HauntBound archive · catalog record
Reported phenomena — as catalogued
13,714 Civil War Graves at the Site of America's Deadliest Prison
760 POW Rd, Andersonville, GA 31711
Research updated May 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Free admission. Free parking.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Paved cemetery paths; flat terrain
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1864 · Civil War · National Cemetery · Clara Barton · Prisoner of War History
The cemetery at Andersonville was established during the prison's operation in 1864, as the death rate inside Camp Sumter made organized burial a logistical necessity. The dead were interred in adjacent land, their graves marked where possible with names recovered from prisoners who knew them.
At the end of the war, Clara Barton led an effort to identify the graves. Dorence Atwater, a prisoner who had been assigned to record the dead while confined at Andersonville, had secretly copied the burial records before his release. His list allowed most of the 13,000 graves to be individually marked — one of the earliest systematic efforts at Civil War grave identification.
The cemetery holds 13,714 Civil War-era graves. It remains an active national cemetery; veterans of American military service continue to be buried there today. The cemetery is part of the Andersonville National Historic Site managed by the National Park Service.
Sources
The paranormal reports specific to the Andersonville cemetery are less developed than those associated with the prison stockade grounds, but the atmospheric reputation of the site does not end at the cemetery boundary.
The orderly ranks of small white stones — 13,714 of them, the majority marking young men who died not in combat but from dysentery, scurvy, and starvation — create a visual record that visitors frequently describe as among the most affecting in the American South.
Dorence Atwater's list, copied secretly during his imprisonment and later used by Clara Barton to identify the graves, is a story of documentary preservation under extreme conditions — one that gives the cemetery's individual markers a provenance most wartime burial grounds lack.
The cemetery continues to accept new burials. Veterans of later American conflicts are interred here alongside the Civil War dead.
Walk the grounds of Andersonville National Cemetery, where 13,714 Civil War-era graves are arranged in orderly rows. The majority of the buried were prisoners who died at Camp Sumter. The cemetery continues to accept veterans' burials today. Adjacent to the former prison stockade site.
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