Kolb Farm

A retired Army couple built their home on the Kolb's Farm Civil War battlefield in Marietta, where 1,500 Confederate soldiers died in 1864. Within five months, a ghost in a long coat and floppy hat appeared in their hallway, operated power tools, dropped coins from thin air, and learned a three-ring bell code the couple had established. Featured on Unsolved Mysteries in 1988, the case is one of the best-documented neighborhood hauntings in Georgia.

The ghost learned a code. Jim Tatum, a retired Army officer, told whatever kept ringing the porcelain angel bell in the guest bedroom that he would only come upstairs if it rang three times in a row. The next time the bell rang, it rang exactly three times. When Jim refused to answer even that, the bell went silent for good.

Jim and his wife Kay built their dream retirement home in 1985 in Kolb Ridge Court, a quiet subdivision in Marietta. The neighborhood sits on land that was once part of Peter Valentine Kolb's 600-acre farm, where one of the bloodiest skirmishes of the Atlanta Campaign played out on June 22, 1864. Confederate Lt. General John B. Hood threw 11,000 troops against fortified Union positions near the Kolb farmhouse. The attack failed so completely that historian Albert Castel called it "more a one-sided slaughter than a battle." Around 1,500 Confederate soldiers fell in the fields that afternoon. The farmhouse, a dog-trot cabin Kolb built around 1836, served as headquarters for Union General Joseph Hooker and doubled as a field hospital.

Five months after moving in, Kay woke around 2:00 a.m. and saw a man walking past the open bathroom door. He wore a long coat and a floppy hat, swinging his arms as he moved silently down the hall toward the stairs. She assumed it was an intruder. Jim was asleep beside her. Every door and window was locked.

Then things got playful. In March 1986, Kay heard an electric drill whirring upstairs while Jim sat watching TV on the first floor. She found the drill running on its own. When she touched it, the metal was ice cold. On another occasion, she watched coins drop one by one from thin air into a wooden bowl on Jim's dresser. TUMS tablets fell individually from a tray, then the entire tray hit the floor. A ball of static electricity appeared in the middle of the bedroom, drifted toward her, and popped near her face.

The most unsettling moment was physical. Kay was bending toward the microwave when she felt two distinct hands tug the hem of her shirt from behind. She could see Jim through the window, standing outside in the yard.

Parapsychologist William Roll investigated the case and theorized that memories could transfer to physical objects, triggering experiences in ordinary people. The Tatums' story aired on Unsolved Mysteries in October 1988, making Kolb Ridge Court one of the more well-documented neighborhood hauntings from that era.

The Tatums weren't alone. At least three families in the subdivision have reported Civil War soldiers walking through their homes. On October 8, 2007, a father and his teenage son were driving through the nearby Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield when a Union cavalry officer on horseback appeared in their headlights, crossed the road, passed through a fence, and vanished.

Peter Valentine Kolb died in 1863, six months before his farm became a killing field. He had seven children and ten enslaved people. The original farmhouse still stands inside Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park, the only surviving Civil War-era structure in the entire park. It's not open to the public, but there's a parking area and trailhead at the intersection of Powder Springs Road and Callaway Road.

The subdivision ghosts are more interactive than most battlefield hauntings. They ring bells, operate power tools, drop coins. The presence in the Tatums' house figured out the three-ring code and honored the agreement. That detail, confirmed across multiple sources and a national TV broadcast, is harder to explain away than a shadow in a hallway.