Kennesaw Mountain

The worst of it fell on a salient in Frank Cheatham's line, on a rise now called Cheatham Hill, where opposing earthworks stood about four hundred yards apart. Eight Union regiments — more than a thousand men — went at the bulge, reached the top of the eight-foot works, and fought hand to hand, muskets used as clubs. The survivors dug in directly below the parapet in the blind spot the defenders could not reach — 'dead space,' in the engineering term, from which the position took its permanent name: the Dead Angle.

Confederate accounts supply the file's prose. 'My pen is unable to describe the scene of carnage and death,' wrote Private Sam Watkins of the 1st Tennessee; Lieutenant Thomas Maney recorded the order passed down the works — stand they must, and stand they did. The Illinois Monument now marks the angle where the Federals held the ground they could not take.

Elsewhere the line bent the other way: at Kolb's Farm on June 22, John Bell Hood's corps had hurled itself at Union entrenchments and lost about a thousand men, a preview of the campaign's recurring tuition.

The mountain fell anyway — not to the assault but to Sherman's resumed flanking, which forced Johnston off the heights by July 3 and open road to Atlanta behind it. The battlefield became a national battlefield park in 1917 under the War Department and passed to the National Park Service in 1933; the suburbs that now surround it arrived later, which is why the ghost file includes homeowners' accounts as well as hikers'.

The battlefield's best-filed apparition is cavalry. On an October night in 2007, a father and son driving through the park — both Civil War enthusiasts, per their account — braked for a rider crossing the road: a Union officer, saber in hand, who passed through a fence on the far side and faded out. The Marietta ghost-tour trade filed it as a 'residual haunting' — a replay, the theory goes, rather than a presence.

The rest of the register runs to type for an overgrown battlefield: soldiers walking the grounds, gunfire and cannon heard on empty trails, the reported smell of blood and powder, and — in the file's more eccentric entries — phantom deer that charge witnesses and vanish at close range, some allegedly photographed mid-transparency. Residents whose houses stand on the old field report figures in period clothing in suburban bedrooms; one homeowner, three miles from Cheatham Hill, described a mounted soldier in his bedroom and judged it 'the energy of something that happened here.'

The archive files all of it as testimony. What the ground verifiably holds is a preserved Confederate salient, a trail system walked daily by people who do not know what the quiet bends are called — and one bend, at Cheatham Hill, that has kept the name the dying gave it.