Lookout Mountain Battlefield

Site of the 1863 Battle Above the Clouds. Faint voices and shadow figures around the Cravens House when the November fog rolls in.

On the morning of November 24, 1863, fog rolled up the side of Lookout Mountain so thick that soldiers fighting on it couldn't see twenty feet. Joseph Hooker pushed ten thousand Union troops up the slope into Edward Walthall's fifteen hundred Confederates. The battle ran across the rocky bench where the Cravens family lived. By afternoon Hooker had pushed the Confederates off the mountain and the country had a new piece of folklore: the Battle Above the Clouds. Every November the fog rolls up the same way it did on the day of the battle.

Lookout Mountain Battlefield, the Tennessee unit of the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park, runs along that same bench down from Point Park at the summit. The Cravens House sits halfway up the slope, the oldest building on the mountain. It belonged to ironmaster Robert Cravens, who built it in 1856 and called it Alta Vista. During the battle Confederate officers occupied the house and Union artillery shelled it until the family fled to a nearby town. After the fighting ended, the house was a wreck. Soldiers had pulled boards off the floors for tent platforms and burned the furniture for cookfires. Cravens spent 1865 and 1866 rebuilding it on the same foundation and lived there until his death in 1886.

The folklore on this stretch of mountain isn't headline-grabbing. There aren't named ghosts here the way there are at Chickamauga, where Old Green Eyes prowls the underbrush looking for his missing head. What people report at Cravens House is quieter and more atmospheric. Faint voices in the early morning when the fog is still on the slope. Shadow figures along the tree line that disappear when the visitor turns to look directly at them. The general somber energy that postwar visitors said hit them as soon as they walked inside.

The post-battle records describe bloodstains that stayed on the floors and furniture for years after the cleanup. The house had been used as a forward position and then as an aid station. Casualty counts for the Battle of Lookout Mountain were relatively low compared to the slaughter at Chickamauga two months earlier, but men still died on this slope, in the fog, on terrain that doesn't naturally hold human bodies once they fall. The mountain dropped its dead into ravines and crevices the recovery teams couldn't always reach.

Up at Point Park, the views are what tourists pay for. The bronze New York Peace Memorial, dedicated in 1910, marks where Hooker's troops finally took the summit. Cameras pick up things in the photos they didn't see while they were taking the shot, figures in the trees, lantern lights moving along the trail at the wrong distance to be other tourists. A team of investigators on Chickamauga in 2001 reported hoofbeats, gunfire, and the smell of gunpowder. Lookout Mountain isn't separate from Chickamauga; the same campaign produced both, the same dead are buried at the Chattanooga National Cemetery a few miles north, where 4,200 of the 12,800 Confederate graves are unknown.

The truth is that most of what gets called paranormal at Lookout Mountain Battlefield is the place itself doing its thing. Fog. Echo. Cold air pulling down off the summit. Stone walls built by men who died here. The terrain holds the battle in a way the visitor center exhibits never quite manage. People walk down from Point Park to the Cravens House and feel the temperature drop fifteen degrees, and they keep going down the trail past the markers, and somewhere on that walk most of them stop looking at the views and start looking at the trees.