DATE: Sunday, November 2, 1997              TAG: 9710230665

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J3   EDITION: FINAL 
TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN

                                            LENGTH:   72 lines

CIVIL WAR LORE LIVES ON IN VIRGINIA

Around Halloween there is room to reflect that, in senses both real and fantastic, we reside in haunted territory.

The Civil War still casts a long and persistent shadow on this ground.

``The Old Dominion,'' emphasizes folklorist L.B. Taylor Jr., ``was the most exposed geographically on all of Dixie, hence it became the major battleground.''

Twenty-six major battles were fought in Virginia, and over 400 smaller engagements; in excess of 17,000 native sons were lost.

``At Cold Harbor alone,'' Taylor records, ``7,000 Union soldiers fell in less than half an hour.

``Tens of thousands of others lost their lives at Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Manassas, New Market, Cedar Creek, Gaines Mill, Malvern Hill, Petersburg and a host of other sites.''

The effects of that monumental conflict upon the imagination have not left us, nor have the consequences, symbolized by enduring tales of wild specters and stubborn spirits particular to the period.

Taylor, 64, is author of many books on historic spooks, among them the captivating Civil War Ghosts of Virginia (Progress Printing, 225 pp., $12).

It's a horripilate parade of Confederate phantoms: ``The Restless Casualties of Ball's Bluff''; ``The Apparition at Abingdon Church''; ``Strange Occurrences in Harper's Ferry.''

Belle Boyd, rebel spy, rides again in the Shenandoah Valley!

``I mix a lot of Virginia history in the ghost lore,'' says Taylor, who lives in Williamsburg and is at work on his 10th collection of outre outings. ``People seem to like that. I get letters from mothers who say my books are the only way to get their children to read about the past.''

A Taylor volume is invariably instructive as well as entertaining. In the course of recounting a centenary manifestation of J.E.B. Stuart at the site of the Confederate general's crossing of the Chickahominy River, the author details the flamboyant past and truncated future of ``The Sir Lancelot of the Civil War,'' cut down at 31. Dapper in his plumed hat and yellow sash, gallant Jeb could have been inspired by the swashbuckling romances of Sir Walter Scott.

``Stuart's obvious delight in harassing his enemies may have reached a peak in December 1862,'' writes Taylor, ``when he captured a supply depot at Burke Station in northern Virginia. On a commandeered telegraph, he wired Washington, tweaking President Lincoln with the following:

```The last draw of wagons I've just made (in his raid) are very good, but the mules are inferior stock, scarcely able to haul off the empty wagons; and if you expect me to give your lines any further attention in this quarter, you should furnish better stock, as I've had to burn several valuable wagons before getting them in my lines.'''

Lincoln also appears in these pages. He had a psychic side, suffering a recurring dream of his own death. Lincoln told his wife, Mary Todd, that the nightmare began with the sounds of sobbing, which he traced to the East Room of the White House, where a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments rested on a catafalque.

``Who is dead?'' the Great Emancipator inquired of a soldier at the scene.

``The President,'' the soldier told him.

And added: ``He was killed by an assassin.''

Taylor notes numerous sightings of Lincoln's shade at Fort Monroe, clad in a dressing gown, standing by the fireplace in the plantation-style house known as Old Quarters Number One.

``I started out trying to be journalistically objective,'' confides the author, a retired public relations director for the fiber division of a chemical company. ``I still haven't personally experienced anything out of the ordinary. But I've come to believe in the sincerity of the people I interview about these incidents.''

After chronicling hundreds of strange and unsettling stories, Taylor says, ``I have come to believe that there are indeed things we don't understand.`` MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia

Wesleyan College.

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