Riverside Cemetery

Thomas Wolfe and O. Henry are buried here. Visitors hear phantom cannon fire from the 1865 Battle of Asheville on foggy mornings.

People leave pencils on Thomas Wolfe's grave. The reason is simple. He's back there working on another novel, the logic goes, and a pencil is the least a visitor can offer a writer who needed sixteen-inch stacks of paper to finish a book. Bourbon gets left there too. A few feet away, visitors drop pennies on O. Henry's headstone in honor of the opening line of The Gift of the Magi. At Riverside Cemetery, the living leave offerings for the dead. By most accounts, the dead are paying attention.

The cemetery was established on August 4, 1885 by the Asheville Cemetery Company, which designed it as both a burial ground and a public park. Today it covers 87 acres on the rolling hills above the French Broad River and holds roughly 13,000 people, among them Wolfe and O. Henry, Governor Zebulon Vance, Confederate General James Martin, Lillian Exum Clement (the first woman elected to the North Carolina legislature), and nearly two dozen German sailors who died as prisoners of war in World War I. A walk across Riverside is a walk through a century and a half of North Carolina biography.

The land under all of it saw combat. On April 6, 1865, three days before Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Union Colonel Isaac Kirby led a force roughly four times the size of Asheville's defenders up onto these hills. Confederate Colonel George Clayton had about 300 men and two Napoleon cannons. They held for five hours. Kirby pulled back. Asheville wasn't occupied until April 26, when General Stoneman's forces finally rolled in. The Battle of Asheville was a rear-guard action that almost doesn't make the textbooks, but according to visitors to Riverside, the ground remembers.

The phenomena reported here are mostly auditory. The distant rumble of cannon fire. The crack of a rifle shot with no rifle nearby. The rhythmic tread of marching soldiers across empty paths. On foggy mornings and at dusk, visitors say they have seen translucent men in gray uniforms moving in formation among the headstones before dissolving. Paranormal investigators have photographed orbs and slow-moving mist near the old receiving vault, the stone structure that once held bodies waiting for burial plots to thaw or graves to be dug.

Other encounters are harder to categorize. Children's laughter carries on the wind near the older sections. Footsteps from no visible source get picked up on audio. Near the shared plot of the German WWI sailors, several visitors have reported a heaviness in the chest they don't otherwise feel. Near the Montford Players Amphitheater at the cemetery's lowest point, the acoustics sometimes conspire with the terrain to make it sound as if a crowd is gathering, even when the grounds are empty.

Riverside is open daily and has become a standard stop on Asheville ghost tours. The city took over management from the Asheville Cemetery Company in 1952 and still maintains the grounds. The living come here for the literary pilgrimages, the marble angels, the Civil War history, or the rumor of soldiers you can hear but not see. Whatever the draw, the pencils on Wolfe's grave get replaced regularly, because someone keeps taking them.