Michael J. Varhola is a freelance writer, editor, and lecturer, and author of three books. He lives in Fairfax, Virginia.
Chapter 1
Arlington National Cemetery
Arlington
We are met on a great battlefield ... We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. ... But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate―we can not consecrate― we can not hallow―this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. ―Abraham Lincoln, “Gettysburg Address”
Arlington National Cemetery is a necropolis, a city of the dead, in the truest sense, and in its 640 acres rest more than 320,000 U.S. military service personnel and their spouses. If it were a city of the living, it would be the 57th largest in the country, falling right in between Cincinnati, Ohio, and Bakersfield, California. There is, in fact, only one U.S. military cemetery that is larger―Long Island National Cemetery―and not by much, with somewhat more than 329,000 internments as of this writing. As an active cemetery, Arlington’s population of souls―resting in peace and unquiet alike―is constantly growing and, on average, some twenty-seven funerals are conducted at the cemetery every weekday.
Arlington National Cemetery clings to a wooded, riverside stretch of the Virginia hills across the Potomac from Washington, D.C., its main entrance being directly adjacent to the Lincoln Memorial. It is the final resting place for veterans of all of America’s military conflicts, from the Revolutionary War up through the current and ongoing actions in Afghanistan and Iraq (from which the number of internments steadily grows). Hundreds of the nation’s most famous veterans are buried at the site, including Audie Murphy, Creighton Abrams, Gregory “Pappy” Boyington, Omar Bradley, Joe Louis, Glenn Miller, John F. Kennedy, and Phillip Sheridan.
It was during the Civil War that the cemetery was opened―veterans of earlier wars being moved there after 1900―and the site was originally part of the 1,100-acre Arlington Mansion plantation. This estate was, in fact, the property of Mary Anna Custis Lee, the wife of Confederate military commander Robert E. Lee and the granddaughter of Martha Washington. As casualties from the protracted insurrection grew into the tens of thousands, however, the federal government needed new cemeteries for them, and Union leaders decided that the grounds of the rebel leader’s home would be both convenient and appropriate.
“The grounds about the mansion are admirably adapted to such a use,” wrote U.S. Army Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs in his recommendation that the estate be confiscated for this use. His suggestion was heartily approved, and on May 13, 1864, Private William Henry Christman of the 67th Pennsylvania Infantry became the first military serviceman to be interred in Arlington National Cemetery―about a month before the site was officially designated as a military cemetery. He was followed over the next year or so by another 16,000 of his brothers-in-arms.
Not everyone was happy about this, of course, and the members of the Custis family, of which Lee’s wife was a scion, were enraged by it. They would not have been in favor of killing so many Yankee soldiers if they had liked them in the first place, and having their home turned into a cemetery for them seemed like a deliberate affront. By all accounts it was, and Union soldiers were buried right in Mrs. Lee’s rose garden and her home turned into a headquarters for the superintendent of the cemetery.
Once the rule of law was reestablished in the wake of the failed Southern rebellion, the Lee family took full advantage of it. Eight years after the war ended, Robert E. Lee’s son, George Washington Custis Lee, a Confederate general in his own right, sued the government and, after a prolonged case that ultimately reached the U.S. Supreme Court, had title to the property returned to his family. Not wanting to live at an estate on which 16,000 of his enemies and 3,800 freed slaves were buried and whose ghosts would doubtless have tormented him and his family in perpetuity, he sold the title back to the U.S. government for $150,000, securing its role as a national cemetery.
Today, the house, along with the outbuildings and grounds immediately surrounding it are maintained and operated by the National Park Service, which now dubs it the “Robert E. Lee Memorial” as a gesture of reconciliation between the two halves of the once-divided country. Nearby Memorial Bridge, linking the cemetery with the Lincoln Memorial, park service guides tell visitors to the site, was designed as a symbol of this reunification.
Arlington National Cemetery itself is administered by the Department of the Army, which operates it on behalf of veterans of all the military services.
There is a line of thought expressed by some people that cemeteries are actually the least likely place in which to encounter ghosts. This is presumably based on the idea that all of the people interred within a cemetery have been properly buried with all appropriate ceremony and there is thus no good reason for their spirits to be unquiet. This does not really make much more sense to me than making generalizations about the inhabitants of cities of the living in general and presumes the people most unhappy about the ways they died will be mollified by a few words and a burial plot. Furthermore, that theory does not seem to be borne out by prevailing evidence in general, and not at all by Arlington National Cemetery in particular.
Arlington National Cemetery has, in fact, come to have a great deal of ghostly phenomena associated with it since it was founded. Curiously, many of these phenomena are distinctly positive in nature, but perhaps that is not so strange in a place where so many who have given their lives for their country are laid to rest.
One of the places within the cemetery where people are said to have felt a spiritual presence is the grave of Robert F. Kennedy, who is buried near his brother, President John F. Kennedy. Singer Bobby Darin, one of the mourners at the slain senator’s June 1968 funeral, is the first to have made this claim. Darin said he felt compelled to remain at the gravesite after the service and that he was thereafter swathed in a bright light that coalesced into a ball of energy and then passed through and “emotionally cleansed” him. He maintained subsequently that Kennedy’s spirit had reached out to him and that his life was changed for the better as a result. Other people have since reported similar incidents at both of the Kennedy gravesites.
A similar kind of effect has been reported in the vicinity of the Tomb of the Unknowns―originally known as the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier but which is now the resting place for three unidentified dead―where some people have claimed to feel what has been characterized as a “vortex of etheric energy.” This energy, according to people who have experienced it at various locations around the tomb, is supposed to have the effect of physical, mental, and spiritual regeneration.
But the area within the national cemetery that has had the most evidence of haunting associated with it―and not of a positive nature―is Arlington Mansion itself. The 8,000-square-foot, neoclassical plantation house has long been purported to be haunted by the ghosts of the Lee and Custis family members who were forced to relinquish it as their home as a result of the Civil War.
“The security people won’t go in the house at night unless they have to,” a National Park Service guide I spoke with at the site told me in July 2008. Things they and other guides have experienced in and around the house, he said, include the sound of disembodied footsteps, especially on stairways; the sound of crying babies in the middle of the night; and the smell of perfume in the rooms formerly occupied by female members of the family. Almost all of the incidents, he said, have occurred during hours of darkness.
Robert E. Lee himself is one of the ghosts believed by some to haunt the mansion, and people have reported seeing or otherwise sensing his specter in the years since the Arlington Mansion estate was confiscated by the government. This should actually be a bit surprising when one considers how Lee is generally regarded by people in North and South alike today. After all, the spirits of heroes who believe they have done the right thing have little inducement to lurk about after death making things go bump in the night.
But the Lee familiar to most people today bears little resemblance to the real man, and is little more than a sentimentalized, two-dimensional construct created by maudlin writers who treat the worst event ever to strike the United States as if it were some golden age. In reality, Robert E. Lee had grave reservations about the legitimacy of the Southern cause and his role in it, as evidenced by his own writings, and knew that he was a traitor to his country, the oaths of military service he made before God, even his own father.
“Our national independence, and consequently our individual liberty,” wrote Revolutionary War hero Henry “Lighthorse Harry” Lee, father of Robert E. Lee, in 1799. “Our peace and our happiness depend entirely on maintaining our union. In point of right no state can withdraw itself from the union. In point of policy, no state ought to be permitted to do so.” Robert E. Lee did everything he could to destroy the legacy his father had struggled to create and in which he had so fervently believed.
And maybe it is the fact that Lee has been so mischaracterized, that he has been made into a sort of hero and the home where he lived turned into a memorial to him, that has led to his haunting the site―not because it is the home where he once lived, but because it is surrounded by the graves of men who he knows would likely never have been killed in a bloody civil war if he had been true to his country, his word, and the ideals of his forebears. He will likely never rest while people continue to invoke his name and treat him as something he did not believe himself to be.
Arlington National Cemetery has always had somewhat of an otherworldly feel to me, and I have little doubt that it is, in fact, a haunt for spirits, of both those who have betrayed their country and those who have given all they had in its service. Whether a visitor senses a negative presence or a positive one while visiting the site will depend on which they happen to encounter and, possibly, to the spirit with which they approach this most hallowed site.
