Cold Harbor, Mechanicsville Virginia
In the summer of 1864, following the Battle of the Wilderness, the Union Army under George Meade, accompanied by the Commander of all the United States Armies U.S. Grant, encountered the Army of Northern Virginia in bloody clash after bloody clash. Following each battle, The Union troops would slip around the Confederate right, and continue their drive towards Richmond, while Lee would hurry his increasingly weakened force to the next defensive position. By July the two armies faced each other at Cold Harbor, near Richmond. Over 100,000 Union troops opposed about 60,000 Confederates.
Although the battle lasted nearly two weeks, the worst of the fighting was on June 3, 1864, when the Union Army assaulted the entrenched Confederates. Approximately 7,000 Union casualties were sustained in the attacks that morning, which Grant ordered broken off shortly after noon. Men trapped under fire between the lines used their bayonets and drinking cups to create temporary breastworks. Wounded and dying men lay in heaps, and some were used to shelter survivors in the field. In his memoirs Grant later wrote that the assault was his greatest error of the war and that he would never order a similar again.
After several days of facing each other in trenches, Grant dispatched some of his troops to the Shenandoah Valley and then yet again slipped around Lee’s flank to threaten Petersburg. The Army of Northern Virginia withdrew to entrenchments around Petersburg and Richmond. Most of the dead on the fields at Cold Harbor were hastily buried in shallow graves. Ever since the battle there have been reports of strange sightings and activities on and near the battlefield. Ghosts of men from both sides have been reported, as have the sounds of gunfire and thundering hoofbeats from horses.
Several groups of visitors and paranormal investigators have reported a sudden thick fog emerging over the battlefield in conditions in which fog wouldn’t normally be possible. One group visited with the intent of photographing reported apparitions only to be forced to withdraw by the sudden dense fog which to them appeared more as thick smoke than mist. There have been reports from visitors and locals of hearing cannon fire and feeling the concussions of the guns. One visitor to the spot where Union Colonel Tomkins was shot in the head felt a sudden stabbing pain in his own temple.
The nearby Garthright House was used as a field hospital, the family living there forced to shelter in its cellar while the surgeons worked above them. The house today has been reported to be haunted by the ghost of a young girl, who may have been part of the displaced family. The same spirit has been reported wandering around the graves of the Cold Harbor Cemetery, which was built in 1866 when many of the hastily buried bodies were dug up and reinterred there. Cold Harbor is but one of many purportedly haunted sites along Grant’s bloody trail through Virginia, but it is one of the most attractive to ghost hunters.