Set the cannonball fragments out at the Lotz House in Franklin, Tennessee, and by morning they've wandered. The house was a Civil War field hospital, its floorboards still bloodstained, and staff report a Lady in White, a little girl at the windows, and objects that refuse to stay put.
Leave something on a shelf at the Lotz House in Franklin, Tennessee, and it may not be there in the morning. Cannonball fragments migrate to the corners of the rooms overnight. Gift-shop t-shirts end up thrown to the floor. And faces nobody can place surface later in visitors' photographs.
The fragments come from a single cannonball, and its path through the house is documented. On November 30, 1864, the ball punched through the roof, smashed through the floor of an upstairs bedroom, and came to rest on the first floor, where the hot lead scorched a burn into the wood that is there today. Lotz patched the entry point himself — a large repaired section on the second floor still marks where the ball came in.
Johann Albert Lotz was a German master carpenter, and he built the place by hand in 1858 to advertise his own craft. The Greek Revival columns, the carved mantels, the solid black walnut staircase wrapping from the ground floor to the second were a showroom for the clients he hoped to land. Six years later the bloodiest five hours of the Civil War played out in his front yard. Roughly 10,000 men fell in about five hours, and most of the south wall of the home was blasted away.
The Lotzes did not ride it out at home. They ran across Columbia Avenue and hid in the basement of the Carter House while the battle went over both buildings. When they came back, their showroom had become a field hospital packed with the wounded of both armies, and the blood soaked into the floorboards. It is still visible in the rooms.
From that ground comes the rest of it. On the upper floors people report a Lady in White; guides call her a soldier's bride or a woman who died in the fighting, though no record fastens a name to her. A little girl is seen staring out the windows. A woman is heard crying out for someone. Knocks land in empty rooms, and footsteps cross floors with nobody on them.
The family that built the house and lived through its worst day did not stay to hear any of it. After the war the Lotzes left Franklin for good and settled in San Jose, California, most of a continent from that front yard. The staff who feel the place, the visitors who photograph it, the guides who name its ghosts are not Lotzes. Whatever moved in, the people it belonged to were already gone.
