Kings Mountain National Military Park

Kings Mountain National Military Park, site of the October 7, 1780 battle where Patriot forces killed British Major Patrick Ferguson and routed 1,100 Loyalists, is haunted by phantom cannon blasts, the smell of gunpowder, and Ferguson's ghost, who legend says returns to his cairn-marked grave at midnight every anniversary.

Two Revolutionary War enthusiasts were standing at Patrick Ferguson's grave, discussing the history of Scottish cairns, when something shifted. They both felt it at the same time: a heavy, focused sensation of being watched. They expected to turn around and find a park ranger. What they saw instead was Major Patrick Ferguson himself, standing not fifty feet away.

Ferguson died on October 7, 1780, shot off his horse by a storm of musket balls while refusing to surrender at the Battle of Kings Mountain. He was the only British regular on the field that day. The rest of his force, about 1,100 Loyalist militia, fought from the rocky summit against roughly 900 Patriot "Overmountain Men" who had marched across the Blue Ridge to find them. The battle lasted 65 minutes. Ferguson's men were surrounded, picked off from behind trees on the slopes below. When Ferguson fell, his foot caught in the stirrup and his horse dragged him across the ridge. The Loyalists raised a white flag shortly after.

The dead were buried in shallow graves on the mountain. The site is now Kings Mountain National Military Park, near Blacksburg in Cherokee County, and it is one of the best-preserved Revolutionary War battlefields in the country. A 1.5-mile trail loops through the positions. Ferguson's grave, marked by a cairn of stones that visitors have added to for over two centuries, sits along the path.

The park closes at dusk. The stories take over from there. Visitors and neighbors describe cannon blasts and rifle shots echoing from the mountain when there is no reenactment scheduled. Shouts carry across the ridgeline. People have seen ghostly fires burning in the woods where no campfire could be. The smell of gunpowder drifts through the trees on still nights.

Stranger still is the smell that some visitors describe near the old burial areas: something organic and wrong, like meat left too long in the heat. The dead were buried fast after the battle, many in mass graves so shallow that accounts from the 1800s describe bones surfacing after heavy rains.

Ferguson is the star of the ghost stories. The legend says he returns at midnight on the anniversary of his death, October 7, and confronts anyone standing at his grave. He was a remarkable soldier in life, the inventor of the Ferguson rifle and one of the finest marksmen in the British Army. The story that he once had George Washington in his sights but refused to shoot an officer in the back follows him everywhere. He ended up buried on a remote South Carolina mountain by men who hated everything he stood for, and the cairn keeps growing.