2,436 Rebels Buried Here

Pennsville, New Jersey

In 1863, Pea Patch Island, a Union prison in the Delaware River, was packed with almost 13,000 Confederate prisoners (It had been designed to hold only 4,000). Disease and malnutrition killed nearly 2,700, and most of their bodies were then barged across the river and buried in trenches on an isolated patch of New Jersey. After the war the grave became a National Cemetery at the insistence of the governor of Virginia, a state that formerly wanted nothing to do with the nation. In 1910 a towering, 85-foot-tall granite obelisk was erected to mark the mass grave, joining a smaller temple-like monument to the 135 Union guards who also died on the island. On the other side of the obelisk, marble tombstones mark the graves of 13 German POWs who died during World War II at New Jersey's Fort Dix.

Yep, a whole lot of death on only a few acres. The total increased by one in 1997, when the caretaker of the isolated cemetery was murdered by spree-kiiler Andrew Cunanan, his fourth victim in just over two weeks. There's no monument to that death, however.