National cemetery holding 2,260 Confederate POW graves where a veiled Lady in Gray is said to weep at the headstone of Tennessee soldier Benjamin Allen.
2900 Sullivant Avenue, Columbus, OH 43204
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Free to visit during posted hours.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Flat, paved walkways through a small enclosed cemetery
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1861 · American Civil War · Confederate Prisoner of War Burials · U.S. National Cemetery System · 19th-Century Reconciliation Movement
Camp Chase was established in May 1861 on what was then farmland west of Columbus, named for U.S. Treasury Secretary and former Ohio Governor Salmon P. Chase. It served first as a training and mustering camp for Ohio Union volunteers and quickly grew into one of the largest Confederate prisoner-of-war camps in the North. At its wartime peak the camp held more than 9,000 prisoners in cramped wooden barracks subject to repeated outbreaks of smallpox, dysentery, and pneumonia.
More than 2,000 Confederate prisoners died at Camp Chase during the war and the immediate post-war period. They were initially buried in a hospital-adjacent plot that became the present-day Confederate cemetery — 2,260 marked graves arranged in tidy military rows on a roughly two-acre tract surrounded today by the residential Hilltop neighborhood.
Reconciliation efforts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries reframed the cemetery as a memorial site rather than a wartime burial ground. The United Daughters of the Confederacy organized annual memorial services beginning in 1912 and continuing through 1994. Since then the Hilltop Historical Society has sponsored an annual ceremony on the second Sunday in June.
The cemetery is maintained today by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs as part of the national-cemetery system, accessed through a stone arch on Sullivant Avenue.
Sources
According to the Ohio Exploration Society's cemetery file and Ghosts of Ohio's archived lore entry, the Lady in Gray was first reported in the years immediately following the Civil War as a veiled woman who tended graves and was described carrying a white handkerchief. Local tradition identifies her as Louisiana Ransburgh Briggs, a Confederate sympathizer who concealed her identity to avoid public retaliation in postbellum Columbus.
The legend developed further into the 20th century. Visitors and grounds workers report finding fresh flowers placed on individual headstones — most often on the grave of Benjamin Allen of the 50th Tennessee Volunteer Infantry — when no one has been observed entering the cemetery. The flowers are described as fresh, not deteriorated, on mornings after rain.
The most-cited modern incident occurred at a summer 1988 Civil War reenactment held in and near the cemetery. Multiple attendees reported hearing the unmistakable sound of a woman weeping near the graves; no woman was present at that location at the time, and the sound is not attributed to any reenactor.
The entry treats this material as folklore and a contemplative memorial tradition rather than a paranormal attraction. The cemetery is sensitive ground — these were prisoners of war who died far from home — and visitors are asked to approach with the quiet appropriate to a national cemetery.
Notable Entities
Media Appearances
Walk the enclosed Camp Chase Confederate Cemetery on Sullivant Avenue. Interpretive signage covers the prison-camp era and the post-Civil War reconciliation movement. The annual Confederate memorial event is held the second Sunday in June.
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