Pea Patch Island
Delaware
Pea Patch Island, in Delaware, was home to over 33,000 Rebel
prisoners during the Civil War. which hosts a Civil War
era fortress that housed more than 33,000 Rebel prisoners
during the Civil War. Over159 years after that bloody war,
ghosts and historians remained trapped in a subject that
defies explanation. Brother fighting brother, death, and
mayhem reminds us the inhumanity, humanity is capable of.
It is on this island off the coast that many people claim
they make contact with ghosts. The island unusual names
comes from the sinking of a wood sailing ship in the 1600’s
that was carry a cargo hole filled with peas. According
to legend, the peas spilled out of the ship, attached themselves
to a small sandbar and eventually the island grew to its
present 200-acre size. Pea Patch Island floats between New
Jersey and Delaware in the middle of the Delaware River.
It was just after the beginning of the War
of 1812 that the U.S. government decided to build a fort
on Pea Patch Island to protect the waters from enemy ships
trying to pass by. It became Fort Delaware, built of granite
and brick with a 56 canons and a moat.
The fort was quiet after that war until the Civil War erupted in 1861. The fort became a defense against invading Confederates. The Union destroyed the Rebel Navy so Fort Delaware saw no action in that war in fighting terms. The Union turned Fort Delaware’s massive walls and thirty-foot wide moat turned into Confederate prison camp.
In April 1862, 258 Confederate prisoners made their way from Virginia, the first guests of this prison that would come to number 33,000. It was a hell-hole for many reasons, one being that the fort was built to hold supplies and ammunition and had little ventilation. The weather was humid and the mosquitoes unbearable at a time when the prison housed 13,000 prisoners at one time with only one cooking stove for every 200 prisoners.
Death was a constant visitor due to poor living
condition, crowding and contagious diseases. It was the
“Anderdonville of the North”. About 2,700 prisoners
died in this miserable place and causes of death was shooting,
drowning, fever, malaria, and a variety of diseases. With
a high water table, those corpses buried rose from the shallow
graves leading prison officials to realize that Pea Patch
Island was no place to hold the hundreds of dead. Some superstitious
officials suggested that the ghosts on the island were the
result of unhappy dead Rebels buried on the island.
They moved the dead by boat to Finn’s
Point National Cemetery in New Jersey and the men selected
for the job drew the short straw. Moving bodies of men who
died from all kinds of deadly, contagious, unseen diseases
frightened them more than fighting the enemy that they could
see.
Prisoners risked death trying to leave the island. They dressed as Union soldiers, hid in the wood coffins or made rafts of driftwood trying to escape with the hope of reaching Confederate sympathizers that would help them back to Virginia. It is no wonder that those who died haunt the island.
Men in gray uniforms move throughout the island, especially on the night of a full moon. Constant reports from visitors talk about photographs with pictures of apparitions, strange voices on a tape recorder and severe temperature changes on digital thermometers.
According to the fort guide there are
- Bloodstains that appear and disappear where a soldier died after hitting his head on the granite stairs when he tripped and fell.
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Visitors reported Confederate soldiers touching them as if they are trying to get their attention.
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A man was chased from the
commandant’s office by a skull.
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Women re-enactors doing a cooking demonstration in the kitchen saw a man in period clothing looking over the food and he walked right through the wall.
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Pictures of apparition in the kitchen
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Rebel officer carrying his head on the ramparts and the dungeons.
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Unexplained woman dusting a mantle while an actor read Poe’s poem, “the Raven.
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Children’s’ voices in the fort.
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Men seen in and about the fort, mistaken at first as re-enactors.
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Orbs throughout the fort along with
apparition sightings.
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Strange variations in temperature
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Voices telling visitors to “leave the area”
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There was a little girl, who was the daughter of the commandant of the fort. She died of disease and lives on here.