Oakland Cemetery

The record is frank about the ordering. In 1852 the city council directed that enslaved burials go to the eastern edge — Slave Square — and as the cemetery grew, many of those graves were exhumed and moved, some twice, to make way for the paying dead. The Jewish and African American sections run in their own ranks; the pauper field takes the indigent.

The largest single file is military: roughly 6,900 Confederate soldiers gathered from battlefield graves after the 1864 fighting around Atlanta, about 3,000 of them unidentified, watched over since 1894 by the Lion of Atlanta — a carved lion lying guard over the unknown, modeled on the Lion of Lucerne. Near the southeast corner, seven of the Union operatives from the Great Locomotive Chase were hanged and buried in 1862, before later removal to the national cemetery at Chattanooga.

Oakland's signature account is the roll call. In the version most often repeated — traced to a Decatur tour guide and the research of William Bender — visitors near the Confederate section report a bugle, then a voice reading names down the rows, and beneath it, faintly, the answers: 'Present.' 'Here.' In the story's sharpest telling, a young man walking the grounds one December evening heard the roll reach his own name.

The cemetery's own staff are on record declining to certify it — one education manager noted that spirits usually haunt the places they lived, not the places they're buried. But the file is thick anyway: footsteps in the old sexton's house that now serves as the visitor center, whispers and cold spots in the office, a bell reported ringing in its tower while unhooked, uniformed figures among the Confederate markers, and Margaret Mitchell sightings filed for decades after her 1949 death — with none recent, the staff note.

Each October the cemetery stages Capturing the Spirit of Oakland, with actors playing the dead among the monuments — the institution, like several in this archive, electing to dramatize its hauntings rather than adjudicate them.

The cemetery keeps its own oddities in stone. Brick magnate Jasper Newton Smith commissioned a life-size statue of himself — seated, top hat in hand — atop his mausoleum facing the gate, reportedly because he wanted to keep an eye on everyone coming and going; local lore claims he found no sculptor's bid satisfactory and paid anyway. Actress Maggie Chapman, who died in 1880 after her winged costume caught a gas jet onstage, rests in the file of theatrical dead. And on March 14, 2008, a tornado crossed downtown and struck the cemetery, toppling oaks and throwing the trumpeting Gabriel off Governor Joseph E. Brown's monument — damage the foundation documented and repaired, the archive's own reminder that the place's disasters are meteorological.