GHOST ARMY OF JOHNSON'S ISLAND
Author Unknown in Fate magazine
A strange story is told in connection with am old Confederate cemetery on Johnson's Island, a speck of land in Sandusky Bay, three miles from Sandusky, Ohio.
During the Civil War, Johnson's Island was used as a prison for some 12,000 Confederate soldiers. At the turn of the century the major industry on Johnson's Island was stone quarrying. Most of the workers were Sicilians who lived in shacks near the cemetery.
One March day a severe storm lashed the island and threatened to topple the stoneworkers' shacks. They fled outside where, whipped by freezing wind and spray, they sought shelter at the base of a bronze statue of a Confederate soldier, which had been erected as a memorial. Suddenly, according to Grace Goulder, who related the incident in the Cleveland Plain Dealer Pictorial Magazine, the shivering Sicilians heard a bugle call. Their eyes widened in terror as they saw gray-clad soldiers, each shouldering a musket, rise from the nearby graves. In complete silence the soldiers marched off into the storm and disappeared from view.
A short time later the storm ended and the Sicilians returned to their shacks. The next day they rowed ashore and told of what they had seen. They were so convinced that their experience had been supernatural, that they refused to return to Johnson's Island.
