Gene Harmon, a reenactor with the 123rd New York Volunteer Infantry, Company D (which also portrays a Confederate unit), says you can feel strange things at Andersonville even at high noon.

“You feel a coldness,” Harmon told Jeff Belanger in Ghosts of War. “You’ll be standing there and it’ll be just like you walked into a freezer. Your bones will hurt from the cold,” but the effect gives way to warmth just a few feet away. “Or you’ll be standing there and you feel a breeze but there’s no breeze blowing anywhere. Or you’ll hear noises.”

Harmon’s unit members spent the weekend of March 10-11, 2001, portraying Union prisoners held at Andersonville, where members of the original Civil War unit were imprisoned. At least one died and was buried there.

Darkness had fallen, but a full moon illuminated the prison site when Harmon and four comrades decided to walk to Providence Spring from the reconstructed portion of the stockade, where they were camped. They took pictures of themselves at the spring, then stood around quietly talking and looking over the site of the prison. They watched as a fog slowly rolled in, and then started to walk through it toward the end of the prison site.

The fog “seemed to quickly swirl around us along with a sudden drop in temperature,” Harmon wrote. “It was a cool night, but we found ourselves shivering and blowing in our hands to warm them up.”

The fog partially obscured “dark forms,” which turned out to be only trees and bushes. As they continued their hike, “a couple of dark forms were noticed further up the hillside” at a corner of the stockade. Realizing that they had left the fog, they turned around to look at it, but, “There wasn’t any!” and the men were “still cold-like ice!” When they reached the corner nothing was found that could have shaped the “dark forms” they had observed earlier. “What were the other dark forms we saw?” Harmon wrote. “Who knows?”

The reenactors watched the distant campfires reflecting off the reconstructed stockade before retracing their steps. In the ravine “the fog rose from the ground all around us almost instantly.” The men “brusquely walked through and started up the opposite slope. As we started up again, the fog instantly vanished!”

Harmon and one friend decided to see if the fog would repeat its trick and returned to the gully, followed by their cursing colleagues who would not let their buddies go alone. The fog “seemed to part and withdraw away from us” and “once again the fog just vanished.” Stepping onto the perimeter road, “the iciness disappeared as well…a VERY discernible increase in the temperature.”

The men observed the depression for awhile, but the fog did not return. Harmon suggested walking into the valley again but his friends understandably threatened to kick his butt if he attempted it.

“The ghosts of Andersonville had welcomed us as some of their own,” Harmon believed. “Their presence was felt in the fog and the far end of the stockade. The iciness pronouncing their close proximity, but never once feeling a sense of foreboding or ill will. How different it might have been had we been wearing gray…”

On another occasion Harman and several friends, including one woman, left camp during the night and “went down to the creek down there and we crossed over until we were walking along the bottom land,” Harman told writer Belanger. “We got up on the road and the lady with me turned and said, ‘Hey did you see him?’ And I said, ‘Did I see what?’ She said there was a guy walking with us back there. Well there wasn’t anybody back there-it was just me and her.”

From Georgia’s Civil War Ghosts (coming soon).

Jim Miles is the author of nine books about the Civil War and two weird Georgia books. See Jim’s books. Contact Jim.
 

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