Visual Narrative Project: The Haunting of Fort Fisher

I chose to photograph Fort Fisher and its beach for my visual narrative. Fort Fisher was a protector of the trade routes and port in Wilmington, NC. Fort Fisher consequently served as a Confederate fort during the Civil War. Although Wilmington is loaded with ghost stories and hauntings, Fort Fisher has always made a huge impression on me due to the close proximity to my home for several years. I went into this project with a documentarian eye, but ended up with my own interpretation of the haunting of this place. I lived on the Island that is made up of Carolina, Kure and Fort Fisher beaches for a few years. When the tourists weren’t littering the beaches with trash and noise pollution, Pleasure Island was practically a ghost town.


More than once, as I walked my dog on the beach at night, I felt the presence of the past. There are many people who could tell you stories of ghost sightings and phantom battle cries on the beaches of Fort Fisher, and I am one of them. Of course the many films I have seen about haunted places may contribute to my interpretation of what a haunting looks or sounds like, but there is a definite feeling that one gets when they are somewhere haunted. This feeling is hard to translate onto film, but sometimes images can capture the mood or the incandescent impression of energy. The photographs that I took were intentionally taken in January due to, not only the due date of the project, but to the fact that the major second battle and capture of Fort Fisher took place in January. The empty beaches, gray sky, and cold weather all greatly affect the mood and life of the island. There is a certain sense of desolation in January that allows you to pick up on the residual history of this place.


With my photographs, I’m trying to call to mind the significance of how residual, violence and powerful emotions can be. I believe that hauntings are sometimes due to the superfluous energy that is generated during moments or events wrought with turmoil and confusion, such as battle. This energy is impressed upon the environment where it happens. When this much violence, pain, and death occur in one place, there are bound to be scars disfiguring the atmosphere. I wanted to evoke the weight of these events on the place, and the magnitude of how it effects the actual environment. People who are open to the idea of a haunting cannot leave this place without sensing the aftermath. There is a stagnant sadness that fills the air on this beach, and a definite sense of fear and pain that, in the right moment, will leave you checking behind you on the empty beach to catch a glimpse of a specter in confederate gray.


I chose to walk around the beaches and the battery mounds as if I were a ghost haunting the land. I tried to frame my subject with an eye that attempts to memorize the very atmosphere that was lost in battle. I tried to see past the vacancy, into the credence of the historical battle. I tried to see the dead and mangled bodies of Confederate and Union soldiers littering the beach. I tried to perceive the sounds of moans and death rattles. I listened for the chaos of frightened horses, magazine explosions, and rapid heartbeats, all surrounded by the crash of the waves on the rocky shoreline. I tried to walk in the shoes of a ghost who perhaps could never leave the fort that he surrendered. I tried to see this place through the eyes of Major General William Henry Chase Whiting, who is said to walk these beaches each night, mourning the end of an era.


The sequence of images is ordered in a way that the ghost whose eyes I am looking though, walks from battlement to battery to beach…forever. I think I could have used any number of the many of pictures I took to tell a different story. But the ones I chose tell the story of a ghost who cannot leave the past. I took all of these images with my digital SLR canon camera. I manipulated the focus and tint of the photographs with the professional program: Picasa 3. I purposefully included thirteen photographs because I wanted to start with the image of the man who is said to haunt Fort Fisher. I took the shot of his image on a historical site information podium standing at the entrance of the fort, with my camera. The following twelve photographs are meant to be seen through the eyes of his ghost.


Although I am not a war buff, nor am I likely to tell the story of a Confederate Major, I was compelled to take these pictures in hope of understanding the earthworks and haunting of Fort Fisher. I hope you enjoy my story.