The Calvary of the Dead

As a member of the 29th Infantry Regiment at Fort Benning, you’ll spend a lot of time doing random odds and ends jobs and a lot of staff duty type work; mostly because the unit isn’t a “line unit” and has a training mission focus. That can be kind of difficult to get used to after being in a normal Infantry unit for a number of years, but it is at least a bit of a down time and change of pace. And even though I was an NCO when I reenlisted to go there, I was one of the lower ranking guys in the entire company I ended up in because of how many Instructor jobs go to the more experienced guys. So I found myself getting volunteered for the kind of stuff that generally gets passed down to the Privates in other units. That was probably the most annoying part about being in a unit like that one, but you do what you have to do.

One of those things I found myself picked to do was clean out the basement area of the Regiment HQ building. Now, these buildings have been around since Fort Benning was Camp Benning and while the exterior looked to be well maintained, the depths of the basements were far from it. They were a dark, drab, spooky mixture of caged rooms and low hanging beams. I remember having to go down there a couple of times to sign out weapons or talk with the armorers and looking off in the distant of those hallways. It was no surprise to me that just as we began to start picking up some stuff from down there, somebody mentioned how they heard that the basement was supposed to be haunted. I was one of those places that you could believe was haunted without even having an experience. Lucky for us, or unlucky depending on how you feel about it, we had an experience that proved that is was.

We had gotten about half of the items we were supposed to clear out up the ramp and out of the building; this took about an hour to get as far as we did. That is when the three of us were stopped dead in our tracks by the house of what were clearly horse steps on the concrete floor. They made that clopping sound that horse hooves make and seemed to be coming from the end of the long hallway towards us near the ramp. We all just kind of stood there with various items in our hands and waited for the sound to stop. Just as the hoof steps neared us, they stopped, and were followed by the sound of a horse neighing. It wasn’t like a sound that could have been a horse, but was clearly the sound of a horse.
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The three of us sort of just glanced back and forth at each other without moving a muscle. Finally, I said “Okay then…” and went back to unloading the items from the cage. It was not until a few weeks later that I finally mentioned it to someone else who had been at Benning a lot longer than I had been. He said “Oh, yeah, the old unit that used these buildings was a Calvary Regiment and kept their horses in stalls underneath the building.” It made a lot more sense as to why we’d heard the sound of a horse stomping through the basement. I wonder how many of the other old buildings here on Main Post are haunted?

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