Eliza Battle shipwreck

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Final resting place of the "Phantom Steamboat of the Tombigbee."

The Eliza Battle was a Tombigbee River steamboat that ran a route between Columbus, Mississippi and Mobile, Alabama during the 1850s. She was destroyed in a fire on the river near modern Pennington, Alabama on March 1, 1858. It was the greatest maritime disaster in Tombigbee River history, with estimates of twenty-six people dead out of fifty-five to sixty passengers and a crew of forty-five.[1][2]

The disaster and its aftermath saw the Eliza Battle enter southwestern Alabama folklore as a ghost ship, with numerous purported sightings of the burning ship from just north of Pennington to Nanafalia downriver. The story of the disaster and associated folklore has been fictionalized in several published short stories.