In Brief
At Prairie Grove Battlefield in Arkansas, visitors report phantom gunfire, footsteps with no one behind them, and a little girl who looks out from the windows of the empty Borden House. A Civil War battle killed about 2,700 men here in a single day in 1862.
The Full Story
At Prairie Grove Battlefield in Washington County, Arkansas, people say the field never went quiet. Visitors report gunfire and cannon fire with nothing firing, footsteps falling in behind them with no one there, and the sounds of marching feet, clashing swords, and snorting horses across open ground. And at the Borden House — a farmhouse near the center of it — some report a little girl who looks out from a window when the house is empty.
The Borden House sat at the bloody center of one of the worst single days northwest Arkansas has ever seen. On December 7, 1862, roughly 22,000 men collided across the cornfields, wheatfields, and apple orchards of the ridge here. The fighting swept straight through the Borden apple orchard. Union troops captured a Confederate battery near the home. By nightfall, about 2,700 men were dead, wounded, or missing.
The family had fled before the fighting, crowding into a neighbor's cellar with around 27 other people while the battle raged overhead. When they crept back the morning after, they found the house burned to the ground. By some accounts, 200 to 300 bodies lay in the yard around it. Sixty bushels of wheat stored upstairs is said to have burned for three weeks.
In 1868 the family rebuilt the house, near-exact, on the original foundation. That replica still stands in the park. Anyone standing in it is standing on the literal footprint of the worst of the fighting, not just near it.
Staff have said, by some accounts, that lights come on upstairs in that house, which has no power. A paranormal team recorded an EVP at the battlefield — a voice on the tape that wasn't theirs — telling them to "go away."
No one knows who the girl is. Some say a child who lived in the house; some say a stand-in for everything that happened here. Either way, she keeps to the upstairs window of a farmhouse that burned to its foundation and was raised again, board for board, on the same ground.
