The Great Locomotive Chase was one of the most daring and dramatic events of the Civil War. On April 12, 1862 a group of Union spies/saboteurs stole the locomotive General at Kennesaw (then Big Shanty) and headed north to destroy railroad bridges on the Western & Atlantic Railroad to cut off Chattanooga from Confederate reinforcements and aid in the Federal capture of that vital transportation center.

The General's conductor, William Fuller, chased his engine on foot, by pole car, and on several different locomotives, catching up with the Raiders near Ringgold. His dedication prevented the Federals from doing significant damage to the rail line.

Mere yards from the spot where the General was captured, that locomotive rests in The Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History, along with an amazing assortment of other Civil War and railroad displays.

Only recently has the museum acquired a ghost, apparently the spirit of TV and movie personality Fess Parker, who starred in the famous 1956 Disney movie The Great Locomotive Chase. He played the Federal leader, James J. Andrews.

"Every house, historical site and museum I know of boasts about their resident ghost," Mike Bearrow, curator of the museum, told Rebecca McCormick of the Monroe Louisiana News-Star. "Anytime we misplaced something or couldn't find what we were looking for, we blamed it on the ghost of Fess Parker. The problem was, he was still alive at the time."

Fess Parker died at the age of 85 on March 18, 2010, a Thursday.

"When I came in to work Monday morning," Bearrow continued, "I made my usual rounds to inspect all the galleries, because one of my jobs as curator is to make sure all the lights are in working order."

Everything seemed normal until he approached the Fess Parker display. "It was dark, dark in that corner. I don't mean dim, I mean dark. By the time I got through replacing spot bulbs and florescent tubes, we counted 11 lights that had all gone out at the same time. No flipped breakers. No blown fuses. We all just looked at each other and said it must have taken Parker three days to get from California to Georgia. And now we've got the resident ghost we used to only joke about."

Reporter McCormick saw a coat worn by Parker in the movie and posted the tidbit to her Facebook page via her BlackBerry. Within a minute a friend in Florida, Joan Ellis, replied that her husband had donated that coat to the museum

"I bought the coat three or four years ago from a Hollywood auction on the Internet," said Jeffery Ellis, a medical doctor and collector of movie memorabilia. "When I called the museum and told them I had the original jacket worn by Parker in the movie, the curator was like, ‘Yea, yea, okay, whatever, I'm sure you do, maybe we can take a look at it sometime.'"

Two weeks later Dr. Ellis drove to Kennesaw with the coat.

"Inside the jacket pocket was the original label from Hollywood Costume Co. with this information on it:,' Ellis said. "Fess Parker, Walt Disney Productions, Great Locomotive Chase. The guy's jaw dropped. After additional research by the Smithsonian textile experts, they learned there were actually three jackets used in the movie. This one was the ‘pristine jacket,' used for inside shots and promotional material."

A ghost and eerie coincidence. It doesn't get any better than this.

Jim Miles is the author of two Weird Georgia books and nine books about the Civil War. See Jim's books.

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