Saturday, October 31, 2020

A West Tennessee Confederate Ghost


            3, A West Tennessee Confederate Ghost

A Ghost Story.

We heard one of Gen. McCown's officers tell a hard story on yesterday. It seems that when McCown was in West Tennessee this officer was sent into a neighborhood where he was well known. He was riding in a buggy and overtook an old acquaintance and friend, named Robert Bond. Bond was on foot. The officer, after the usual salutations and inquiry after the news, asked Bond to take the buggy and drive on to the next house and await his coming, that he was tired of riding, and wished to walk the intervening half mile. When the officer came up to the house the buggy was standing there and the horse tied to the gate.

The officer asked the ladies at the house what had become of Mr. Bond. They, amazed, answered that Bond had been killed in a skirmish near Corinth, and that his body had been brought home and buried on the day before the officer arrived.

He asked the ladies who had brought the buggy to the gate. They answered that there was no driver, that the horse came quietly to the gate and that one of their number had got out and tied him.

It is needless to state that the officer who made this statement discredits his own senses, but he is confident that he could not have mistaken Bond for another man, that his personal peculiarities were well known to him, but how he could have disappeared, and how a dead man could have driven off a horse and buggy, and then vanished, or why his disembodied spirit should have appeared to him when he did not even know that Bond was dead, are questions often asked by the officer referred to. He is, evidently, surely puzzled by the occurrence as were his auditors by its narration.—Knoxville Register.

Montgomery Weekly Advertiser, December 3, 1862.[1]