In Brief
At Antietam National Battlefield near Sharpsburg, Maryland, a group of schoolboys once walked the field beside the Bloody Lane and began chanting a strange refrain. Their teacher recognized it: the Gaelic war cry of an Irish brigade slaughtered on that exact ground in 1862.
The Full Story
On a school trip to Antietam National Battlefield near Sharpsburg, Maryland, a group of boys from the McDonough School were walking the field beside the Sunken Road when they started to chant. The story goes that it sounded like the "fa-la-la-la-la" from "Deck the Halls" — until their teacher heard it. She knew the real words. It was "Faugh a Ballagh," the Irish Gaelic war cry of the men who charged this exact ground. The children had no way of knowing the phrase.
The men who screamed it are the reason the field is called what it is. On September 17, 1862, the Battle of Antietam became the bloodiest single day in American history — roughly 22,726 men killed, wounded, or missing by sundown. The fighting moved across the day from a cornfield, to a sunken farm road at midday, to a stone bridge over the creek in the afternoon.
The sunken road is where the Irish Brigade charged. Their chaplain, Father William Corby, gave them absolution first. According to the National Museum of Civil War Medicine, within twenty or thirty minutes "506 of these very men lay on the field, either dead or seriously wounded." The road earned its name after the battle. Soldiers reported bodies lying two and three deep in it. They called it Bloody Lane.
A Federal Highway Administration history of the place collects the legends that followed. Visitors at Bloody Lane say they smell gunpowder with no source, hear gunshots cross the empty field, and glimpse figures in Confederate gray on the trail before they vanish. The agency calls the schoolboys' chant the most convincing of the reports.
The anonymous dead are everywhere here. Only one ghost has a name. The Pry House, nearby, served as Union General McClellan's headquarters and then a field hospital. General Israel Richardson was carried into an upstairs room mortally wounded, developed pneumonia, and died there on November 3, 1862. His wife, Fannie, traveled from Michigan to nurse him through his last weeks. In 1976, a fire broke out in the house. Firefighters reported a woman in 19th-century clothing standing at a second-floor window of the room where Richardson died. After they put the fire out, they found the floor by those windows had collapsed. No one could have been standing there.
No newspaper recorded that day at the school. No park ranger logged it. The chant survives only as a story, passed along the way the war cry was: by people who weren't there when it started, repeating a sound from a field where 506 men fell in half an hour.
