Stone Bridge at Chickamauga

Old Green Eyes has been seen at Chickamauga's Stone Bridge since the 1970s. The legend predates the 1863 battle by a century in Cherokee tradition.

The Stone Bridge at Chickamauga sits in the part of the battlefield where Old Green Eyes has been seen most often, which says less about the bridge itself than about how persistent the legend is. Green Eyes, by the version park rangers have been told for at least 50 years, was a Confederate soldier whose head was taken off by a cannonball at Chickamauga on September 19 or 20, 1863. His body was buried where it fell. His head wasn't, because nobody could find enough of it to bury. The thing now wandering the battlefield, glowing-eyed and hunched, is supposedly looking.

So goes the soldier version. There's also a panther version, in which Green Eyes is something far older than the war, a creature local Cherokee oral tradition described well before any white settler arrived. The 1863 battle, in this telling, just gave it more to feed on. Paranormal investigators who came through in the 1970s and 1980s tended to cite the soldier story. Rangers and longtime residents lean toward the panther.

Chickamauga itself was the second-bloodiest battle of the Civil War. 34,624 men were killed, wounded, or missing across two days. The Union army was driven from the field. Confederate General Braxton Bragg failed to follow up on the victory and lost Chattanooga six weeks later anyway. The 5,300 acres of national park preserved since 1890 cover most of the original ground. The Stone Bridge crossing on the West Chickamauga Creek became a landmark for Federal troops trying to retreat north toward Rossville Gap.

The bridge area, along with Snodgrass Hill and the Brotherton Field, is where most of the named encounters cluster. A 1969 incident involving a witness named Paula Norris, whose car malfunctioned within sight of the bridge during a paranormal investigation, is one of the dated references investigators keep coming back to. Sightings picked up in the 1970s. Park rangers in that decade reported close-range encounters with what they describe as a humanoid figure with greenish luminescence around the eyes, sometimes seen as two floating orbs at roughly the height of a man's head.

The Lady in White also turns up here. She's been described in a wedding gown, walking the field around the Snodgrass Cabin, looking for a husband killed in the battle. The cabin served as a field hospital during the fight and is one of the original surviving structures on the battlefield. Visitors have heard moans coming from the empty cabin at night and have heard what sound like surgical instruments being set down on a wooden table.

Other accounts at the bridge are less specific and easier to write off. Cold spots in summer. The smell of gunpowder with no source. Distant cannon fire, which most witnesses attribute to reenactment groups that aren't actually scheduled. The persistent reports come back to the figure with the green eyes, and the persistent reports come back to that one stretch of the creek crossing.

The thing about Old Green Eyes is that the legend predates the Civil War battle by at least a century in Cherokee tradition. The 1863 fighting attached a soldier story to it. A creature the Cherokee already had a name for got a new costume. Visitors to the Stone Bridge after dark have described seeing the eyes from across the creek, low to the ground, watching them watch back. Most leave without going down to the water.