MURDER? MYSTERY! HEADLESS CORPSE FOUND ON CIVIL WAR GRAVE!
Creepy things have been known to happen at night in the old graveyards, grave robbers creep around digging up the dead looking for gold and silver. Picture this, a headless corpse dressed in a tuxedo with white gloves sitting on top of a coffin of a Civil War Colonel who has been dead for 114 years.
The story takes place in Franklin, Tennessee, just south of Nashville. In 1977, a semi-fresh body was found sitting upright on the coffin of Confederate Colonel William Shy. The corpse was wearing a tuxedo with white gloves. What a mystery! Whose body is it? Was the corpse a victim of murder? Were grave robbers involved?
In order to understand what was going on, we have to go back to the story of the Battles of Franklin and Nashville to where this story begins. The Confederate Army of Tennessee was the last great hope of the Confederacy. In light of the recent Union victory at Vicksburg, all of the Union Army attention and resources were brought to bear on the Army of Tennessee because they knew that their defeat could end the war.
Leading the Army of Tennessee was badly beaten and emotionally unstable Confederate General John Bell Hood. Hood had already lost the use of one arm at Gettysburg and a leg at Chickamauga and he literally had to be strapped on his horse to keep from falling off. Plus, he was somewhat of a basket case by this time. The Union Army was near Columbia, Tennessee, just a few miles south of Franklin, and Confederate General Hood had set a pretty clever trap to attack them while they are passing through the farming community of Spring Hill as they were on their way back to Franklin.
The Union troops smelled out the plan and slipped out of town in the middle of the night, passing right by the Confederate camp and actually got in sight of their camp fires. They made it to Franklin where firmly entrenched themselves and prepared for battle. When General Hood realized what had happened he was so enraged that he pursued them to Franklin and orders a full-frontal assault. This became known as the Battle of Franklin, and was a terrible decision, made by a desperate man, and the result was 6,200 casualties including 5 Confederate Generals in only one day.
Before the Confederates could mount another attack the next day, the Union Army once again made an overnight the escape north into Nashville where they are they were even more entrenched and prepared for battle. Once again, Hood has been “hoodwinked”, and he is livid!
At that point, Hood had to save face and his honor, so he hastily moved his tired and decimated army north and set up on several hills south of downtown Nashville to threaten the city with cannon fire. Setting up a siege on a fortified city with over 60,000 Union troops fully entrenched was a crazy idea, especially with only 25,000 tired men and just a few cannons. Thus, began the Battle of Nashville.
With the loss of so many Confederate Generals at Franklin, leadership was at a premium. Colonel William Shy took the lead on Compton’s Hill, which was on the hill on the Confederate right flank. Within a few days, the Union Army moved south to clear the hills of Confederate soldiers and cannon. They attacked all of the hills in the siege line. On Compton’s Hill, where Colonel Shy is commanding, confederate cannon fire was ineffective because, in their haste to get prepared for battle, they set their breastworks and cannon too far back on the steep hill to be able to stop the Union Army’s attack. The Union was effectively protected at the bottom of the hill and as they ascended.
On day two of the battle, all of the Confederate held hills were overrun, including Compton’s Hill, by the Union men from Minnesota. Colonel Shy was killed along with most of his men. He is found bayoneted to a tree with a close range shot to the forehead with powder burns evident around the bullet wound.
He was just a young man, only 26-years-old and unmarried. He was known for having a quiet disposition, a man of deeds and a great leader in battle. He was so respected by his men and the community, after the war they changed the name of the battle location from Compton’s Hill, to Shy’s Hill, and it still bears that name today. They took his body to the nearby Compton Home and laid it on the front porch until his family could come from Franklin to retrieve it. He was buried at his parents’ home in Franklin and due to their relative wealth, his body was embalmed with arsenic which was a new process that had just been developed.He was placed in a 300 pound, watertight, iron casket and there he rested. Until a crazy thing happened…
On the evening of 21 December 1977, someone found that Colonel Shy’s grave had been disturbed. Well, disturbed is an understatement. A headless corpse was sitting on top of Colonel William Shy’s coffin, dressed in a tuxedo, white gloves and black square toed boots. Imagine the horror! The local Sheriff was called, who then called the State Forensic Anthropologist at The University of Tennessee-Knoxville. It was determined that the body had been dead less than six months.
A new murder case was opened as the body seemed to be relatively, let’s say, “fresh”, as there had been little deterioration. The iron coffin in the bottom of this grave that belonged to Colonel Shy was still there and relatively undisturbed. The coffin weighed over 300 pounds and it took a crane to get it up and out of the ground. The coffin had a hole in top of it and to the surprise and horror of who first looked inside, a human head was found. Did the head belong to a murder victim or was it Colonel Shy’s head? Where was the rest of Colonel Shy’s remains? It took 12 days to get an answer.
Once the UT anthropologist got the corpse to his lab in Knoxville, the first thing that he noted was there was no synthetic material in the tuxedo, it had all-natural materials. Then he noted that the teeth in the skull had no dental work and there was as bullet hole in the front temple of the skull, with an exit in the back. This corresponded with the reports that Colonel Shy was shot through the skull at short range. Now the pieces were beginning to come together.
The anthropologist said that the corpse could not have been only 6 months old. Due to the arsenic embalming process and the air tight coffin, Colonel Shy’s body had been preserved to the point that it looked like a recent death. The speculation was that someone searching for Civil War memorabilia or valuables, dug down into Colonel Shy’s grave, then knocked a hole in top of the coffin and pulled his body out through the hole and in the process separated his skull from the body. Then it was thought that maybe someone came up on the grave robber causing them to leave in a hurry. We’ll never know.
The grave robber was never caught but I wouldn’t be surprised if the good Colonel comes back to haunt he or she every now and then. You think?
After the UT State Anthropologist published his findings, the mystery was solved and the new murder case was closed. Since the Shy family no longer lived on the property where the grave is located, the next of kin was notified and came from Texas for reburial. A local funeral home donated a proper new coffin and Colonel William Shy was finally at peace again. His re-internment was attended by the Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy and he was given a proper burial.
The iron coffin given to a man who lived north of Nashville to take to his farm for restoration as it was rusted very badly. He kept it in his barn for three weeks while he continued to work on it. He stated that the smell of arsenic was so bad, they had to move the coffin outside periodically to let it air out. Once it was done they took it back to the Williamson County Archives where you can visit it even today.
So, the mystery of the “well dressed” corpse with no head was solved and he is resting back in his rightful place. What do you think about this story? Let us know in the comments. Also, be sure to watch the video about this story below!
-Scott Denney, Historian, Family Tree Nuts