Droop Mountain Battle

When I was a child, my family used to take vacations to visit West Virginia’s state parks, and my dad especially loved Droop Mountain and the surrounding area. So one year, we rented a cabin there for a few nights. I was about 10 years old at the time.

That first day, we spent our time walking around, learning about the battle, and visiting the town near the mountain. We got back to the cabin around dinnertime, and my mom fixed supper. My sister and I were sitting on the front porch right at dusk, and from there we had a good view of the battlefield.

All at once, she yelled, “Look, there’s a guy on horseback!”

We watched him ride across the field and then disappear into the woods. When we were called in for dinner, we mentioned it to our dad. He laughed and said no one was allowed out on that field with horses, and that we were just seeing things and letting our imaginations run wild.

After dinner, all of us sat out on the porch for a while, but we did not see anything unusual. Around 10:00 or so, we went to bed.

Sometime around midnight, my sister woke up to the sound of gunfire and men yelling. She woke me and whispered, “Listen.”

I heard it too.

We crept to the door, slowly opened it, and stepped out onto the porch. What we saw left us stunned. There were soldiers on horseback fighting other soldiers, men shouting as if from far away, swords drawn, and bugles sounding in the night.

The strangest part was that they all seemed to be surrounded by a mist, almost as if the battle was playing out inside a fog.

We looked at each other, then ran as fast as we could back into the cabin, jumped into our beds, and stayed awake the rest of the night, scared to death.

We were both in our 20s before we ever told our parents what we saw that night.