Leg of the Gallant Hood

Tunnel Hill, Georgia

The leg of Confederate General John Bell Hood has its own tombstone outside the west entrance to the Chetoogeta Mountain railroad tunnel. Hood did not lose the leg in the narrow tunnel by carelessly dangling it outside a train. Instead, the leg was sawed off after Hood was hit by shrapnel during the nearby Battle of Chickamauga.

After the amputation, Hood recuperated at a house just outside the tunnel. His leg was supposedly brought along with him in case he died. "They wanted to bury him as whole general," was how tunnel tour guide Judy Jones explained it. When Hood's doctors grew confident that he would survive, his rotting leg was buried.

A wooden "footstone" was erected over the leg's final resting place, and local Civil War re-enactors reported seeing the ghost of one-legged Confederate soldier walking through a nearby field, presumably looking for its missing leg. On the 150th anniversary of the amputation, the wooden marker was replaced by one made of granite. And yet rival leg detectives continue to cast doubt on the story, insisting that the general's leg was anonymously buried elsewhere, closer to the battlefield.

Tunnel museum manager Erin Johns said of the leg, "there's no way to know for sure where it is anyway," and so the tombstone remains.