Miller Shuff should have been on top of the world. As an ironworker during the American Civil war in 1861, he’d had the good fortune to hire on at the Catoctin Iron Works near Thurmont, Maryland, as part of the team casting iron plates for the Monitor – the North’s first ironclad warship. But Shuff had also been in trouble with the law most of his adult life; rum running, thievery, rustling, public drunkenness and fighting being only some of his sins. So when Brunhilde - his shrill, argumentative and obstinate wife - abruptly died of a stroke one cold October night, he feared he would be blamed for her death and sentenced to the hangman’s noose. In the dead of night, Miller put Brunhilde’s body in an ore cart and pushed it to the Catoctin Iron Works. No one saw him toss her body into the red-hot furnace fires, and no trace of her was ever found. Brunhilde Shuff’s ashes were mixed into a batch of pig iron that ultimately would become iron plates for the Monitor. And almost as soon as those plates were bolted to the ship, the crew noted strange occurrences and sounds. Sailors nervously joked that the creaking, groaning iron plates sounded almost – human. One unnerved sailor swore he’d seen a ghostly woman standing on the ship’s bow, glaring intently at him. And the sailor’s concerns were exacerbated by a general feeling that the Monitor could not stand up to her counterpart being constructed by Southern engineers: the Merrimac. In fact, Southern engineers had designed and partially finished the Merrimac before Northern spies were even aware of her existence. So the Monitor was, at best, a rush job of dubious quality. On March 8, 1862, the Monitor and Merrimac met for the first time and exchanged gunfire. To the Monitor crew’s surprise, the Northern Ironclad took precious little damage from her enemy’s cannonballs. As one crewman reported, “It was almost as if the Monitor was too stubborn to be damaged.†Another crewman noted, “The strangeness of it was, every time a cannonball hit the Monitor, she just groaned and griped, like she was Lord Almighty irritated.†The exchange of the Ironclads ended in a draw, despite the widely held assumption that the Merrimac would prove victorious, and the North went on to win the Civil War. And if Miller Shuff ever drew any connection between his wife’s complaining spirit and the Monitor’s unexpected survival in battle, he kept it to himself until the night he died, when he confessed the truth of his wife’s demise and his disposal of her body. ---------------------------------------- Image incorporates Blender, Terragen, xFrog and DAZ Studio software, with very minor touchup in PSP. Creation time approx 20 hours. People wanting to know more about Catoctin Iron works may reference this URL: http://www.emmitsburg.net/history_t/archives/gateway/chapter3.htm