Andersonville National Historic Site
During the Civil War this quiet stretch of southwest Georgia was Camp Sumter, the Confederacy's largest and deadliest prison, where nearly 13,000 Union soldiers died of disease, starvation, and exposure in barely fourteen months, the dead laid in trench graves that now form the white rows of Andersonville National Cemetery. Visitors report cries of agony and the moans of starving men drifting across the open fields, especially when fog settles over the old stockade ground at dusk, where dim figures wander the earthworks.
Motorists along Highway 49 describe a robed figure thought to be Father Peter Whelan, the Confederate chaplain who ministered to the dying, while the most reported spirit is commandant Captain Henry Wirz, hanged for the camp's horrors, said to pace the road into the prison he could not escape in death.
📍 496 Cemetery Road, Andersonville, GA 31711, Andersonville, GA · Get directions