Point Lookout

At the southern tip of Maryland’s western shore, the land narrows to a flat, sandy point between two great bodies of water. On one side is the Potomac River, a mile and more wide. On the other is the Chesapeake Bay. The wind comes off the water constantly. In summer, it’s hot and humid and thick with mosquitoes. In winter, the cold cuts through everything.

Today it’s a quiet state park, with campgrounds, beaches, a fishing pier, and a small white lighthouse standing at the very end of the point.

During the last two years of the Civil War, it was home to the largest prisoner-of-war camp in the Union. Tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers were held here, in tents, on open sand, behind a wooden stockade. Thousands of them died.

Camp Hoffman

Before the war, Point Lookout was a summer resort. In 1862, the Union Army turned it into a military hospital. Then, after the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, when the Union suddenly had far more prisoners than it could handle, it built a prison camp there.

Officially named Camp Hoffman, it was a pair of stockades enclosing about forty acres of flat, low ground just above sea level. There were no barracks. The prisoners lived in tents — often worn-out, leaking tents — crowded together on the sand. There were no trees for shade or firewood. Drinking water came from shallow wells that were often brackish and contaminated. Sanitation was primitive.

The camp was designed to hold about ten thousand men. At times, it held twenty thousand. Over the course of its existence, more than fifty thousand Confederate soldiers and civilians were held there.

The Suffering

Conditions at Point Lookout were brutal.

In summer, the heat was oppressive, and the low, swampy ground bred mosquitoes and disease. In winter, the wind off the water was bitterly cold, and prisoners in thin tents with little firewood and a single blanket suffered terribly. Some froze to death. Food was scarce and poor; prisoners later described eating rats and scraps to survive. Diseases like dysentery, typhoid, smallpox and scurvy swept through the camp. Prisoners wrote later about the misery of living in mud and filth, surrounded by the dying.

According to the National Park Service and state historians, somewhere between three and four thousand prisoners died at Point Lookout, though some researchers believe the true number was much higher. Many were buried in mass graves near the camp. Their remains were later moved, in part, to a Confederate cemetery a few miles north, where two monuments now stand over them.

Among the guards at Point Lookout were regiments of the U.S. Colored Troops — Black soldiers, many of them formerly enslaved, who now held their former enslavers’ soldiers prisoner. Prisoners’ accounts from the camp often reflect their fury at this reversal.

The Lighthouse

At the end of the point stands the Point Lookout Lighthouse, a small white two-story house with a lantern on its roof. It was first lit in 1830, long before the war, and it stood there throughout the years of the prison camp, just outside the stockade.

The lighthouse has been called one of the most haunted lighthouses in America.

Over many decades, keepers, park rangers, residents and paranormal investigators have reported strange experiences inside it. People describe hearing footsteps, voices, snoring and the sound of people moving in empty rooms. Doors open and close. A woman in a long skirt has been seen standing at the top of the stairs. Many believe she is Ann Davis, the widow of one of the early keepers, who herself served as keeper of the light for many years in the nineteenth century.

Other visitors say they’ve seen men in tattered gray uniforms near the lighthouse, or on the beaches nearby, or walking toward the water — escaped prisoners, some say, trying to swim to freedom. A park ranger once reported seeing a young man in old-fashioned clothes on the lighthouse grounds who vanished when approached. Investigators have recorded what they believe are voices saying things related to the war and the camp.

Near the Water

Point Lookout’s prisoners lived within sight of the water, and some of them tried to escape into it. A few managed to swim across the Potomac to Virginia. Others drowned in the attempt. Their bodies sometimes washed up on the beaches.

That may explain one of the most common reports from Point Lookout: people walking the shoreline at night, especially in fog, who say they’ve seen shadowy figures moving at the water’s edge, or heard men’s voices calling out across the water.

The Forgotten Camp

Point Lookout is one of the less famous Civil War sites. People know about Andersonville, the notorious Confederate prison camp in Georgia, where nearly thirteen thousand Union prisoners died. Far fewer people know that the Union had its own terrible camps, and that Point Lookout was the largest of them.

There’s a kind of silence about places like this. The suffering of prisoners, on both sides, doesn’t fit easily into stories about heroic battles. And yet thousands of young men — farmers, clerks, teenagers — died slowly here, on a sandy point by the sea, of hunger, cold and disease.

If there are ghosts at Point Lookout, I think they’re the ghosts of men who waited, and waited, for the war to end — and didn’t make it home.