Old Green Eyes is the most reported ghost on the Chickamauga battlefield, and the legend splits in two: a soldier decapitated in the 1863 battle, still hunting for his own head, or a fanged beast that prowled these woods long before the first shot was fired.
The park ranger met the man at 4 a.m., on Glen Kelly Road. Edward Tinney had spent years as chief ranger and historian of the Chickamauga battlefield, on the Georgia-Tennessee line south of Chattanooga, and he was out checking on Civil War re-enactors when the figure stepped into the road. He stood over 6 feet tall, with stringy black hair to his waist and a grin Tinney called devilish. A passing car swept its headlights across the spot, and the man was gone.
At Chickamauga the eyes gave the thing its name, Old Green Eyes, and they're about the only detail everyone agrees on. "The green eyes are the thing that define it the most," says Amy Petulla, who runs local ghost tours. Past that, no two people tell it the same way.
One version is a soldier. The story has him decapitated by a cannonball during the battle, his head still drifting the tree line at eye level, two points of green light hunting the dark for the body they were blown off of. That version fits the ground. On September 18-20, 1863, the armies collided here in a Confederate victory that cost roughly 34,000 men, the second-bloodiest battle of the Civil War after Gettysburg. Most of that killing fell on Snodgrass Hill, where General George H. Thomas held his line long enough to cover the Union retreat and earned the name the Rock of Chickamauga. Snodgrass Hill is also where most of the Green Eyes sightings begin.
The other version is older, and it doesn't need the war at all. In that telling, Green Eyes is a beast with long dirty hair, mangled jaws, and two long fangs, and it prowled these woods before the first shot was ever fired. The 1863 slaughter didn't make it. It woke it.
It isn't the only thing reported out there. Near the Snodgrass Cabin, people describe a Lady in White drifting the field in a pale gown, said to be searching for a husband who never came home from the fighting. In October 2001, three paranormal investigators spent a night by Snodgrass Hill and came back describing running hooves, gunfire, and the smell of gunpowder on a ridge where nothing had fired in over a century.
Tinney never tried to name what he saw. "Wherever there has been great suffering," he said, "people are always seeing strange things."
The park's current chief historian, Jim Ogden, traces the whole modern legend to one source: a park employee who started work in the late 1960s and began telling it. But the oldest sighting on record runs against him. In 1876, an early Fort Oglethorpe resident named Jim Carlock reported something 10 feet tall with a big white head out near the field. That was 13 years after the battle, and nearly a hundred years before the man who supposedly made the ghost up.
