In 1775 Cherokee leaders sold most of Tennessee and Kentucky to the recently arrived white settlers, but Dragging Canoe, a proud chief, said that the sacred land should not be defiled by the white man's ax and plow. -This is the Dark and Bloody Ground - he proclaimed to the assembled chiefs.

Perhaps it is the abundance of decaying mansions that harbor dark and sinister secrets, or perhaps it is Tennessee's tragic heritage of war and defeat, or it may just be the love of a good story that accounts for the fact that Tennessee is steeped in strange tales. Each of these 40 accounts has...

Explore the strange and shadowy side of the civil war . . . A fascinating collection of ghostly sightings, auspicious visions, audible manifestations, and uncanny premonitions.

• In 1872 a photographer who claimed he could capture the -essence' of dead relatives took an image purporting to show Mary Todd Lincoln with the protective ghost of Abraham Lincoln behind her.
• The spirit of George Washington who appeared to John C. Calhoun in the 1840s to persuade him not to dissolve the union.
• The nameless drummer boy from the Army of Ohio who still plays at the Shiloh...

In the spring of 1861, Ambrose Bierce, just shy of nineteen, became Private Bierce of the Ninth Indiana Volunteer Infantry. For the next four years, Bierce marched and fought throughout the western theater of the Civil War. Because of his searing wartime experience, Bierce became a key writer in the history of American literary realism. Scholars have long asserted that there are concrete connections between Bierce s fiction and his service, but surprisingly no biographer has focused solely on Bierce s formative Civil War career and made these connections clear.
Christopher K. Coleman uses...