History & local legend
Camp Security, east of York, held British prisoners of war from 1781 to 1783. Men captured at Saratoga and Yorktown spent the closing years of the Revolution here, sometimes accompanied by wives and children. Illness and deaths at the camp later helped make its fields the setting for ghost stories.
One local tradition says the dead appear on Christmas Eve. Henry L. Fisher's poem “Hesse Dahl” imagines Hessian soldiers rising to taunt the commander they blame for their captivity and deaths. That literary version differs from the camp's recorded population: historian Jonathan Stayer noted that no German units were assigned to it.
Stayer once joined a group of young people searching the fields for the Christmas ghosts. A distant wail sent them home. He later learned that the sound had traveled about four miles from York's New York Wire factory, where a steam whistle was playing its midnight Christmas concert.
Sources
- Friends of Camp Security, site history, captives and Fisher’s Hessian ghost tradition
- Jim McClure, York Daily Record, Jonathan Stayer recounting his Christmas Eve experience at the county historical society
- Goldfinch Archaeology and Friends of Camp Security, 2022 field report, preservation area and street address
- Uncharted Lancaster, attribution of Hesse Dahl to York County poet Henry L. Fisher
- U.S. Census Bureau address match for the preservation area
- The Pennsylvania-German, From Reading to York, p. 172, field photograph in the vicinity of Camp Security
