People who visit Hannah Creek Swamp report cold spots, feelings of dread, and the sound of a hanging. Johnston County has a lot of history, but this particular stretch of swamp has a story soaked into it — a Confederate lieutenant, a band of rogue soldiers who crossed every line, a gold crucifix found around the wrong neck, and a revenge killing so far outside the rules of war that nobody's quite known what to do with it for 160 years. It's a ghost story. It's a war crime story. It's also, it turns out, a case of mistaken identity stretching across two centuries — because the monster at the center of it was already dead before the Civil War started. The swamp, apparently, does not care about the timeline.