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Fort Meigs

PERRYSBURG

THERE IS AN AURA OVER A BATTLEFIELD, an aura created by acts of privation, courage, and sacrifice, that cannot be felt at other historical sites. A visitor to such a battlefield can never truly understand the travails of those who fought and died there, but one can feel an emotional tug, a spiritual pang of empathy, at such places. Some say that there is more to that spiritual empathy than we can comprehend and that the spirits of those who have died on the battlefield remain forever bound to it.

Fort Meigs is one of those places.

During the War of 1812, the Northwest Territory was a strategic location and a central area for American military operations. Until the spring of 1813, the war in the Northwest had gone badly for the Americans. Both Fort Mackinac and Detroit in Michigan Territory were lost to the British and their Indian allies, as well as Fort Dearborn in Illinois Territory. An American defeat on the River Raisin in Michigan was an additional blow to the United States. Only Fort Wayne in Indiana Territory was able to repulse the British attack.

General William Henry Harrison, newly appointed commander of the Northwest Army, was determined to thwart the British advance by establishing a log and earthen fort on a bluff overlooking the southern shore of the Maumee River. The fort was a sprawling structure for its time, built to serve not as a permanent military installation but a temporary supply depot and staging area for an American invasion of Canada. The palisade enclosed ten acres and included seven two-story blockhouses and five artillery batteries. At its greatest strength, approximately two thousand men were sheltered in tents within the fort’s perimeter and included U.S. Army regulars, militia from Ohio, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, and several companies of volunteers.

It was difficult to get a sense of that bustling activity on the day I visited the reconstructed fort. I was alone. There was no sound in the vast, open space enclosed by the wooden palisade, other than crickets sawing in the high grass and the wind whispering over the grounds. A solitary hawk floated high above the fort in a sky so hard and blue I felt as though I could reach up and rap it with my knuckles.

As I walked among the traverses—long, earthen berms taller than a man, thrown up as protection against incoming artillery rounds—the wind abated. There was only silence.

It was among these traverses one night that Virginia Pfouts saw the dark shape of a man during a recent Garrison Ghost Walk. Virginia has been a volunteer at Fort Meigs for the last eight years and knows the fort and the other volunteers very well.

“It was more of a silhouette,” she said in a conversation after my visit to the fort. “I saw it in an area of the fort that the tour did not visit. There shouldn’t have been anyone down there. I got closer and looked down another traverse to where the man had been. He was gone. None of the volunteers said they had been in that section that night. I know it wasn’t one of the people on the tour. We count noses and keep a close watch on them so we don’t lose anyone in the dark.”

During the British sieges of Fort Meigs in May and July, 1813, American observers would stand upon the traverses. By watching how the smoke from British cannons across the river drifted on the wind, they could predict with a fair degree of accuracy where the projectile would hit and shout a warning to the soldiers in that area to duck for cover. It was dangerous work. A solid shot cannon ball could take away a man’s head, or leave him standing for a few seconds with a bloody hole big enough to look through drilled through his chest. A “bomb bursting in air,” as Francis Scott Key wrote during the same war, could pepper him with shrapnel or turn him into a human torch with flammable resins.

Could Virginia’s specter be the ghost of one of these unfortunate casualties?

“Some people have seen ghostly figures walking upon the traverses,” said John Destatte, a volunteer with more than thirteen years’ experience. “There are certainly enough tragic stories from the fort’s past that could account for the many ghost stories.”

John told me how a detachment of Kentucky militia came to the aid of the besieged fort, captured a British gun battery across the river, and then fell into a trap set by “retreating” Indians. Those who were not killed in battle were taken prisoner by the Indians and subjected to torture until Shawnee Chief Tecumseh heard about it and put a halt to the tortures, all the while upbraiding the British officers who stood by and let it happen as “women.” Of the 800-man detachment, 650 were killed or captured.

“One of them was a captain,” John said, “who had been seriously wounded by a musket ball that entered one temple and passed out through the other without killing him. The ball severed his optic nerve and the man was blinded. He wandered over the battlefield until the Indians killed and scalped him.”

Indians are said to haunt the fort in addition to the ghostly soldiers. Unbeknownst to General Harrison, the site had been previously used by Native Americans for several centuries. As American soldiers constructed the fort, human remains were unearthed. An entry from the 1813 diary of Captain Daniel Cushing reads:

In almost every place where we have thrown up the earth we find human bones aplenty. Yesterday the fatigue party that were digging a trench in front of blockhouse No. 3 and 4 came upon a pile of bones where they took out 25 skulls in one pit … In walking around this garrison on the earth that has been thrown up it was like walking on the sea shore upon mussel shells, only in this case human bones.

It came as no surprise to hear both John and Virginia say that the area around blockhouse No. 3 is where most people report unusual events. John talked about the woman and child sometimes seen peering from a second-floor window, and about the bluish-white light that has been seen floating in the dark near the blockhouse and then drifting down the slope to the river.

“People who have seen it say that it is an Indian spirit, al-though they can’t explain why they feel that way,” John said.

Virginia has seen the light.

“It was as bright as a camera flash,” she said, “only it lasted longer. A full four seconds, at least. It wasn’t a camera. No one in our group was using one. There were no other lights that could have made the flash.”

Virginia has had other experiences at blockhouse No. 3. One night, after she and some other volunteers had locked up the blockhouses and were returning to their cars in the parking lot, two police cruisers pulled up. The officers told her that the motion detectors in one of the blockhouses had been triggered. Something was inside.

“Sometimes there will be a false alarm,” Virginia said. “Maybe a mouse or something. I went back into the fort to check. The policemen didn’t come with me.”

She went to all the blockhouses, checked the locks, and found them all securely fastened. Then she came to blockhouse No. 3, with the steep traverse running close before it.

“I was standing at the door in the dark. I checked the lock. It was still locked. Suddenly, I heard the sound of a musket misfiring behind me, from up above the traverse. I whirled around but there was no one there.”

“A musket?” I asked.

“I’ve heard that sound plenty of times during re-enactments. I recognized it immediately.”

Are the spirits of Fort Meigs still at war?

John said that some people have seen soldiers firing weapons. Virginia said that two women from Canada saw a ghostly gun crew working a cannon at the fort’s Grand Battery at three o’clock in the morning. I never did find out what the women were doing at the fort in the middle of the night, since Virginia did not feel that she should speak on their behalf and no one could remember their full names or where they lived. Canada’s a big country.

I didn’t see any ghosts at Fort Meigs, but I did find the melancholy gravestones of three officers killed there. The graves were not far from the soaring obelisk that memorializes the soldiers of Fort Meigs. Nor are they far from the cold spot—“refrigerator cold,” Virginia called it—that some people have felt even in the brightest sunlight. Indians murdered one of the officers outside the fort. British artillery killed another as he conferred with General Harrison inside the fort, and the other, wounded at the Grand Battery, died from tetanus a few days later. Scores of the dead are buried in unmarked graves just outside the fort’s main gate, while others lie in peace in an adjacent cemetery.

During the May 1813 siege, British troops managed to set up an artillery battery on the site now occupied by that cemetery. In a bloody attack, American troops overran the battery and knocked it out of commission. Apparently, that engagement rages on almost two hundred years later. People have heard the sounds of battle—fifes and drums, hoof beats—echoing from the site.

Virginia has heard a soldier walking beside her.

One evening she and some of the other volunteers were walking out from the visitors’ center to their cars. Virginia had parked her car in an area removed from the others, and one of the volunteers asked her if she wanted to be escorted to her car. She said no, she had her soldier walking beside her.

“Now, why in the world did I say that?” Virginia said. “It just came out. It was very strange. As I was walking to my car, I had the sense of someone else with me and I heard a little metallic jingling accompanying me. It sounded like the rattling of a musket tool against a belt buckle. Whenever I stopped, the sound stopped, too.”

Virginia said she checked her haversack and her camera case, shaking them to see if they were making the sound. They were not. Some time later, another volunteer said she had heard the same sound, only in a different part of the fort.

Virginia had felt the presence of an unseen person before. Once, when she was whitewashing the interior of blockhouse No. 1, she experienced an overwhelming sensation that someone was behind her, watching her. She turned to look, but there was no one there. Although she has never heard them herself, Virginia says that some people have heard footsteps pacing the second floor of the blockhouse.

“None of this bothers me,” she said. “There is nothing I fear at the fort.”

But there are volunteers who refuse to go to certain places within the fort after dark.

“In all my years here,” John said, “I have never experienced anything unusual. Yet, people will tell me what they have felt or seen in a certain area of the fort, and I’ll research what happened there and say, ‘That makes sense.’”

Both John and Virginia are longtime residents of the area and have a long association with Fort Meigs, beginning even before their volunteer days. John, a Perrysburg resident all his life, remembers playing on the traverses as a boy before the fort was reconstructed. Virginia grew up in a house on the site of the Kentucky militia’s defeat. They are both sincerely committed to preserving the history and the memory of the fort and its soldiers.

“It really bugs me when people make up stories about what they’ve seen or heard at the fort,” Virginia said. “It makes it so much harder for those of us who have really experienced these things to be believed.

“I believe the spirits of 1813 are still at the fort. It is paranormal. I don’t know how else to explain it.”

Indeed.