Antietam National Battlefield

The fight opened near the Dunker Church, the whitewashed German Baptist meetinghouse that still stands on the field. It ground through the Cornfield and the West Woods, broke against the sunken farm road that became Bloody Lane — where some 5,000 casualties fell in a few hours — and ended at the stone crossing then called Rohrback's Bridge, now Burnside's Bridge, where the dead were buried quickly in and around the abutments in graves that were never properly marked.

The Irish Brigade charged Bloody Lane behind a Gaelic battle cry. The Piper House, a log-and-frame farmhouse that still operates as a bed and breakfast, sat inside the lines; the Pry House served as McClellan's headquarters and a field hospital where General Israel Richardson died weeks after the battle. The battlefield was established as a national site in 1890 and has been administered by the National Park Service since 1933. The national cemetery beside it was dedicated in 1867 and holds 4,776 Union dead; the Confederate dead went to other grounds in Hagerstown and Frederick. The Dunker Church itself collapsed in a 1921 windstorm and was rebuilt, largely from its own salvaged material, for the battle's centennial — the file notes the building has its own resurrection story and keeps it modest.

The reports sort themselves by address with unusual discipline. At Bloody Lane: phantom gunfire, the smell of powder on still air, and men in Confederate dress who are taken for reenactors until they vanish — a detail recurring often enough that it has become the file's signature. A group of Baltimore schoolboys walking the lane heard singing from the empty fields, something like 'Deck the Halls'; the file notes, drily, that the Irish Brigade's Gaelic war cry would have sounded, to a schoolboy, rather like fa-la-la.

At Burnside's Bridge, night visitors describe balls of blue light moving over the water and a drum cadence that fades rather than stops. At the Pry and Piper houses: footsteps on stairs, and the apparition of a woman tentatively identified as a general's wife. Around Dunker Church and the Mumma farm, investigators claim EVPs, cold spots, and voices without bodies.

A Washington Post reporter staying at the Piper House in 1998 — it may be the only B&B where a guest can sleep on a designated Civil War battlefield — woke at two in the morning to what sounded like cannon fire and confessed the professional embarrassment of a skeptic checking the window.

The visitor center closes at five and the park at sunset, which the file notes is either a curfew or a courtesy. The reports continue regardless — Antietam's haunting is the rare case where the legend's scale is smaller than the documented record beneath it.