Chicago Hauntings: Civil War ghosts at the site of Camp Douglas
CHICAGO (CBS) -- Camp Douglas – once located in what is now the Bronzeville neighborhood – was once called "The North's Andersonville."
How could that be, you might ask? Andersonville is located a good 10 miles north and a few miles west of the historic site along Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive where the Illinois state historical marker for Camp Douglas is found.
That's not the Andersonville they were talking about. The Chicago neighborhood with its antique stores, fashionable bars and restaurants, and Swedish flag replica water tank shares a name with an infamous Confederate prisoner-of-war camp during the Civil War in Georgia. The prison camp – officially known as Camp Sumter – was overcrowded and notorious for unsanitary conditions – and nearly 13,000 Union soldiers died there.
Camp Douglas in Chicago was a Union prisoner-of-war camp – and while the death rate there was not as high, it had a similar reputation for squalor and poor treatment.
As Tony Szabelski of Chicago Hauntings Ghost Tours told us for this all-new addition of Chicago Hauntings, the site also now has a reputation for ghosts.
As recalled by the Encyclopedia of Chicago, Camp Douglas was founded in the fall of 1861 – initially as a training camp and staging center for Union troops. It was named for U.S. Sen. Stephen A. Douglas, who donated the land for the camp from his 53-acre Oakenwald estate. Part of the site had been used as a fairground prior to the war, according to a publisherd report.
The nearly 60-acre camp spanned from 31st Street on the north to 33rd Place on the south, and from Cottage Grove Avenue on the east to somewhere around Giles Avenue (formerly Forest Avenue – a name the street retains farther south in Roseland) on the west – but other than Cottage Grove Avenue, the street grid as we know it today was not laid out that long ago. The Lake Meadows apartment and condo development, shopping center, park, and community are located on the site today.
Initially, Camp Douglas was one of the few camps in the North that trained African American soldiers – and it was planned as one of the largest Union training camps, according to the Illinois State Historical Society.
By the end of 1861, the Union Army was in need of facilities for Confederate prisoners – and Camp Douglas was selected as such a facility after the fall of Fort Donelson in Tennessee, as noted by David L. Keller's 2015 book, "The Story of Camp Douglas: Chicago's Forgotten Civil War Prison." In February 1862, the first 1,258 Confederate prisoners were sent to Camp Douglas – amid concerns from both the Chicago Tribune and Mayor John Rumsey that the site was not prepare for such a use, Keller wrote.
Another wave of 2,450 Confederate prisoners were sent to the camp in April 1862, Keller wrote.
Nearly 30,000 Confederate prisoners were housed at Camp Douglas through the end of the war in 1865. More than 10,000 prisoners were housed in the camp at once at certain points – according to the Camp Douglas Restoration Foundation – which Keller co-founded – there were 12,082 prisoners at the camp at the beginning of December 1864.
The camp was built to hold a fraction of that population.
The Encyclopedia of Chicago said one in seven prisoners died at Camp Douglas. The total number of estimated deaths ranges from 4,243 – the number of names on the monument at the Confederate Mound in Oak Woods Cemetery, to 7,000 – a high estimate by some historians, the foundation reported.
Smallpox, malaria, cholera, typhus, and scurvy were among the major causes of death. The hastily-constructed structures and the camp, harsh weather, and poor sanitary conditions were to blame.
As quoted by the Transylvania County, North Carolina GenWeb Project, Henry W. Bellows of the U.S. Sanitary Commission complained to a colonel at the camp: ""Sir, the amount of standing water, unpoliced grounds, of foul sinks, of unventilated and crowded barracks, of general disorder, of soil reeking miasmatic accretions, of rotten bones and emptying of camp kettles, is enough to drive a sanitarium to despair. I hope that no thought will be entertained of mending matters."
The cold weather was also a problem – with many prisoners coming from the South not used to such conditions. There were also reports that the prisoners were forced to sit with their pants down on the frozen, snowy ground as a punishment, according to the GenWeb project.
In addition, Keller told the Chicago Tribune in 2013 that meals for the prisoners were composed of "potatoes and bad beef." The camp also lacked sewers.
Camp Douglas was shut down after the end of the Civil War in 1865. The prisoners who were still there were ordered to take an oath of loyalty to the United States, and the buildings were torn down soon afterward, according to published reports.
While Camp Douglas was already long gone before anyone alive today was born, Szabelski says there are people to this day who say they see the ghosts of soldiers roaming the grounds – dressed in raggedy old clothing.
Some also report hearing a bugle call in the morning. There are stories that the daughters of Col. Benjamin Jeffery Sweet – the last commander of Camp Douglas and later a Wisconsin state senator – would go around in the morning and blow the bugle while singing, "Are you all dead yet?" to the sick prisoners.
Szabelski himself did a paranormal investigation at the site of Camp Douglas with a group some years back. They got some interesting results – capturing some shadow figures and recorded voices that sounded like Union soldiers.
Szabelski also pointed to a specific location on the former Camp Douglas site where a Culver's is now located, at 3355 S. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. He said that the smallpox burial ground for the camp was located at that site – and an estimated 600 prisoners were buried on the site.
The Culver's opened in January 2018, despite The Camp Douglas Restoration Foundation – which has conducted extensive research on Camp Douglas and has dug up numerous relics – having urged developers not to build the Culver's on the site, Szabelski said.
Szabelski has not heard too much about any ghost stories around the Culver's yet, but it has been open for less than six years – so he says we'll see as time goes on.
Other paranormal experts have also reported experiences with the uncanny at the Camp Douglas site. Paranormal expert Ursula Bielski notes these include "tactile sensations of being grabbed by one's arm or hand, the smell of tobacco, and intense spots of gold; feelings of dread or sadness that come and go without warning."
Apparitions near Stephen A. Douglas' tomb
The Stephen A. Douglas' Tomb and Memorial is also located nearby, at 636 E. 35th St. Douglas died June 3, 1861, only a couple of months after the Civil War commenced with the Battle of Fort Sumter.
Douglas is perhaps best known infamously for sponsoring the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 – which repealed the Missouri Compromise limiting the northern geographical reach of slavery, and allowed new western territories to decide whether to allow the vile institution under a principle of "popular sovereignty." Douglas, a Democrat, is also known for his debates with Republican Abraham Lincoln as the latter challenged him for the U.S. Senate in 1858.
Douglas went on to lose the 1860 presidential race to Lincoln. His place in history today is far from revered – in 2020, activists succeeded in getting the name of Douglas Park on the city's West Side to Douglass Park, honoring Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass instead of Stephen A. Douglas.
Also in 2020, the University of Chicago took down a bronze plaque of Douglas and a stone from the Old University of Chicago – an unrelated institution that operated between 1856 and 1886 on land donated by Douglas adjacent to the camp.
But shortly after his death, Douglas was deemed worthy of a public monument. As Joseph L. Eisendrath Jr. wrote in the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society in 1958, Douglas was first buried in a simple grave near his Chicago cottage, but his friends organized the Douglas Monument Association to construct a more prominent tomb.
Illinois sculptor Leonard Wells Volk – a member of the association – designed the monument, a 96-foot granite structure composed of three circular bases, a 20-foot diameter octagonal mausoleum housing Douglas' sarcophagus, and a 46-foot column with a statue of Douglas at the apex.
But the monument association came up short in funds. Douglas' remains were transferred to the monument in 1868 before it was finished, and two years later, the masonry on the monument cracked as water froze, Eisendrath wrote.
The Chicago Post in 1870 said of the site, "The fence is not fit for a cowyard; the grounds are shabby and uncared-for; and generally the aspect of the enterprise is altogether unlovely."
Meanwhile, Volk's original design for the monument was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, so he had to resubmit the plans to the commission, Eisendrath wrote. The tomb was finally completed in 1881.
Bielski reports sightings of a shadowy male figure in period dress sitting on the ground near the monument began almost immediately after it was completed. Chicagoans wondered if the lack of respect shown Douglas had caused him to come back from the dead – but Bielski said there are some other possibilities for who this ghost might be.
In November 1877, W. F. Coolbaugh – a Chicago bank president and close personal friend of Douglas – shot himself at the monument. The 56-year-old's body was "found prostrate in his own blood with a pistol at his side," Bielski reported in her 2018 book "Haunts of the White City."
Years later, two more men died by suicide at the foot of the tomb – a man named Matthew Walsh in March 1879, and a tailor named Martin Arndt in June of the same year. Arndt had just been denied a raise and fired for asking, Bielski reported.
There are still tales told of a shadowy figure by the monument today, according to Bielski.