Andersonville Prison

Camp Sumter held over 33,000 Union prisoners in a space built for 10,000, and nearly 13,000 died in fourteen months from disease, starvation, and violence. Visitors report hearing phantom gunshots and marching, smelling battlefield odors with no source, and seeing the ghost of executed commander Captain Wirz walking up Highway 49 before vanishing.

Nearly 13,000 Union soldiers died at Camp Sumter in fourteen months. That's roughly 30 men a day, every day, from February 1864 until the war ended. The dead were buried in trenches, shoulder to shoulder, in a cemetery so dense that the headstones almost touch. Walking through Andersonville National Cemetery feels less like visiting a graveyard and more like standing in a crowd.

The prison was built for 10,000 men. By August 1864, it held over 33,000. The stockade covered 26 and a half acres of open Georgia swampland, ringed by pine log walls standing 15 to 17 feet high. A "deadline" fence ran 19 feet inside those walls. Cross it and the guards shot you. No warning.

The men inside died of scurvy, dysentery, exposure, and starvation. A single polluted stream ran through the camp, serving as both water source and latrine. Michigan cavalryman John Ransom kept a diary documenting conditions, and former prisoner Dorence Atwater secretly recorded the names of the dead in a registry he later gave to Clara Barton. In July and August of 1865, Barton and Atwater returned to identify and mark the graves. Four hundred and sixty markers still read "Unknown U.S. Soldier."

On August 14, 1864, something happened that the prisoners interpreted as divine intervention. During a heavy rainstorm, a spring burst from the ground inside the stockade, providing clean water for the first time. The prisoners called it Providence Spring. The Women's Relief Corps built a stone pavilion over it in 1901, and it still flows today.

The prison commander, Captain Henry Wirz, became the face of everything that went wrong at Andersonville. Descriptions from the period call him scrawny with a gimpy arm, a Swiss-born eccentric who ordered prisoners chained to heavy iron balls, hung by their thumbs, and shot near the deadline fence. After the war, he was arrested and charged with conspiracy to harm federal prisoners. Historians still debate whether Wirz was genuinely cruel or simply under-resourced and overwhelmed. The debate didn't save him. He was hanged in Washington, D.C. on November 10, 1865, the only Confederate official executed for war crimes during the entire Civil War.

Some of the worst violence came from inside the stockade. A gang of Union prisoners called the Raiders terrorized fellow inmates, stealing food, money, and clothing through beatings and robbery. The other prisoners organized a counter-group, the Regulators, who captured the Raiders' leaders. Six men were tried by a jury of prisoners and hanged on a makeshift gallows on July 11, 1864. One of them, a man named Curtis, managed to break free from his rope bindings and ran. He was caught and dragged back. Their names were Collins, Muir, Curtis, Delaney, Sullivan, and Sarsfield. When the thousands of graves at Andersonville National Cemetery are decorated with American flags each Memorial Day, those six graves sit apart, yards away from the others, unflagged.

Visitors report hearing things at Andersonville that shouldn't be there. Gunshots. Marching. Low conversation from empty fields. One Vietnam veteran described a sickening, sour odor near the stockade site, something he compared to the smell of a wartime field hospital. Park rangers have been called to investigate the smell but never found a source.

Captain Wirz has been seen walking up Highway 49 toward the prison entrance. Cars slow to offer him a ride and he vanishes. His figure has also been spotted pacing the stockade grounds, looking, according to witnesses, both anguished and angry.

There is a gravity to this place that has nothing to do with believing in ghosts. The cemetery holds the remains of nearly 13,000 young men who died in filth and darkness, and six more who were killed by their own side. The spring still runs. The graves still touch.