April brings mystery tribute to rebel grave

RALEIGH -- Each April, a stranger creeps into Oakwood Cemetery and drapes a single gravestone with a black sash.

He lights a candle in tribute to a doomed Confederate hanged for firing a last-ditch shot at Raleigh's Yankee occupiers.

Chuck Gooch has spent 21 years as the cemetery's superintendent and hasn't any idea who leaves the sash on the tomb of the soldier known only as Lt. Walsh.

"We usually leave it up until it starts looking bad or the wind takes it down," he said.

After 20 years, the soldier's secret admirer remains a small-time legend among history buffs who like to guess at his identity. The guessing begins anew each April 13, the death date of the hotheaded Texan with no known first name.

One theory:

"They come down on the day he was hanged," said Charles Purser, a Garner retiree who makes a hobby of Civil War graves. "Then they go back to their houses and drink mint juleps."

The Oakwood hill is dotted with Civil War dead, the silent tombstones offering hundreds of stories that might inspire a midnight visitor every April for 20 years. None carry more over-the-top Southern drama than Walsh's story.

On April 13, 1865, Walsh fired six potshots at the Union cavalry as it marched into a surrendered Raleigh.

Stories told by historians, Civil War buffs and the accounts of time-yellowed newspapers vary.

Walsh might have been drinking in a Fayetteville Street saloon, and the liquor might have pushed him to his daring act. He might have been looting the downtown stores in the chaos of Yankee invasion, and his shot might have been just another act of thuggery. Or the sight of blue coats and brass buttons in Raleigh might have spurred him to one last act of defiance.

There is even disagreement about whether Walsh fired deliberately into the air or aimed for the red head of Gen. Hugh Judson Kilpatrick, Union cavalry commander.

Regardless, Walsh spurred his horse and tore west down Morgan Street. His mount slipped in the loose dirt while making a turn and Walsh fell captive to Yankee pursuers. He was immediately sentenced to hang, historians say.

Troops led him to a grove of trees at Bloodworth and Lane streets, where he asked for a final five minutes to write his wife a farewell note.

Request denied.

"They just strung him up right there," said Thomas Smith, lieutenant commander of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, North Carolina division. "He was only doing what thousands and thousands of other troops were doing, and that was firing at the enemy. He may not even have heard there was a truce."

Walsh became an instant martyr, a symbol of the dying Confederacy. "He was a hero to Raleigh women," said Bill Hutchins, a lifelong Raleigh resident and amateur historian. "They laid flowers on his grave for six months."

But neither Hutchins nor Smith can name Walsh's secret admirer.

"I don't think anybody can," Smith said. "We've never been able to track it down."

The dead after dark

A good mystery adds liveliness and romance to any city, especially when it centers on violent 19th-century death.

Travel to any Southern city with its older houses and graveyards intact -- Savannah, Charleston, New Orleans or even Asheville and Wilmington -- and the tourists line up for nightly ghost walks and cemetery tours.

Baltimore profited for decades by the story of a cloaked stranger who left cognac and roses at the grave of Edgar Allen Poe. Then last year, a 92-year-old man claimed to have started it all as a publicity stunt.

Raleigh's reclusive stranger generates little talk, by comparison, even among the people who spend most of their days among Oakwood's dead.

The tributes likely come from nearby Historic Oakwood, the neighborhood of restored 19th- century houses, said Purser, who has helped place most of Oakwood's Confederate tombstones.

There, neighbors at least celebrate Raleigh's past, if not always the Confederate cause.

For years before he was moved to Oakwood, Walsh lay at the corner of Bloodworth and Lane beneath his hanging tree -- a site that is now very desirable Raleigh real estate, blocks from downtown.

It is easy to imagine a sympathetic soul there, inspired by mint juleps and a spring moon, donning a makeshift uniform and trudging into the night with a black sash.

You can almost hear the clatter of hoofs, or the clinking of a sword over moonlit stones.