real, they're definitely at Fort Monroe. And May 1861, just weeks after the war began. Three enslaved men Frank Baker, James Townsend and Shepard Malloy, escaped from a Confederate labor camp and fled to Fort Monroe, hoping for protection when their owner demanded their return under the fugitive Slave Act, Union General Benjamin Butler made a bold decision.
He declared that these men were contraband of war and refused to send them back. Word spread quickly, and soon thousands of enslaved people fled to the fort seeking freedom. But while Fort Monroe has this incredible history, it is also home to some incredible ghost stories. The first, which I'll mention, is the ghost of Jefferson Davis, the most famous spirit to haunt the fort. The president of the Confederacy himself. You see, after the Confederacy collapsed in April 1865, Davis fled south.
I talked about this earlier and the missing gold. He was eventually captured, and he was charged with planning Abraham Lincoln's assassination, which he actually didn't do. However, they changed the charge to treason and he was jailed at Fort Monroe for two years. At first, he was confined to a damp, dark cell, which they called casemate. So he was in casemate number two, and he was kept in isolation. He suffered from illness, depression and paranoia during his imprisonment.
During his two years at Fort Monroe, he eventually was moved to a roomier abode, and his wife was actually allowed to come and live on the grounds and keep an eye out, and he was allowed to take nightly walks. To this day, visitors and staff claim to have seen his apparition walking the grounds at night. There's even accounts of whispers, footsteps and a ghostly person that paces in casemate number two.
A woman has also been seen in the window of the home where Davis's wife lived, watching him for her husband. Another spirit on the grounds is the woman in white. Now, according to legend, in the years following the Civil War, a young officer stationed at the fort was caught in a secret affair with a woman from a wealthy southern family. When her husband discovered the betrayal, he killed the officer in a jealous rage.
Devastated, the woman is said to have leapt from the fort's ramparts into the cold waters below. To this day, the woman in white has been spotted wandering the ramparts, her veil and dress drifting in the breeze. Though I can't confirm the validity of the story of this supposed murder suicide, a strange woman in white has been witnessed by many over the years. There are other famous figures that are said to haunt the fort.
This includes Abraham Lincoln, who's been seen sitting and working at a desk. There's also sightings of Ulysses S Grant and Edgar Allan Poe, who served at the fort for a few years in the 1820s. The fifth Civil War mystery is the disappearance of Ambrose Bierce. Now, this final mystery takes place after the Civil War. But this is a man who I've taken a great deal of interest in recently. I've been researching his story for its own single episode of A Study of Strange.
And the reason I'm throwing him in with the Civil War mysteries is because his life and work was defined by the war. Ambrose Bierce was a Union soldier turned writer. He became famous for his chilling short stories and his work in journalism. Now, most of his work dealt with people, psychology, and the lasting impacts of the Civil War. Quick tangent here Ambrose is most famous work today might be the story, an occurrence at How Creek Bridge, which was made into a short French film in the 1960s.
And this film was famously licensed to become an episode of The Twilight Zone. And it's incredible. It's a great film. You can find it on YouTube. It is worth a watch. At the age of 71. Ambrose Bierce traveled to Mexico, and he did this because he decided he wanted to witness the Mexican Revolution. His background as a journalist and his desire to learn go on adventures.
None of this had really died down as he aged in one of his last letters, which he sent to his niece, it read, I shall not be here long enough to hear from you, and I don't know where I shall be next. Guess it doesn't matter much. Eidos Ambrose, his very last letter that we're aware of was dated on December 26th, 1913. It was postmarked from Chihuahua, Mexico. And in it, he said he expected to leave the next day by train for Naga, where Pancho Villa was planning an attack on the federal army.
And with that, Ambrose Bierce was never seen again. Some believe Bierce was executed by punch of his men. Others suspect he faked his death, and he slipped away into anonymity. But there's no grave, no remains, no witnesses, no conclusive evidence at all that we're aware of in terms of what happened to this very famous author. The Civil War left behind more than just battlefields and broken men and left behind stories. Stories that shaped generations of Americans.
And most of those stories are about the horrors of war that divided the nation and separated families, and lost more soldiers than any other war in United States history. And it also left a lot of mysteries. Thank you for listening to a study of strange. If any, of the mysteries that I've covered today have sparked some intrigue, and you want to learn more. Send me a message. A study of strange at gmail.com, and I will see if I can do a deep dive in and spend some more time on any one of these.
In the meantime, if you're new to the show, make sure to subscribe. Follow. Wherever you listen to podcast, feel free to check out our Substack, which has additional content. You get episodes early through our website. A stay of strange.com. Otherwise, thank you and good night.