OLD SANDERS CONFEDERATE MUSEUM

Location: The Old Sanders House Confederate Museum is on a tiny windswept island off the North Carolina coast near Fort Sumter. It is best reachable by boat.

Description: The tiny island is only about one and a half square miles in size with a small wooden glen. A small boat dock receives visitors and takes guests and tourist up a wide foot path up the hill to the museum which sits near a steep rocky cliff. The structure is a restored two story two-hundred year old Southern Colonial with a pitched roof, gables and bay windows for a truly intimidating appearance. The interior has been pain stakingly restored with oak floors, mahogany railings and Nineteenth century furniture. Most of the displays are open while others are contained in glass cabinets.

Ghostly Manifestations: Colonel Joseph Beauregard Sanders was born in 1915 almost exactly fifty years to the last day of the American Civil War. He was a decorated military officer in several wars and an avid collector of Civil War memorabilia for much of his born life. It was his lifetime wish to create a historical museum devoted to the Civil War as he traveled the entire United States collected and gathering everything from old guns, uniforms, old ammunitions, tintypes, letters and the like for his collection. Many of the guns still had pellets still lodged in them and some of the uniforms still had blood from lost soldiers marked in them. Another thing is for sure, some of the former owners are still very much attached to them.

Storing the artifacts in his family home, Sanders soon became aware that his house was being haunted by the psychic memories and lost spirits of countless men killed in that war. Until his own death, he often told friends and associates that he was hearing the far off echoes of gun shots, battle cries that were echoing through time and footsteps resounding through the halls. The war-torn specter of a weary Confederate Soldier has often been seen standing confusingly at the top of the stairway as he stared down to the room. Those who have seen him said he looks tired and fatigued as if he is about to fall over.

Something else has appeared too. Some guests and visitors have seen one or two ghastly green phantoms gliding through the old house. Their appearance is always preceded by the presence of cold air or by the rotten, foul stench of decayed flesh. One guide had to step back from the Colonel’s old study because of the diseased odor but as he stepped back, the sight of the green phantom floated up over his head into the ceiling. It’s rumored these amorphous shapes are supposed to be the ghastly visages of death caused by the massive death toll and carnage of the war. Seen drifting from room to room, their icy presence has been felt all over the house and on the grounds on even the sunniest day. Sometimes they’re seen lurking in the basement where the objects not on display are stored.

Guides and curators have also found displays tampered with and objects moved. One morning, one of the display mannequins from the first floor ended up in an unused second floor room along with an antique Winchester rifle usually kept locked in a glass case.

“All the cases are kept locked,” Curator Daphne Whitney answers. “Only one key opens all of them and it was still locked in my office in the main study. There is no logical reason for the rifle or the figure to have been moved up there.”

Several guests and tourists have remarked that the combination of Union and Confederate items in the same displays is a major taboo. The Confederate Flag that hangs in the foyeur has fallen down repeatedly and frequently. It’s very old, very heavy and it has stains and bullet holes in it. Some report they still smell gunpowder on it. On any night when the doors are open to plain sight of the Union flag on the other end of the house, the flag mysteriously crashes to the floor.

“I heard it fall.” Fred Travers admits. A curator, handyman and historian, he was replacing the adjacent door hinge to the kitchen when the flag fell just out of eyeshot.

“I had left the doors to the parlor open as I came from the kitchen with more tools.” He recalls. “I came around the corner like this to continue fixing the hinges, and I then heard a loud thump and crash. I looked around and there was the flag on the floor, rod and all. The clasps that hold it weren’t even bent or broken. It was almost as if one person had lifted it up and dropped it which is impossible because it was nearly impossible for Shorty and me to get it back.”

Norville “Shorty” Clemens has been the guard and caretaker of the grounds since the museum opened. He has his own room in the basement and he often likes making up his own Civil War legends on the spot to go with the items on display or the identities of the ghosts possibly haunting the structure. Nick-named “Shorty” as a joke because he’s actually six foot three and as thin as a rail, he doesn’t act scared of the ghosts.

“But then,” Travers adds. “If I lived with a two-hundred pound Great Dane, I wouldn’t be scared either.”

In the one room upstairs, there is a prim and proper bedroom set up with furniture as you might find in a Southern bedroom from the Nineteenth century. The canopy bed is always kept clean and straight yet every so often, a tour comes through and the guide leading the guests notices wrinkles on the bed as if someone has been laying on it. The shape is rather distinct, much like a real person and it only takes half a minute to pull the comforter and straighten them out, but a few minutes later, the next tour comes through and it’s wrinkled again.

“A few times,” Whitney answers. “We’ve opened up and during the walk through we notice that part of the comforter has been flipped up as if someone has been sleeping in it. I’ve straightened it every time, yet we still find it mussed seconds to a brief minute after fixing it and no one else has been in there.”

“You notice that mannequin there,” Whitney points out the headless female mannequin in the room modeling a authentic Nineteenth century dress. “I was once leaning over to fix the bed and as I did, I could see my reflection in the mirror opposite the bed. As I did, I also noticed the mannequin, only this time, it had a head.”

“We had a historian working here one summer named Wilma Schuster.” Whitney continues. “She was so short compared to Shorty that she only came up to his chest. Well, anyway, one afternoon she was helping him lock up when they said they both experienced the unmistakable scent of tobacco smoke. Of course, this is a non-smoking structure and why the smoke detectors never picked it up is beyond me, but they searched the entire first floor searching for the origin of the scent before it burned the place down. They were never able to find it, but they did say it was strongest in the study. That’s where the Colonel used to work and he was a notorious pipe-smoker in his day.”

History: Windswept Island was once Windswept Point, a part of Cape Hatteras, but over the years and several storms and hurricanes through the Twenties and Thirties lowered the land and exposed the cliff. The house has sustained damage over the years and even lost a third floor room and parapet. A cave opened up in later years just above high tide and just below the basement which might explain some of the hauntings.

The house itself is at least a hundred and thirty years old and possibly even two hundred. When Sanders died in 1964, the house was left to a sole heir who donated it to the local county. With the help of the local historical society and raised funds, the old house has been converted into the Civil War Museum it is today.

Identity: Possibly the countless spirits of those lost in the Civil War as well as Colonel Joseph Beauregard Sanders himself.

Comments: Scooby-Doo, Where Are You, Episode “A Night Of Fright Is No Delight.” Hauntings based on Rock Castle Museum in Hendersonville, Tennessee, Hickory Hill in Junction, Illinois and the Whaley House in San Diego, California.