On the foggiest mornings, hikers on Lookout Mountain near Chattanooga, Tennessee, see forms resolve out of the mist and dissolve, hear voices carry too far, and catch cracks of gunfire. The 1863 Battle Above the Clouds was fought here, blind, in the same fog.
The forms come out of the fog and go back into it. Between the trees on Lookout Mountain, just south of Chattanooga, Tennessee, hikers describe shapes at the edge of visibility that "resolve briefly into the silhouette of a person before dissolving back into the mist." They appear at distances the fog makes impossible to measure, and they come most on the mornings it rolls in heaviest.
The fog is the whole story here. On November 24, 1863, it climbed the eastern face of this mountain so thick that men fought in it half-blind, unable to see who they were firing at. Major General Joseph Hooker sent roughly 10,000 Union troops up the slope against Edward C. Walthall's brigade of about 1,500 Mississippians, and the two sides collided somewhere inside the cloud. History remembers the day as the Battle Above the Clouds, a name the weather earned as much as the fighting did.
Halfway down that slope, on a rocky bench between the summit and the valley, sits the Cravens House. Robert Cravens, a Chattanooga ironmaster, built it in 1856 and named it Alta Vista: one story, six rooms, white, and L-shaped. When the armies came, Federal guns on Moccasin Bend across the river found the white house an easy mark and hit it six times, and by mid-November the family had fled to Woods Station, over the Georgia line. Confederates held the ground in front of the house until early afternoon, when they were pushed back past the walls and a Union general, W. C. Whitaker, claimed it for his headquarters. It became a field hospital, and post-battle accounts describe bloodstains that lingered on the floors long afterward. When the Cravens family finally returned, only the stone basement and the dairy house were still standing; soldiers had stripped the rest for tent floors and firewood.
The folklore settles on the rebuilt house. Some say they have heard faint voices in the stillness of early morning, or seen shadowy figures near the tree line as the fog comes over the mountain. Visitors describe a heaviness inside, a somberness they cannot place. No one has ever put a name to a ghost here, and there is no formal record of any of it. Just people, telling the same things.
What they report keeps its own schedule. The silhouettes, the conversational voices that carry farther than voices should, the single cracks of gunfire "isolated and sharp, echoing off the slopes" — they arrive on the foggiest mornings and thin out when the air clears. The most common report of all is quieter: the feeling of being watched on the trails where the fighting was worst, and it too comes with the fog. The mountain gives up its figures on the same terms it once gave up its battle: only when no one can see.
