Stones River National Battlefield

The National Park Service site in Murfreesboro where the Battle of Stones River was fought, December 31, 1862 to January 2, 1863. A visitor center and numbered tour road cover the ground.

Roughly 81,000 soldiers fought here over 3 winter days, and about 23,000 of them became casualties, more than 1 in 4. Around 3,000 men were killed outright.

Stones River National Cemetery, established in 1865, holds more than 6,000 Union graves. The park’s Hazen Brigade Monument is the oldest American Civil War monument still standing in its original battlefield location.

Rangers, visitors, and re-enactors describe shadowy figures and strange feelings at tour stops 4 and 6 by the Slaughter Pen. The Murfreesboro Post asked if this is the area’s most haunted spot.

Investigator Mark Walsh of Rutherford County Paranormal has collected reports of cannon fire, musket fire, and soldiers seen walking the field at night, encounters he described in a WKRN feature.

One re-enactor’s account, retold in the same feature: a uniformed soldier raised his hands in surrender, fell, and vanished.

The ghost books tell of a headless horseman, Julius Garesché in the telling, an officer killed here by cannonball. The 2010 “Haunted Battlefields of the South” adds a soldier’s figure at re-enactors’ campfires.

Entry is free. The tour road and cemetery gates open 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, walkers and cyclists get sunrise to sunset, and there is no night access.