Belle Boyd continues

This morning the local paper, The Wisconsin Dells Events, carried the following article about the Belle Boyd haunting story that Debbie Kinder had shared with Tom and the newspaper reporter:

Soldiers surprise cemetery sexton

Hearsay and rumor often drive a community's ghost stories. In the case of Belle Boyd, a legend in her own right, rumor has it that the former groundskeeper at Spring Grove Cemetery left his post while mowing the lawn after seeing ghosts near Boyd's cemetery site.

"As the legend goes, he saw some soldiers dressed in Confederate or Union uniforms walking up to her grave, and he realized he could see right through them," current Cemetery Sexton Bob Hall said. "Whether that's true or not is another matter."

In his nine years as cemetery sexton, Hall said he has not experienced anything of that magnitude.

Boyd was a Confederate spy during the Civil War. Though she was born in Virginia in 1844, she died in Kilbourn on June 11, 1900.

Her cenotaph in Spring Grove Cemetery reads, "On May 23, 1862 at the battle of Front Royal, Belle Boyd, then 18, ran across the battlefield between the firing lines with information for Gen. Stonewall Jackson on the disposition of Union troops. With this information, Jackson broke through and captured Front Royal. Union forces under Gen. Banks were driven from the Shenandoah Valley."

After earning fame from the war, a novel concept for a woman at the time, she became a celebrity of sorts and held speaking tours throughout the country. While on tour in Kilbourn, she died in her hotel room at Hile House located near where the Visitor and Convention Bureau stands downtown.

Haunting the Traveler's

After the Hile House, the building became Traveler's Hotel/Motel and was run by the Hess family until it was torn down in 1985. Though Mike Hess was just a child at the time, he said there were several stories circulating that Boyd's spirit never left.

"There were instances where footsteps were heard upstairs when nobody was there," Hess said. "I lived in the first floor at one time, and my brother was up on the third floor. When I went up to see him, there was a door that blocked off the third floor from entry and when I knocked on the door there were footsteps coming across, and nobody answered. I asked my brother about it later, and he said nobody was home. So there was definitely something there."

Hess also recollected an instance when he made a sandwich in his first-floor unit and placed it in the refrigerator.

"When I came back later, there was a bite taken out of it, and nobody else was there," he said.

When Hess was helping with remodeling work at the Bennett Studio, he said Ollie Reese had a coffee can of dirt from Boyd's grave. Reese told Hess he was meaning to send it to Virginia to rest her soul. But as far as Hess knows, that never happened.

"Maybe it was because she was a Confederate spy and was buried here that her spirit worked up here," Hess said.

I'm reading the book she wrote about her exploits during the war, and Tom and I visited her grave this morning. I asked if he knew where it was, and he said it should be easy to find. Although there is a Civil War memorial at the top of the hill in the cemetery, marked by a life-sized statue of a Union soldier, Belle's is the only tomb marked with a Confederate flag.