Kennesaw House

The Kennesaw House in Marietta served as the staging point for the Great Locomotive Chase, a Confederate field hospital, a morgue, and briefly Sherman's headquarters. Paranormal teams have cataloged roughly 700 distinct presences, and visitors have walked off the elevator into full visual recreations of a Civil War operating room.

A visitor stepped off the elevator into the basement and walked into a Civil War hospital. Wounded men on stretchers, blood everywhere, a surgeon operating without anesthesia, screaming. The visitor scrambled back into the elevator and rode up to the lobby. When the front desk heard what happened, they went back down together. The basement was empty.

That account has been told on PBS, CNN, and the History Channel. It is probably the most famous story from the Kennesaw House, but it is far from the only one.

The building started life in 1845 as a cotton warehouse, built by Marietta's first mayor, John Glover. A decade later, a Massachusetts businessman named Dix Fletcher bought it, renovated it, and opened the Fletcher House hotel. It sat right on the town square, across from the Western and Atlantic Railroad depot.

On the night of April 11, 1862, Union spy James Andrews and eighteen disguised Federal soldiers slept here. Andrews booked a room overlooking the railroad tracks. He needed to watch the locomotive called the General. The next morning, while the train's crew ate breakfast at a nearby stop, Andrews and his men stole the General, its wood tender, and three boxcars. The theft launched the Great Locomotive Chase, a 90-mile pursuit north toward Ringgold. Andrews was captured and hanged as a spy. Eight of his men received the Medal of Honor, the first ever awarded.

When the fighting reached Marietta in 1863, the Confederacy converted the hotel into a field hospital. The upper floors became a morgue. The fourth floor caught fire when embers from the adjacent depot drifted over, and soldiers who were already dead burned again. The rest of the building survived. Sherman reportedly spared it because Dix Fletcher was a Mason and Fletcher's son-in-law Henry Cole was a Federal spy. Sherman used the building briefly as his headquarters before moving on.

Local estimates put the ghost count at roughly 700. Paranormal investigation teams have cited that number based on the volume of unique electronic voice recordings captured inside the building. Whether or not you trust that methodology, the math works on its own terms. This was a hospital where soldiers died in the halls, a morgue where bodies stacked up, and a hotel where people came and went for decades.

The most common sighting is a woman in an antebellum dress with pink trim. Children notice her more than adults do. She smiles at them before disappearing. Some think she may be Dix Fletcher's wife.

A Civil War surgeon in uniform rides the elevator. Dr. Wilder, a Union surgeon and nephew of the building's former owner, has been seen by multiple people walking the upper floors. An employee at the Marietta History Center was working late one night when he heard a noise outside his office. He opened the door and watched a man in a cream-colored coat and black hat walk past him down the hallway and vanish. He closed his door and went back to work.

Staff hear footsteps on the upper floors after hours. Doors open and close with nobody behind them. The elevator visits floors nobody called it to.

The Marietta History Center occupies the second and third floors now. It's open during the day. After-hours paranormal tours run through Tours of Marietta. The building has been a cotton warehouse, a hotel, a war hospital, a morgue, a Union headquarters, and a museum. Five or six dark chapters stacked on top of each other. The employee who saw the man in the cream coat knew exactly what he was looking at. He just closed his door.