Fayetteville Confederate Cemetery

This small cemetery and adjacent Walker family plot hold hundreds of Civil War soldiers. The woods to the east are known as Ghost Hollow.

The Fayetteville Confederate Cemetery occupies 3.48 acres on East Mountain — now known as Mount Sequoyah — in Fayetteville, Washington County, Arkansas. The cemetery was established by the Southern Memorial Association (SMA) of Washington County, which formed on June 10, 1872, following a notice published in the Fayetteville Democrat. The organization purchased the hilltop site on April 11, 1873, and dedicated the cemetery exactly one year after its founding. The initial dedication interred approximately 300 Confederate soldiers, but the cemetery would eventually hold roughly 800 burials as remains were gathered from battlefields and temporary graves across northwestern Arkansas.

The dead were collected primarily from two of the Civil War's major engagements in the region. Bodies from the Battle of Pea Ridge in Benton County were reinterred at a cost of $1.40 per body, while remains from the Battle of Prairie Grove in Washington County cost $2.50 each to disinter and move. The burials are organized into separate sections for casualties from Arkansas, Texas, Missouri, and Louisiana — reflecting the geographic range of Confederate units that fought and died in the Ozarks. The highest-ranking officer buried in the cemetery is Brigadier General William Yarnell Slack, a Mexican War veteran who was wounded at Wilson's Creek in August 1861 and sustained fatal injuries at the Battle of Pea Ridge, dying on March 21, 1862. The original sandstone markers installed in 1876 were replaced with marble in 1903, and a monument was dedicated in 1897 with its cornerstone laid that May. A native-stone entrance gate was added in 1926-1927 at a cost of $682, and a cut-stone wall replaced the original wooden fence between 1885 and 1890. The cemetery was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1993.

The paranormal activity reported at the Confederate Cemetery reflects the violent deaths of the hundreds of young men buried beneath its weathered headstones. Visitors have described hearing the faint sounds of distant battle cries echoing across the hillside — not the sharp crack of individual gunshots but a low, rolling wave of sound that resembles the sustained roar of massed combat. Shadowy figures have been observed moving among the graves at twilight, appearing as dark silhouettes that shift between the rows of marble markers before dissolving into the failing light. The figures are described as human-shaped but indistinct, as though seen through smoke or fog even on clear evenings.

Adjacent to the Confederate Cemetery is a small Walker family burial plot that carries its own reputation. The woods to the east of both cemeteries are known locally as Ghost Hollow — a name that has persisted for generations among Fayetteville residents. Two spectral brides are said to haunt Ghost Hollow. The first is a headless bride, seen drifting between the trees in a white gown, her form complete in every detail except above the shoulders. The second bride met her death when her wedding dress caught fire, and according to the legend, her cries of pain still echo through the hollow on certain nights. The origins of both legends are unclear — no specific identities or dates are attached to either story — but the consistency of the accounts across decades of Fayetteville folklore suggests they draw from real incidents that have been lost to the passage of time.

The Confederate Cemetery is open to visitors and is included on Fayetteville's haunted tours. The city's official tourism materials acknowledge the site's ghostly reputation while emphasizing respect for the burial ground. Standing among the neat rows of marble markers beneath towering oak trees, it is easy to understand why the place generates the responses it does — 800 men killed in some of the most brutal fighting of the Civil War, many of them unidentified, buried far from the homes they left to fight for a cause that was lost before most of them reached this hillside.