The Carter House

Captain Tod Carter was shot off his horse 200 yards from his own front door at the Battle of Franklin. He died inside two days later.

Captain Tod Carter rode at the Confederate line through his own front yard at the Battle of Franklin. He was twenty-four, fighting for a town he had not seen in three years, and he was shot off his horse less than 200 yards from the front door of the Carter House. He didn't die immediately. His family found him at sunrise on December 1, 1864, carried him into the parlor of his own home, and watched him die in the back bedroom two days later, on December 2.

The Carter House sits at the geographic center of one of the worst hours of the Civil War. The Battle of Franklin was fought in the late afternoon and evening of November 30, 1864. In five hours, more than 9,500 soldiers were killed, wounded, captured, or counted missing. The Confederate dead included six generals. The Federal entrenchments that bore the brunt of the assault ran directly through the Carter family's farmyard.

The brick farmhouse was built in 1830 by Fountain Branch Carter, Tod's father, who was sixty-seven on the night of the battle. Federal officers commandeered the house as a command post in the morning. Fountain, his daughter-in-law, several grandchildren, and the Carter family enslaved workers spent the entire battle hiding in the brick basement under the kitchen, packed in shoulder-to-shoulder while artillery shells tore the property above them apart. Today the original outbuildings, the smokehouse and the farm office, are pocked with more than a thousand bullet holes. Park rangers point them out on the tour. The walls are still wood; the holes are real.

Tod Carter had been on a Confederate raid south of Franklin for most of the war. He had not been home in three years. His final ride was from the south, with General John Bell Hood's army. According to a fellow officer's later account, Tod said he could see his own house in the distance and was riding home for supper.

He never made it inside under his own power. The bedroom where he died is preserved on the tour exactly as it was, including the original bedstead. Visitors who linger there describe the air going noticeably colder. Several have reported feeling something tug at their clothing, and one or two have watched a small statue on the mantel jump in place. Tour guides have learned not to argue with what guests describe.

The most-named ghost in the house is Tod, but he isn't the only one. His sister Annie Carter, who lived in the house long after the battle, has been spotted in upstairs windows by people standing in the yard, dressed in the clothing she would have worn as an adult. Footsteps in unoccupied rooms. Voices speaking the names of family members nobody in the building has spoken aloud. A figure pacing the front lawn at the line where Tod fell, walking back and forth as if waiting for something to happen.

The site is operated by the Battle of Franklin Trust as a state historic site, with rangers leading guided tours through the original house and the bullet-pocked outbuildings. The basement where the family hid through the battle is part of the standard tour. The room where Tod died is the last stop.

A lot of plantation-museum hauntings have to stretch a death or a tragedy to make the story land. The Carter House doesn't. Twenty-four-year-old Tod Carter rode toward his own front porch in the worst battle of the western theater, was shot off his horse in his own yard, and was carried into his childhood bedroom to die. The whole Carter family was inside the basement when it happened. They came up at dawn to look for him, and they had two days to say goodbye.

The bullet holes are still in the smokehouse, 200 yards from the bedroom where Tod finished the last journey of his life.