Jefferson Barracks

Jefferson Barracks spent the nineteenth century as the Army's western schoolhouse. It bills itself — on documentary grounds — as the birthplace of American cavalry: every mounted trooper passed through for horsemanship training, and in 1866 the 9th and 10th Cavalry regiments were organized here, the units history knows as the Buffalo Soldiers. The alumni list reads like a war college exam: Ulysses S. Grant was stationed here in the 1840s and met Julia Dent, whose family farmed at White Haven nearby; William T. Sherman served here; so did a procession of men who would later wear stars on both sides.

During the Civil War the post became a Union induction and training center and one of the largest military hospitals in the country — thousands of beds in barracks wards and hospital buildings, taking the wounded of the western campaigns by riverboat up from the fighting. The post cemetery that began with an infant in 1827 was designated a national cemetery in 1866, and the graves kept arriving by the boatload. The post stood down as an active Army installation in 1946; the National Guard and the VA still occupy parts of it.

The ghost reports at Jefferson Barracks are unusually well cataloged for a military installation, building by building, as if someone had conducted a staffing review. Building 1 — the post headquarters, built in 1900, its second-floor ballroom still holding a hand-painted 1938 map of the post — files two residents: an elderly Confederate general observed in the post commander's office, and a shadowy figure seated at a second-floor desk by the window. Building 25 reports lights that come on unassisted. Building 29 produces footsteps, self-flushing toilets, and a disembodied voice that shouts 'Dismissed' — the archive notes this is the only ghost in the file who gives orders.

Building 37 holds a hazy apparition without further description, and the Powder Magazine posts a ghost sentry — a soldier still standing a watch nobody relieved. On the parade ground and in the old hospital buildings, figures in period dress come and go in reports dating back, by the file's reckoning, to the 1920s. A lieutenant colonel quoted in the local ghost literature delivered the institutional position: if you have ever worked late in one of these old buildings, you would be convinced.

At the national cemetery the claims are what a quarter-million graves would predict: a little girl seen walking among the stones — unidentified by the record, like so many in the early sections — and uniformed figures of both armies reported coming face to face across the grounds, an encounter the war's hospital wards made literal here long before the legends did. Confederate dead and Union dead lie in the same cemetery; a Memorial to the Confederate Dead was dedicated on the grounds in 1988. The reports place them still meeting.

A working military post with a National Register cemetery, a museum in the old ordnance buildings, and the largest ghost file in the St. Louis area by the local literature's own count — thirteen of the thirty-five occupied buildings reporting activity. The barracks trained the Army's cavalry, buried its dead from a century and a half of wars, and now, per the reports, keeps some of them on staff.