POINT LOOKOUT STATE PARK
State Park — 11175 Point Lookout Road, Scotland, St. Mary's County, Maryland
Status: Historic site · Access: Open to public
Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/point-lookout-state-park-scotland-maryland/

Civil War POW camp and lighthouse peninsula called America’s most haunted park.

The peninsula held the largest Union POW camp—52,000 Confederates passed through and thousands died—then a quarantine and a navy hospital. The park’s folklore includes voices in the swamp-edge campground and a lighthouse keeper still making rounds; it’s routinely called America’s most haunted state park.

After Gettysburg, the Union had a problem of arithmetic: tens of thousands of Confederate prisoners and nowhere to put them. Its answer was a flat, marshy peninsula at the mouth of the Potomac, where a forty-acre compound of tents called Camp Hoffman was thrown up beside an army hospital in the summer of 1863. The camp was built for ten thousand men; it held as many as twenty thousand at a time, and more than fifty thousand passed through before it closed in 1865.
Nearly four thousand of them never left. They died in the tents, sixteen men to a canvas, of disease, exposure, bad water, and a federal ration cut imposed in 1864 as retaliation for the treatment of Union prisoners in the South. The peninsula is now Point Lookout State Park — swimming beach, campground, lighthouse — and it is routinely described, with complete accuracy about the numbers at least, as the most haunted ground in the entire Maryland state park system.

THE DOCUMENTED RECORD
Point Lookout's layered service record starts before the prison. In the War of 1812 the British camped there and offered freedom to enslaved people who reached their lines — which is why the site sits today in the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom. In 1862 the Union built Hammond General Hospital on the point and Fort Lincoln to guard it. Camp Hoffman, officially so named, was the largest Union-run prison camp of the war and its reputation among inmates was among the worst: flooding stockades, polluted water, thin rations, and winter gales straight off the Chesapeake. In the 1870s Maryland moved the Confederate dead to a common grave a mile inland; the federal obelisk raised there in 1910 carries, on twelve bronze tablets, the names of 3,382 soldiers and sailors and 44 civilians.

THE LIGHTHOUSE
The Point Lookout Light has watched all of it since 1830 — the hospital, the prison, the hospital's own quiet decades, the park's creation in 1965, and its own transfer to the state of Maryland in 2006. The Preservation Society that formed that year has restored the complex toward its 1927 appearance and opened it to the public as a museum in the summers. The light is the park's senior witness, and it is the one building on the point whose job description never changed.

WHAT WITNESSES FILED
The reports sort themselves by era, which is tidy of them. In the campground and along the swamp edges, visitors and rangers file voices, figures in gray, and the sounds of men in distress — the prison camp's register. At the lighthouse, the reported presence is a keeper still making his rounds, with footsteps and door movements filed by staff and paranormal teams who have worked the tower repeatedly. Campers describe singing and shouting where no one is camped, and the lighthouse's own paranormal nights sell out on the strength of them. All of it is anecdotal; the peninsula's documented dead, around four thousand, supply whatever the accounts need.

WHAT REMAINS
What remains is the archive's strangest juxtaposition: a state park where children swim within sight of the ground where four thousand prisoners died of exposure, and where the night sounds of the campground are, depending on the listener, weather or testimony. The mass grave is a mile off, marked and named. The rest of the peninsula files its reports in the dark.

FILED CLAIMS — 2 on record, reported not verified
· [Anecdotal] reported anomalies: Campers and staff report voices, apparitions and a presence in the lighthouse and along the shore. The reports at Point Lookout State Park are the site's second history — unofficial, unverified, and stubbornly retold. The reports are anecdotal — consistent enough to record, thin enough to stay unproven. 'Point Lookout State Park' carries the account. The pattern of small anomalies is itself the claim — none dramatic alone, persistent together.
  source: Point Lookout State Park (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_Lookout_State_Park)
· [Media reported] haunting reputation: Paranormal media routinely calls it America’s most haunted state park. The reports at Point Lookout State Park are the site's second history — unofficial, unverified, and stubbornly retold. Media accounts carried the story further than the evidence ever did. Sources including 'Point Lookout State Park' keep the claim in circulation. The haunting claim is now part of the site's identity, filed alongside the documented history.
  source: Point Lookout State Park (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_Lookout_State_Park)

HISTORY — 3 documented facts
· NPS includes this site in the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom. Point Lookout State Park's past is on record — the entry belongs to the verified layer beneath whatever lore attaches. It's verified history: the dossier's load-bearing detail. The detail is preserved in 'Public NPS Network to Freedom listings, row 2, ID 01GA01'. It anchors the timeline the rest of the file hangs from.
· [1863–1865] Camp Lookout held ~52,000 Confederate prisoners 1863–65; thousands died of disease and exposure. Point Lookout State Park's past is on record — the entry belongs to the verified layer beneath whatever lore attaches. It's verified history: the dossier's load-bearing detail. 'Point Lookout State Park' documents the entry. It's the sort of fact that gives the haunting reports their context.
· The site later served as a quarantine and navy hospital; the 1883 lighthouse is preserved. 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. 'Point Lookout State Park' documents the entry. It is the kind of fact the rest of the dossier leans on.

SOURCES — 2 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
· Point Lookout State Park — Wikipedia
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_Lookout_State_Park

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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/