THE STORY
Reported Haunting
The legend of Vivia Thomas at Fort Gibson involves a heartbroken 1860s Boston socialite who disguised herself as a man and enlisted in the Army to hunt down her unfaithful fiancé. After tracking him to the fort and shooting him dead in a fit of jealousy, she was overcome with remorse and ultimately froze to death atop his grave. Her restless spirit is now said to haunt her burial plot in the National Cemetery's "Circle of Honor," where her real-life 1870 tombstone still stands.
The legend of Vivia Thomas is told around Fort Gibson. So it goes, one morning in 1870, a soldier was found dead atop a grave in the nearby cemetery. When the doctor examined the body, he found she was a woman. Vivia Thomas had been educated and elegant, and she fell in love with a handsome Army officer. When he suddenly left shortly before their wedding, Vivia found out he had been stationed at Fort Gibson and she set out on a difficult journey to find him. She cut off her long hair and dressed in men’s, then enlisted in the Army at Fort Gibson where she located her lover and found he had begun an affair with a Native American woman who lived nearby. Vivia followed him on a trip to see her, and she shot him with her rifle and left him dead. The soldiers thought he had been killed by Indians. Vivia shortly after became upset at what she had done and began to spend the nights weeping at his grave, and one night, she froze to death. Now, the apparition of a young soldier there has been seen pacing and weeping. Her story touched the fort’s commanders, and in the cemetery’s Circle of Honor, they set a stone that reads “Vivia Thomas, January 7, 1870.”