In Brief
At Riverside Cemetery in Asheville, North Carolina, visitors keep reporting men in Confederate gray moving through the headstones at dusk, then vanishing. They tell of distant cannon fire with no cannon — echoes, they say, of a battle fought on these hills three days before the war ended.
The Full Story
At Riverside Cemetery in Asheville, North Carolina, the figures people report don't belong to the famous dead buried here. They wear Confederate gray. Visitors describe shadowy men moving in formation among the headstones at dusk, then vanishing, and they tell of distant cannon fire and gunshots with no cannon and no gun anywhere on the grounds.
The cemetery sits on five terraced levels above the French Broad River, in the Montford district, and it opened in 1885. Roughly 13,000 people are buried across its 87 acres, and some of them are why the place is on every Asheville map. Thomas Wolfe is here, and visitors leave pencils in the urn at his grave because he wrote his drafts longhand. O. Henry is here too, and they leave pennies on his headstone for the first line of "The Gift of the Magi" — "One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all." Two governors are buried here, a clutch of Confederate generals, and the Japanese photographer who first mapped the Great Smoky Mountains.
But the soldiers in gray aren't about the writers, and they were never invited. On April 6, 1865 — three days before Lee surrendered at Appomattox — about 300 Confederate defenders under Colonel George W. Clayton held off a larger Union raiding force on the hills near here for roughly five hours, until the Union column gave up and withdrew. That fight is the one the visitors keep walking into at dusk: shapes that fall into formation among the headstones, then aren't there, and the rumble of cannon that no one can ever find.
The other reports gather around the old receiving vault, the stone structure that once held bodies waiting to be buried. Paranormal investigators say they've captured orbs and misty shapes near it. Visitors describe disembodied voices, footsteps, and children's laughter drifting on the wind — heard, never traced to anyone standing there.
Buried close to the vault are eighteen German sailors, prisoners of the First World War, who died of typhoid after being moved to a mountain detention camp. In November 1932, a crowd of more than 5,000 gathered to dedicate their monument, the German Ambassador among them, before the stone settled back into the quiet it has kept ever since.
The living still come to leave pencils and pennies for the literary dead. The men in gray were never asked to stay. They're the ones who keep turning up.
