In June of 2025, we returned to Fredericksburg and once again stopped at the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, where we conducted some investigations while walking up and down the Sunken Road.

This was our second stop at this location. We first stopped in 2006 during our trip on our honeymoon and went on the tour with the tour guide. We also spent some time in the National Cemetery in Fredericksburg.

We produced a video about our visit and investigation, bringing you along with us as we tried to communicate and investigate some of the paranormal claims along the sunken road.

The Sunken Road at Fredericksburg, part of today’s Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, began as a simple wagon lane worn below grade by generations of traffic along the base of Marye’s Heights. By the 1860s it had become a shallow trench flanked by a stout stone wall—ordinary infrastructure that, in December 1862, would be transformed into one of the Civil War’s most fearsome defensive positions. The lane ran east–west behind gardens and modest homes, including the Innis and Stephens houses, with Brompton atop the heights beyond. When the armies converged on Fredericksburg, geography and masonry quietly promised catastrophe.

On December 13, 1862, Confederate infantry of Longstreet’s corps, many of them South Carolinians and Georgians, crowded into the road behind the wall. They stacked rifles, tamped cartridges, and peered across gently rising open ground that funneled Union assaults into a killing zone. The Irish Brigade and wave after wave of Federal troops advanced over frozen fields, their green flags and blue coats stark against the winter light. Musketry from the wall, reinforced by batteries on the heights, swept the slope. By nightfall, the stone wall had become a symbol of futility, with fallen soldiers carpeting the ground in front of it.

The tactical dominance of the position rested on simple mechanics: cover for the defenders, clear fields of fire, and a steady supply line along the lane. Confederates could fire in volleys, step back to reload, and be replaced by fresh ranks. Union brigades, compressed by fences and streets below, presented dense targets at predictable ranges. Accounts speak of bodies stacked two and three high in places, an awful embankment that both shielded and trapped men as darkness and cold set in. Survivors remembered the acrid fog of powder smoke clinging to the wall and the incessant rattle of musketry that seemed never to cease.

In the months that followed, Fredericksburg became a place of pilgrimage and shock. Soldiers and civilians alike visited the road to reckon with what had happened there. The wall and adjacent houses bore scars—pockmarks, shattered shutters, and splintered rails. Burial parties worked grimly, and the town resumed life amid reminders of loss. The Sunken Road passed into legend, a short stretch of stones and clay carrying the weight of thousands of stories.

War returned in May 1863 during the Second Battle of Fredericksburg. This time, Union troops surged up the slope and, after brutal close-quarters fighting, pried the Confederates from the wall. The reversal did not erase the memory of December; rather, it added another layer to the site’s reputation for stubborn courage and ruinous cost. When the guns finally fell silent in 1865, the lane remained quiet again, but never truly ordinary.

As the decades rolled on, veterans’ reunions brought old foes back to the wall. They traced bullet scars with aging fingers, swapped recollections, and argued over distances and timing. Those meetings often introduced the first whispers of the uncanny—men who claimed to hear volleys in the wind or smell powder where there was none. Whether born of memory, grief, or something less easily explained, such impressions settled around the place like evening mist.

Modern visitors describe an atmosphere that changes with the light. At dawn, the road feels hollowed out and cool—a corridor of stillness below the modern world. After dark, the lane can seem narrower than it appears by day, the stone wall looming, the houses close-set and watching. Rangers tell of guests who step down into the depression and fall quiet, as if a pressure descends—an emotional “drop” difficult to articulate but challenging to shake. Many attribute this phenomenon to the road’s residual energy, the idea that intense events can impress themselves on a landscape.

Among the most repeated claims are phantom volleys and distant drumbeats that seem to come from the slope when no reenactment or training is scheduled. Visitors have reported sharp, sulfurous whiffs of black powder and the metallic tang of blood on cold mornings, sensations that vanish as quickly as they arrive. Others speak of sudden cold spots along the wall in summer heat, bands of air that prickle the skin and lift the hair on one’s arms without any breeze.

Shadow figures are said to pace the length of the wall, especially near the Innis House, glimpsed as a dark shoulder or hat brim sliding past a window before receding into stone. Several accounts describe a line of translucent forms cresting the rise in near-silence, as if an attack approaches in slow motion and then dissolves. A few visitors insist they have heard clipped commands—“Forward!” “Dress on the colors!”—uttered in urgent, breathy whispers that seem both close and far away.

One of the most poignant legends involves a compassionate Confederate known to history as Richard Kirkland, remembered for bringing water to wounded Union soldiers after the fighting. In some tellings, a young figure clambers over the wall in moonlight, kneels among the invisible, and vanishes when approached. Whether the narrative is a conflation of history and hope or something stranger, it persists because it offers mercy in a place defined by violence.

Around Brompton and the terraced slope, people have reported pale, human-sized mists that drift against the prevailing air, then fold inward like smoke being drawn through unseen cracks. Photographs occasionally show faint bands or globes of light aligned in ranks along the wall; skeptics cite insects and moisture, but believers see the repetitive geometry of a drill line. More unsettling are reports of “time slips”: a handful of visitors have stepped into the lane at twilight and briefly heard the clatter of canteens, the jingle of sling swivels, and the creak of leather as if an unseen column were standing to their left.

Inside and around the historic houses, disembodied footsteps move along floorboards and stop just behind closed doors. Windows that were firmly latched are sometimes found raised an inch, as if someone needed air. Guides recount soft tapping at panes on windless nights and the impression of someone peering from a sash—anxious, expectant, then gone. In the quiet after these moments, an almost oppressive silence returns, as though the lane itself has taken a breath.

Even those inclined to doubt the paranormal often concede that the Sunken Road exerts a particular gravity. It is a place where landscape and memory interlock: the rigid edge of a wall, the shallow groove of a road, the open sweep of a slope, and the echo of human will tested to breaking. Whether the phenomena are hauntings in a literal sense or hauntings of the mind, the experiences reported here testify to how deeply the events of December 1862—and the war that followed—sank into the stones and soil.

Today, as part of the national military park, the Sunken Road invites reflection. Visitors walk its length, handrails and interpretive signs guiding them where battle once raged. Some visitors come for the history and leave with goosebumps, while others come seeking ghosts and leave with a renewed sense of the weight of the past. In either case, the lane continues to live up to its name—a trough worn not only by wheels and weather but by memory—and for many, by echoes that refuse to fade.