Then, as the noises got nearer, she plainly heard and saw, as the fog shredded and dimmed here and there, gray, misty figures of horses and horsemen beneath Confederate flags and banners, rolling cannon, and rank after rank of gray-clad foot soldiers who had heavy beards and long, uncut hair. She watched the procession for a long time before it gradually faded into the distance. At the last, she heard the notes of a bugle blowing, and then everything was quiet and still. She did not talk many times of what she had seen. Those who did not believe a phantom army had ever marched did not care to hear it, and those who believed that it had firmly insisted that the subject “be left alone.”

Today the story of the Army of the Marching Dead is less well known than some ghost stories of the Confederacy, but there are those in Charleston who will tell you, in a whisper, that the dead soldiers still march.

Peggy Robbins, a Tennessee native, is a free-lance writer living in Gulfport, Mississippi.
Over the past three decades, she has written extensively about American heritage and
military history.