FORT NEGLEY PARK Historic Site — 1100 Fort Negley Blvd, Nashville, Davidson County, Tennessee Status: Operating · Access: Open to public Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/fort-negley-park-tennessee/ NPS-listed historic site associated with the Underground Railroad. A historic site in Nashville, Tennessee, a National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom listing, Fort Negley Park is filed here for what the record attaches to it. NPS-listed historic site associated with the Underground Railroad. HauntHunt files it with dark history, Underground Railroad history and the Underground Railroad. The dossier holds 1 reported claim, 1 legend and 4 documented facts, with the verified spine filed separately from the lore. The site is open to visitors. Between August and December 1862, some 2,700 laborers — most of them Black: self-emancipated "contrabands" who had fled to Union lines, free Black residents conscripted for the work, and enslaved people whose enslavers were promised payment for their labor — built Fort Negley on St. Cloud Hill above Nashville. Records show 2,768 Black workers officially enrolled. Hundreds died during construction. The star-shaped limestone fort they raised, 62,500 cubic feet of stone and 18,000 cubic feet of earth at a cost of $130,000, remains the largest inland masonry fortification built during the Civil War. The file notes at the outset what it is and is not: Fort Negley is filed as dark history, not haunting. The Union took Nashville on February 25, 1862, and fortified the city second only to Washington; Captain James St. Clair Morton designed the polygonal fort, and the army named it for General James S. Negley. THE DOCUMENTED RECORD The fort's guns opened the Battle of Nashville on December 15, 1864, signaling an army that included roughly 13,000 United States Colored Troops; two days later Hood's Confederate army was effectively destroyed. The fort itself was never attacked — its size and position did the discouraging. Men of the 17th USCT guarded it as the war ended, and freedmen later moved hundreds of dead, Black and white, from graves around the hill to the Nashville National Cemetery. The individual record survives in fragments. Phillip Cheairs escaped the Rippavilla plantation, worked the Nashville fortifications from August 1862, received a documented $49 payment — among the few paid at all — enlisted in the 12th USCT in September 1863, and was killed by a farmer while guarding the railroad in Cheatham County on November 1, 1864. The Works Progress Administration restored the fort in 1936-37 and the city let it go again; it was overgrown for decades, listed on the National Register in 1975, and reopened as an interpreted historic site — with the laborers' names, where recoverable, now treated as the exhibit. The site also carries a National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom listing for the contraband camps it anchored. WHAT WITNESSES FILE The paranormal layer in this dossier is thin and the archive says so plainly — one reported claim, one legend, no named apparition, no signature phenomenon in the record. Visitors and tour guides offer the predictable ambient reports of a hilltop ruin: footsteps, figures on the walls, voices on the wind. None rises to documentation. What the file can verify is the body count underneath the folklore: hundreds dead building the fort in four months of 1862, thousands of USCT fighting around it in 1864, a cemetery full of relocated dead. The haunting Fort Negley offers is largely the historical kind, and the record is unusually blunt about it. WHAT REMAINS Fort Negley today is a city park, a National Register site, and the subject of a Vanderbilt-led database project recovering the builders' names. The file's verdict: whatever else walks St. Cloud Hill at night, the documented dead of 1862 earned the monument, and only recently got the plaque. FILED CLAIMS — 1 on record, reported not verified · [Local folklore] haunting: Local lore describes figures of laborers and soldiers among the stone walls—retold in Nashville ghost-tour coverage. The account has been recorded since 20th century. The site in Nashville, Tennessee gives the account a documented setting: real place, real history, unresolved reports. It circulates as local folklore — the kind communities keep rather than verify. The account appears in 'Tennessee haunted places listicle'. The haunting claim is now part of the site's identity, filed alongside the documented history. source: Tennessee haunted places listicle (https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/tennessee/haunted-places-in-tn/) HISTORY — 4 documented facts · NPS includes this site in the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom. The site's documented history is the record the rest of the file stands on. The record holds it as fact — documented, not retold. The record appears in 'Public NPS Network to Freedom listings, row 2, ID 01GA01'. It's the sort of fact that gives the haunting reports their context. · Fort Negley Park is documented on the National Park Service Network to Freedom for its role in the Underground Railroad. Fort Negley Park's past is on record — the entry belongs to the verified layer the museum itself interprets. This belongs to the verified spine of the entry, the layer everything else is measured against. Sources including 'NPS Network to Freedom listing' carry the record. The detail belongs to the verified spine of the entry. · [1862-08-01] Fort Negley was built in 1862 largely by African American laborers, many of whom died during construction. The record dates it to 1862-08-01. Fort Negley Park's past is on record — the entry belongs to the verified layer the museum itself interprets. The record holds it as fact — documented, not retold. The record appears in 'Fort Negley Park'. It is the kind of fact the rest of the dossier leans on. · The fort was restored and opened as Fort Negley Park. The site's documented history is the record the rest of the file stands on. This belongs to the verified spine of the entry, the layer everything else is measured against. 'Fort Negley Park' documents the entry. It anchors the timeline the rest of the file hangs from. SOURCES — 5 cited · Public NPS Network to Freedom listings, row 2, ID 01GA01 — National Park Service https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/sortable_dataset/undergroundrailroad/F0E29766-00A1-12E5-C3D062151C3F7E26/nri-NTFListings6426NOPIItable.csv?t=1784017173223 · NPS Network to Freedom listing — National Park Service https://www.nps.gov/subjects/ugrr/index.htm · Underground Railroad — Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_Railroad · Tennessee haunted places listicle — OnlyInYourState https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/tennessee/haunted-places-in-tn/ · Fort Negley Park — Metro Nashville https://www.nashville.gov — HauntHunt is a research archive. Claims are filed as reported — documented where sources exist, marked as folklore or unverified where they do not. Methodology: https://haunthunt.com/methodology/ · Corrections: https://haunthunt.com/report/