Oakland Cemetery

At Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta, the story people tell most is the roll call. Near the Confederate section, visitors say they've heard a bugle and then a man's voice reading names down the rows of headstones — and, under it, faint answers. "Present." "Here."

The section those names belong to holds about 6,900 Confederate soldiers, gathered from battlefield graves after the 1864 Battle of Atlanta. Roughly 3,000 of them were never identified. An entire field of men no one could put a name to, and a voice still trying to count them — no other graveyard's haunting fits its ground the way this one does. In the most-repeated version, recorded by researcher William Bender and passed along since, a young man walking the grounds in December heard the roll call reach his own name.

All of it is legend, attributed to a Decatur tour guide and to Bender's research, not a thing anyone has proven. The cemetery's own people are skeptical. Its education manager once noted that spirits "would usually haunt the places that they lived in" — not a graveyard.

But Oakland keeps a long list of the dead who don't fit that rule. The first person buried here, in 1850, was Dr. James Nissen, a visiting physician so afraid of being buried alive that he had a friend cut his jugular vein first, to be sure. Maggie Chapman, an opera singer, went into the ground at 24 after her winged costume caught fire from a gas jet onstage in 1880. And brick magnate Jasper Newton Smith had a life-size statue of himself carved seated atop his own mausoleum, top hat in hand, gazing toward the gates — the local legend says he climbs down at night to wander the rows, though Bender could find no one who'd actually seen it.

So the field keeps its 3,000 unnamed men, and somewhere a voice keeps reading. The unsettling part isn't that the dead won't rest. It's that, by every telling, someone is still answering.