Old Green Eyes: The U.S. Civil War’s Strangest Ghost

Welcome on this Weird Wednesday! Today we’re off to Chickamauga, Georgia, to look for something weird in the woods.

In 1863, Union and Confederate soldiers met on a battlefield near Chickamauga, Georgia. The two-day battle had nearly 35,000 casualties—the second-highest in the US Civil War, second only to Gettysburg. The Confederacy won the battle, but ultimately lost the war. Today the site is part of Chickamauga & Chattanooga National Military Park.

If ghosts are created by trauma and tragedy, then battlefields would make for heavy hauntings. Civil War battlefields are no exception—Chickamauga’s got the usual phantom sounds of canons and fighting, ghostly lanterns of grieving family members come to find their dead soldiers, and even a White Lady searching for her lover. But then there’s one guy that just doesn’t fit.

Old Green Eyes is pretty much just that—green eyes, floating in the woods. Sometimes he’s got a body, and sometimes that body is human-like, but most of the time, he’s just a pair of glowing eyes. And nobody seems to know what the guy is doing there. What on earth does he have to do with the Battle of Chickamauga? Or anything else?

Naturally, Old Green Eyes is a fan favorite among ghost hunters and Civil War buffs. He’s even got his own festival. So let’s take a look at some theories about this unique ghost and scare up some glowing writing prompts.

“The first gun at Chickamauga” by Alfred Rudolph Waud, 1863

• Something’s missing. Obviously, the most common theory for Old Green Eyes is that he actually is a soldier from Chickamauga, whose body was buried without its head, and thus the head is still wandering about looking for its should-be grave. That doesn’t explain the glowing green eyes, of course—but you as a writer could. Maybe the soldier’s death wasn’t from the battle at all, but at the hands of a supernatural creature or curse, meaning he left no ordinary ghost. Or maybe the soldier had strangely piercing—almost glowing—green eyes in life.

• Creature feature. Some accounts of Old Green Eyes do give him a body—just not a human one. Supposedly, he’s appeared as a cougar, while others say the green eyes belong to a horse with a ghostly rider. The second one is easier to explain on a Civil War Battlefield—horses and soldiers both died there. But the big cat is just weird. There could conceivably be a present-day, live cougar in the Georgia woods, either migrating from a population in Florida or escaped from a zoo. Or maybe there was a cougar present during the battle and it was killed and became a very unexpected ghost. Explanations aside, what effect would a large ghost cat have at the site? Is it scarier than a human ghost or more cuddly? Does it have a reason for still hanging around the woods? Does it still get hungry?

“Battle of Chickamauga, Sept. 20, 1863” by J. T. E. Hillen

• I was here first. Some legends place Old Green Eyes on the battlefield long before there was a battle, suggesting he might have been a protective Native American spirit. Tread carefully here: the horror trope of “this cursed land was once a Native American burial ground” is extremely disrespectful to indigenous peoples. But there are other ghosts who might have pre-dated the battle of Chickamauga. Maybe the fields have seen murder before. Maybe there was a wildfire or deadly pandemic in the area. Is Old Green Eyes a victim? A killer? A family member left behind? Did his ghostly eyes always glow or is it a reaction to seeing all the death of the Civil War on his haunting grounds?

• The blood cries out. When you think about disembodied glowing eyes in the woods, human ghost is not what first springs to mind. So perhaps the trauma at Chickamauga attracted something else to the blood-soaked woods: a demon. There are a lot of ways to use this idea in a story. Perhaps the demon is an active malevolent presence that threatens people who live nearby, or at least those who walk through the woods. Or perhaps he’s just doing his own thing, enjoying the 160-year-old battlefield and ignoring present-day folks. Or maybe over 160 years, he’s become sorrowful at what happened in those woods and now he’s protective of the locals.

• The fog of war. All of these explanations deal with Old Green Eyes haunting the place after the fighting is over. But what if he actually showed up during the Battle of Chickamauga? What would soldiers do if they saw disembodied green eyes in the woods while fighting for their lives? Would they think Old Green Eyes was a demon, the ghost of a newly deceased soldier, a trick of the imagination, or a scare tactic by the enemy? Maybe they’d even see him as the Grim Reaper.

Thanks for spending your Weird Wednesday here! Do be sure to check out the Old Green Eyes festival, it looks really fun.

Sources & further reading:

Asfar, Dan, Edrick Thay, and Shelagh Kubish. Ghost Stories of the Civil War. Ghost House Books, 2003. On Goodreads

Old Green Eyes Festival

Chickamauga National Park and the Famous Ghosts Who Haunt It: Yesterday’s America

Haunted Battlefields – Shiloh and Chickamauga’s ‘Old Green Eyes’: Tennessee Ghosts & Legends Podcast

Legend of Green Eyes: a local ghost story: Northwest Georgia News

Chickamauga Green Eyes: Astonishing Legends

Battle of Chickamauga: Wikipedia

Chickamauga & Chattanooga National Military Park