THE GHOST WHO WALKS WILLIS PARK

It first appeared on a late October night.

Past midnight, among the bushes, benches and monuments of Willis Park, a light eerie mysterious figure can be seen lurking among the shadows.

The figure is not observed clearly by everyone. Only on rare occasions does it emerge from the darkness, visible only to those who listen closely to a particular sound of the late night.

As it stalked the historic downtown square, its soldier’s body was adorned with tattered battle-scarred butternut grey. It wore no shoes but its bloody bare feet gave witness to severe action from Fredericksburg and Antietam. As many children do when they come to Willis Park, the tattered soldier sat atop the ancient cannon, gazing upward to the Confederate officer atop the tall center-of-the park monument.

Among hundred-year-old buildings, the figure quickly zips in and out of storefronts, easily passing through solid, closed and locked doors of Sharon House. In the park, he absorbs the stone monuments, digesting the names and tributes inscribed.

Billy Conners had been watching this mysterious and wandering apparition for nearly a half hour.

He knows the routine of the downtown courthouse clock as each day atop its high tower corner from where it correctly tolls the hour and half hour 24 hours a day. Unable to sleep, as he sits on the balcony rocker, each night he counts the clock’s hourly chime -- to check its accuracy, of course.

And then on this one particular October night it happened.

At midnight, the clock bonged 13 counts.

And then Billy saw him. In butternut gray, a civil war soldier sitting atop the ancient cannon nearly in front of the Bon Air, his gaze focused towards the top of the monument where a civil war officer stood guard over the historic downtown square and all its monuments dedicated to those who served in our nation’s great struggles.

Fascinated and a little bewitched, from his vantage point on the Bon Air balcony, Billy saw the figure suddenly appear in the gazebo where it watched the changing colored lights – green, yellow, red. Billy’s body tingled. Cool now in October, sweat still broke out on his face as the figure suddenly appeared at the far end of his balcony.

Momentarily, they stared at one another, then, zap, the soldier was gone.

Billy searched the park with his eyes then saw some motion on the far side of the park across from Reeves Gifts, in front of the war memorial wall. The figure appeared to be reading the names of those honored dead who gave their lives to serve their country.

Then in an instant, from monument to monument, the figure dashed and zipped with instantaneous speed. From the time capsule planted in 1973 near the gazebo, to the service history of Samuel Marvin Griffin, to the monument dedicated to teacher and students who perished in the Atlanta hotel fire in 1946, to newspaperman Benjamine Ellsworth Russell, to the remembrance of Revolutionary War Soldiers, from the Daughters of the Revolution to the Daughters of the Confederacy, and from the center of it all, the civil war officer in all his Confederate finery with musket at the ready, guarding from high atop his place of honor.

As Billy watched the busy figure in the park, it suddenly appeared back on the balcony, sitting on the railing only a few feet away from one another, almost face to face. It was almost time for the courthouse clock to strike the half hour, usually a bong of one.

But this time it kept bonging. And on the thirteenth bong, even on the half hour, the ancient butternut soldier vanished as if turned off by a light switch.

A commotion in Willis Park sparked Billy’s attention.

Then the horse reared. The rider raised the musket over his head, and Billy heard him speak:

Listen my children and you shall hear
A clock that tolls from the spire so near.
, And as the midnight hour strikes thirteen,
Then Oh my children, you’ll know its Halloween.