Civil War Ghosts

Few events have sparked more legends and stories of the supernatural than America's Civil War. The accounts of gallantry and heroism have spread far and wide. Nancy Roberts grew up listening to her father's stories of the War Between the States, and she trekked over many battle sites with him during her childhood. After reading about General Joshua Chamberlain's supernatural experience at the Battle of Gettysburg, Roberts began to collect tales of the blue and gray and write them down.

In the days before the Civil War, there lived in New Orleans the gens de couleur libre - copper-skinned half-castes, liberated by their "owners," but confined by their color to a life of political non-existence and social subordination. Here is a compelling and richly textured tale of a people forever caught in the shadows between black and white.

Confederate John Singleton Mosby forged his reputation on the most exhilarating of military activities: the overnight raid. Mosby possessed a genius for guerrilla and psychological warfare, taking control of the dark to make himself the "Gray Ghost" of Union nightmares. Gray Ghost, the first full biography of Confederate raider John Mosby, reveals new information on every aspect of Mosby's life, providing the first analysis of his impact on the Civil War from the Union viewpoint.

While attempting to join up with her lover Matt Jorgensen as he joins Confederate Calvary, Ginny McBride is hit by a musketball from a Union rifle. She develops amnesia, losing all memory as to who and where she is. Matt spends his military time trying to find her. When she returns to herself, she in turn tries to find Matt. It is a story that also engulfs the Western folklore of Jesse James, Cole Younger and his brothers and Belle (Starr) Shirley as they became legends.

The transhumanists are attempting to use the chaos of the American Civil War to escape the Observer Effect: the immutable law that recorded history cannot be changed. If any should attempt it, time has a way of dealing with those transgressors in a very brutal, very final fashion. Now it is the last days of the Confederacy, and the Fall of Richmond looms. In the Shenandoah Valley, in the region later known as Mosby's Confederacy, insurgency brews, and the time travelers must join the raiders to prevent a transhumanist trap from dooming the mission from the start.

A ghost in his deserted childhood home in Virginia, Tom Smiley can’t forget the bloody war and its meaningless losses, nor can he shed his revulsion for his role in the Confederate defense of slavery. But when a young couple moves in and makes his home their own in the early twenty-first century, trouble erupts—and Tom is forced to not only face his own terrible secret but also come to grips with his family’s hidden wartime history.

Mosby, the "Gray Ghost" of the Confederate lore that celebrates the Lost Cause, has an image that has proven nearly impossible to corrupt or change, and time has done little good against it. Unlike the vanished 19th century code of honor that he represented, Mosby has retained the image and all its connotations. But that image, which he helped fashion, was mostly an invention

In the early days of photography, in the death-strewn wake of the Civil War, one man seized America's imagination. A "spirit photographer", William Mumler took portrait photographs that featured the ghostly presence of a lost loved one alongside the living subject. Mumler was a sensation. Peter Manseau brilliantly captures a nation wracked with grief and hungry for proof of the existence of ghosts and for contact with their dead husbands and sons. It took a circus-like trial of Mumler on fraud charges to expose a fault line of doubt and manipulation.