Spirits May Remain in Civil War Hotel

By Darrell Bird

Assistant Editor of The News-Enterprise

Dec. 31, 1992

Former Eagle House Hotel

…During the attack on Elizabethtown by Morgan’s Raiders on Dec. 27, 1862, a cannonball fired from atop Cemetery Hill ripped through the roof of the former Eagle House Hotel, killing at least 10 Yankees in a third-floor attic.

The two small rooms were reportedly makeshift holding cells for soldiers who had gotten into trouble while on leave from their post at Fort Boyle near Colesburg.

The deaths accounted for about half of the Union fatalities that morning, and nearly all of the fascination with the old building today.

“I’m not one to be superstitous or believe in stuff like that,” Frances Madison, who worked in the Duff insurance building for many years, says. “But by George, I believe it for here. I really do. It happened several times.”

In the smaller section, Duff Insurance is on the first floor and Peck, Flannery, Cream and Warren architects is on the second. The architectural firm moved there in 1977 faced with a complete remodeling job of a floor left dormant for decades.

“We had hired a construction company to do the job, but being eager to get started, I decided to take a sledgehammer and see what was inside the walls,” Larry Gream recalls.

“it was after hours, and a sinking sun was summoning darkness. The building was sealed and vacant. The demolition task at hand was a brick wall in the middle of the floor separating what had been rooms 1 and 2 in the hotel.

“When I hit the wall with a sledge hammer, there was a scream the likes of which I’ve never heard before or since that emitted from the hallway,” Gream says. “And I thought I saw a movement about six or seven feet in the air near the stairwell. It could’ve been an owl, but we never saw any evidence of anything ahg the building was locked.”

Fellow architect Steve Cherry was there that evening.

“We had been tearing down some existing sheet rock,” he says. “But when Larry hit that wall, all the sudden there was a kind of scream, really high-pitched.”

Gream described it as “blood-curdling.”

“We immediately knew we’d had enough renovation work for the night,” Gream says with a laugh.

David Pepper, whose father, Joe, owned the building for many years, discovered the attic as an adventurous teen-ager in the 1950s. He returned in 1989 to chronicle the findings on film and videotape.

Once inside, Pepper discovered numerous writings on time-weathered sheetrock….Some were dated 1862 and made reference to Fort Boyle.

Most interesting, however, was a large, but crude, pencil sketch of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. The name Jeff Davis was scrawled just above his nose.

Drawing of Jeff Davis

Other findings included old boots, bottles and a letter still protected by its wax seal.

“The footsteps were just accepted as fact,” Pepper says. “The old building was known for creaking and the sounds of something walking down the hall in the middle of the night. But we would look in the hall, and never see anybody.” …

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