Fort Delaware

Start with the numbers, because they are the part of Fort Delaware most often repeated and least often checked. Four incompatible death tolls circulate. The bronze tablets on the Confederate Monument at Finn's Point, erected by the federal government in 1910, carry 2,436 names. The Department of Veterans Affairs, on the same page, gives "an estimated 2,502 men" who died in custody. Ed Okonowicz writes that the Confederate death toll was "close to 2,500". Figures of 2,700 and 2,925 also circulate online without a stated basis. The prisoner totals are worse: 10,048 at once (the state park), "almost 33,000" over the whole war, 22,773 by the January 1866 closure (the VA), 40,000 in some popular retellings. None of these can be given in a site's own voice. They belong to whoever counted them. Now date the ghost story, which is a separate question from dating the deaths. Handy's 1874 journal is the most detailed published account of imprisonment at Fort Delaware — around 1.4 million characters of diary in the digitised text. Searching it is a cheap test of whether the fort had a haunted reputation among the men who suffered there. It does not. The words "haunt", "apparition", "phantom", "spectre" and "supernatural" appear zero times. As a control on the same file: "prisoner" appears 449 times, "Schoepf" 116, "small-pox" 41. The corpus is complete and searchable; the hauntings simply are not in it. There is exactly one ghost story in the whole book — the word "ghost" occurs four times, and the other two are "Holy Ghost" — and it is a good one. On Saturday 13 August 1864, amid the excitement of a prisoner movement, Handy recorded that "Old Parson Thomas had a dream about two weeks ago, in which he thought he saw the ghost of Stonewall Jackson", who told him: "Try to do the best you can; there will be the commencement of a general exchange on the 13th of August; and on the 3d of September, peace will be declared." The exchange did begin that day. Peace did not come on 3 September. That is the earliest Fort Delaware ghost on record: a prisoner's dream, told for its prophecy, not for the building. The modern reputation can be dated precisely, and its origin is unusually well documented — because the man who built it wrote down how he did it. The earliest dated appearance is a chapter, "Resurrecting the Past at Fort Delaware", in Ed Okonowicz's Spirits Between the Bays (Myst and Lace, 1994), the first volume of his Delmarva ghost-story series. In the introduction to Civil War Ghosts at Fort Delaware (2006) Okonowicz explains the rest: "These candlelight walks began in 1997, when the late Lee Jennings, state parks historian, suggested that he and I develop the unique historic walks — with a heavy dose of hauntings and humor." Jennings' plan was a double act: "I would do the folklore and ghost tales, and he would provide the fort's history." Okonowicz ran the tours until 2009 and is blunt about their purpose: "the intent was never to deliver an actual ghost, packaged and gift wrapped. Instead, the tours were a lure, a supernatural bribe to entice folks to visit and experience this historic Civil War wonder." The superlative has a source too. Okonowicz records that in spring 1999 a Discovery Channel crew filmed a segment on the island for a Halloween special called Ghost Waters, in which "the announcer labeled Fort Delaware one of the most haunted sites in the United States near the water". That line, from a television voice-over, is the ancestor of every "most haunted" claim now attached to the fort. The amplification came in 2008, when Ghost Hunters aired a Fort Delaware episode on 18 June and returned for a seven-hour live broadcast on Halloween night. Okonowicz notes the effect directly: "As a result of the national publicity the fort received following an episode and Halloween-night special on the TV program Ghost Hunters, many claimed the potential for spirited sightings on Pea Patch Island was high." Ask what the institution says, and the answer is careful. Delaware State Parks does not claim the fort is haunted. Its own text for the Paranormal Adventure invites you to "experience the history of the park as you and DSGI (Diamond State Ghost Investigators) embark on an evening of paranormal investigations inside the Fort" — an activity, not a finding. The investigators say something similar: the DSGI motto, attributed to their leader Gina Dunham, is "History first, then the paranormal." The sharpest scepticism comes from inside the park. Reviewing the site for H-CivWar in October 2019, the historian Robert Baumgartner traced the sequence — tourists posting camcorder videos online, then the television coverage, then the fort's own tours — and warned that with ghost hunters "the historical narrative becomes lost". Donald Laskey, then lead interpreter at Fort Delaware State Park, replied publicly six days later, on 31 October 2019: "Likewise Paranormals do present many problems when it comes the history of the place being lost. Due to the high profits in our paranormal tour they will only be replaced when the money stops coming in or we can replace them with something better, both have thus far been elusive." And the last word belongs to Okonowicz, interviewed by the Cecil Whig in 2023. Asked whether he believes in ghosts after thirty years of collecting them: "I've talked to hundreds of people who said they have seen ghosts, and there are probably two that have the making to be true, to be possible." Of his own material he says: "Some of the stories have a semi-truth and just enough meat and potatoes."