Virginia Ghost
by Katelyn n' Stephanie
(Lugoff, Alabama,USA)
Robert David Shirtliffe
My friend Stephanie and I went on a tour of all the Civil War sites and we went into the woods because when I took a picture of one of the battlefields, the flash reflected off something shiny and we went to go and see what it was. We had stumbled on an old civil war graveyard (the death date and birth date were still legible on one of the gravestones). It was obviously snowing when we went and I thought that it would make a neat picture, so I took one. When we got back to the hotel room, I dumped the pictures onto my laptop and put a black border around the picture. When I had finished I got Stephanie to look at it and she noticed the man in the upper left-hand corner of the picture. It was just Stephanie and me there and we didn't have a tour guide. The man in the picture is obviously not dressed how we would dress so that means that he can't be from this time period.
We had free internet and decided to look up the clothes from around that period. They didn't match. Then Stephanie showed me a picture that she had taken and the date on the nearest gravestone said 1891 as the death date. The name was Mary Shirtliffe. We also looked at the clothes from that period, and it was a match. We also looked up Mary Shirtliffe to see if she did anything special throughout history. She was a female surgeon in a Confederate field hospital that was set up there. And they buried the dead using rocks that Mary found because she didn't think that just a board was enough.
The hospital moved with the Confederates to the next camp and the bodies were left there. Mary recorded the location in her diary to tell the families where their loved ones were buried. She later said in her will that she wanted to be buried there too. Her husband was Robert David Shirtliffe and he often visited her grave.
This is who we saw. The tree has fallen on top of her grave so you can't very well see it. Creepy Huh!!??