The Green Eyes legend points to something that has haunted this area for generations
Something lingers over the Chickamauga Battlefield.
Over 150 years later, the memory is not easily forgotten of the battle so bloody it cost the lives of 34,624. It’s as if 9/11 happened again and again 10 times in a row during September 18 to 20, 1864.
According to the tales, a specter with green eyes emerged from the trees and gun smoke and to this day stalks the Chickamauga National Military Park. According to Amy Petulla, owner of Chattanooga Ghost Tours, Green Eyes is one of the Chattanooga area’s most notable ghost stories. It’s significant both because of the number of people that know of Green Eyes, and the fact its haunt is the site of one of the bloodiest battles of the bloodiest wars the United States ever fought.
But talk to four different people and you may very well get five different answers as to what the Green Eyes legend is. It may take the form of a tiger, a head, a large dark figure or a Civil War soldier but “The green eyes are the thing that define it the most,” Petulla said.
“Basically lore or myth has been used by people over millennia to help explain the in-explainable and to help provide rationale for tragedy,” Pamela C. Ashmore said, head of the Anthropology department at University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
And despite appearing farfetched initially, those folktales contain grains of truth. Ashmore, who focuses on biological anthropology, said in part of the Indonesian archipelago, folklore described the presence of small humans. In 2003, scientists discovered Homo floresiensis. “We determined that there is valid fossil evidence for short statured humans that once existed on the island of Flores,” Ashmore wrote.
Paranormal investigators will take to the night with video and voice recorders hoping to capture proof of the paranormal. Could traces of Green Eyes and what it points to be found through the dusty records of local history rooms, flickering from the blue light of online databases?
Green Eyes Today
According to the current telling of the Green Eyes legend, it is some kind of creature, a cat or something larger and more foreboding.
Georgiana C. Kotarski in her 2006 book “Ghosts of the Southern Tennessee Valley” wrote Green Eyes takes the form of the tiger atop the monument to the Ohio 125th who is searching for the men who died when the company of 1,000 stood atop Snodgrass Hill to quell the advance of Confederates during the last day of fighting.
However, Mark Fults, psychic and author of Chattanooga Chills, said Green Eyes is a creature older than the battle, older than the Cherokee. While Fults said he has seen other paranormal events on the Battlefield (most that happened when he was driving through the Battlefield often during the ‘90s) his description of Green Eyes that he wrote in his book came from listening to accounts from three people and interpreting it through his metaphysical beliefs.
He believes Green Eyes is a remnant of the worship practices of the mound builders, perhaps a guardian of a sacred space with the appearance to scare people away. Perhaps Green Eyes is “an elemental,” Fults said, which walked with its large gnashing teeth, long hair and cape among the dead and dying during the battle to glean energy and trace elements. “Green Eyes has roots in something,” Fults said. “Either which way, he’s a warning but what is he a warning of?”
The Origins
Jim Ogden, the mustachioed chief historian for the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park was clear about when the Green Eyes tale began. He wrote: “A former National Military Park employee who began working here in the late 1960s maintained that he was the one who started a ‘Green Eyes’ story connected with the Battle of Chickamauga.”
In other words, the Green Eyes tale is another invention from the same era that produced the Etch-A-Sketch and the 1964 Pontiac GTO. When Ogden talks with people who went to school in this area in the late 50s, early 60s, they don’t remember hearing the tale or hunting for the paranormal on the battlefield.
“When I came here in 1982, it was something that was already going around,” Ogden said. He learned about Green Eyes within the first few days that he started working at Chickamauga Battlefield. Back then, he worked in a law enforcement capacity, spending nights patrolling the battlefield. “I’ve encountered a lot of strange things,” Ogden said, “but all those were people doing odd things, and many of them illegal things.”
The park is closed after dark and those searching for Green Eyes and other ghosts do so illegally. “It peaks” in the fall, Ogden said.
Early Ghost Hunts
Accounts of early Green Eyes lore is stored in the James T. Callow Folklore Archive, which is run by the private Catholic school University of Detroit Mercy. Students taking anthropology courses recorded jokes, sayings and ghost stories. And while the school is hundreds of miles away, Green Eyes stories may have come from the Peabody field note collection, according to Pat Higo, archives and special collections librarian for the university. There’s approximately 12,000 entries in the archive, and online they include no dates or names. According to the archive, Green Eyes shed its animal form from 1964 to 1993. It was a soldier.
“Green Eyes (of Chickamauga Battlefield) is supposed to be a Yankee soldier that was shot, left to die, and never buried during the Civil War. His spirit is out for revenge,” said one entry. Another said it was the ghost of a soldier who lost his head thanks to a cannonball. Every night, the poor fellow searches for his appendage.
Groups of youth would drive their cars out to the battlefield to see if they could encounter Green Eyes. One group of young men believe they encountered Green Eyes when they saw a large shadow in their midst, but nothing was there when they turned on their headlights. Another account said a group watched a pair of white lights that shone in the trees descend and grow closer. After scrambling away, the group claimed they saw Green Eyes and they swore never to visit the battlefield at night.
So why do the ghost stories change? Petulla thinks it’s a multi-year game of telephone. “The more times we tell something the more elaborate it gets,” she said. Memory is like wet clay she said because it changes every time the event is recalled. Furthermore, some people want to tell a good story, and embellishment occurs.
But that park ranger, the one that made up the Green Eyes tale, might not have made it up whole cloth. For there are other, older records of ghost tales in Chickamauga.
“Did you ever see a ghost?” asked “Uncle Jim” Carlock. “They used to see them on the Chickamauga Battlefields just after the war.” Carlock’s account rests in a worn, cloth-bound copy of “The Official History of Catoosa County Georgia, 1853-1953,” which sits in the genealogical collection of the Catoosa County Library. Carlock was only a child at the tail end of the Civil War. Eleven years later, he and a group of his friends traveled to Chattanooga for the Centennial celebration of 1876. They watched as a balloon was launched from Market Street. On the way home, they traveled through the battlefield.
There, in the darkness, Carlock and his companions saw it from where they sat in a wagon. “It was dark and no houses were near,” he recalled. “We saw it coming along and it looked like it was ten feet high with a big white head.” Another companion, Mr. Shields who was riding horseback, went up and hit it. There was a cry of a baby and “the ghost” said “Let me alone!” The figure was a black woman, and the large white head? It was a bundle of clothes the woman was balancing. “That was the only ghost I ever saw,” Carlock said.
Bierce’s Chickamauga
And that brings us to a story birthed from the chaos of war, for years after the battle, a veteran wrote about the battle in the form of a fictionalized horror story titled “Chickamauga.”
The veteran’s name was Ambrose Bierce. He was a contemporary of Mark Twain. While Twain is known for his humorous writing, Bierce was known for his themes of horror. While Twain only joined the Confederate cause for two weeks, Bierce served in the Union Army as an aide to a brigadier general. On that fateful day in September of 1963, Bierce watched as thousands of Confederate forces poured into the hole in the federal line.
According to Ogden, “He has taken his own experiences and he turned it up a little bit.” Beirce wanted to be sensational for his time, a journalist and a great writer.
He may have also suffered from PTSD. Bierce, according to Ogden, had trouble recounting what personally happened to him during the Civil War, but he had “no problem describing the awful effect in horror.”
And there’s the matter of Bierce’s death. To this day, no one is exactly sure how the writer died. All that is known is he was in Mexico at the end of 1913 with Pancho Villa’s army when he just disappeared.
According to Ogden, soldiers today come home seeking to the adrenaline rush they experienced in perilous situations like not knowing when an IED would explode. They may turn to risky activities like high-stakes poker games.
In his story “Chickamauga,” Bierce tells the story of a young boy who goes out to play war near the battle of Chickamauga. He falls asleep and wakes in the evening.
As he goes on his way, the boy discovers scores of wounded men crawling away from the fight, their faces streaked with blood, suffering wounds from which they will never recover. The boy plays among them.
Finally, he reaches a creek where the dead are drowning. The boy goes across and he discovers his home ablaze with fire, his mother dead.
As Ogden said, fiction tries to capture a part of the human experience. Even veteran accounts that are embellished, very few are made up, according to Ogden, for they “are based on some degree of their perception of their reality.”
On the battlefield, one of the families in the path of the fighting had a handicapped child. “Did he interact with the family?” asked Ogden. “We can’t say for certain.”
Bierce was just one person to leave Chickamauga forever changed. Today, the empty cannons of Chickamauga watch over rippling fields while birds call to each other in the autumn trees.
Years after the fight, soldiers like Confederate Captain Frank T. Ryan would recall the hellish aftermath. For Ryan, he lay shot through the leg, immobile, watching as a brush fire advanced upon him.
Ogden wrote, “You should feel something, often that something will be disturbing (although other places and/or other accounts can bring the sense of inspiration, awe, grandeur); let the real people help you sense the real events through the mind’s eye, and in the case of Chickamauga…often right where it took place.
One more thing. It’s one of those weird quirks of human events. According to his article titled “A Wry Self-Portrait,” Ambrose Bierce had green eyes.