Shy’s Hill: Powder Burns and Plundered Graves

On December 16, 1864, twenty-six-year-old Confederate Colonel William Shy was killed during a desperate last stand at the Battle of Nashville, forever lending his name to Shy’s Hill. Sealed in a heavy cast-iron coffin near Franklin, Tennessee, his resting place remained undisturbed for over a century—until December 1977, when police discovered a torn-open grave and a headless corpse propped atop the broken vault. Fearing a modern murder victim had been dumped in an antique tomb, investigators called in renowned forensic anthropologist Dr. William Bass, who uncovered the startling truth: the body was Shy himself, desecrated and decapitated by grave robbers hunting for buried Civil War relics. In this episode of Southern Ghost Stories, for Tennessee Tales Tuesday, Allen Sircy explores the bloody collapse of the Army of Tennessee and the macabre aftermath of Middle Tennessee’s most bizarre grave-robbing mystery.

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