Every night at the stroke of twelve, the quiet street exploded with the sound of the rolling wheels of heavily burdened wagons, horses’ hooves, and marching men.

The first recorded mention of the noise was by a laundress who lived on the top floor of a building on Trapman Street. She complained to her husband that her sleep was repeatedly broken by the noise, and she was getting too little rest to do her work during the day. What caused the noise? she asked, and couldn’t he do something to stop it? Her husband excitedly told her that the noise was none of her business; she must “leave it alone and not speak of it.” The next midnight, when the noise started, she slipped out of bed and went toward the window to look down into the street, but she was caught by her husband and yanked back. He was enraged at her, and he trembled as he snarled hoarsely: “Let what you do not know alone! It is their affair and God’s!”

Confused and frightened, the woman asked her husband no more questions, but she did ask the woman who worked at the next tub in the laundry room if she had heard the noises. The woman hesitated for several moments, then nodded. “What is it?” pleaded the disturbed laundress. After thoughtful minutes, the other whispered, “Since you need to know and the men all know, I will tell you. It is the Army of the Marching Dead going by.”

“Where in heaven’s name are they going?”

“To reinforce General Lee in Virginia. When the army from the North began to crush our Southern soldiers and our cause was losing on the battlefields, the men who had died in the hospital here and been buried in the land by the hospital pushed the lids off their coffins, rose from their graves, and marched to strengthen the weakened Southern battle lines. No one signed a peace for the dead, so they knew not when peace came. They still march, ‘tis said, they will march forever, until Judgment Day, to reinforce General Lee.” The frightened laundress claimed she never again tried to look out her window after midnight.

But another lady, one who lived in Trumbo’s Court, which dead-ended at Trapman, and who, too, had been warned by the men in her family not to listen to strange stories nor seek the nature or cause of strange night sounds, did look out one midnight as she heard the distant noise of the whispered-about Army of the Dead rumbling along the road. At first, she said, she saw only thick gray fog rolling in from the river and drifting down the street.