A new challenge facing national park managers sounds like material from a Hollywood medical thriller. Unfortunately, it's fact—not fiction—and it has the potential to become a major problem in the years ahead.

The 20th Annual Antietam National Battlefield Memorial Illumination is slated for December 6, weather permitting. Situated along the five-mile driving tour are 23,110 luminaries – one for each solder killed, wounded, or missing in 12 hours of savage combat on September 17, 1862.

The powerful storm that struck the National Capital Region on June 4 damaged many park units. Antietam National Battlefield was hit very hard, but it could have been worse. The park’s witness trees escaped unscathed.

Development pressures, cellphone towers, and mining threats are among the concerns that landed the Antietam and Monocacy national battlefields, a portion of Cedar Creek and Belle Grove National Historical Park, and seven other battlefields on the 2008 list of "Most Endangered" Civil War battlefields.

Are there ghosts haunting the Pry House at the Antietam National Battlefield? Reporter Erin Julius of the Hagerstown Herald Mail went to investigate last weekend. There is a history of ghostly sightings at the former Civil War field hospital. Read on to discover what the reporter found while ghostbusting.

With the 150th anniversary of the launch of the Civil War in the offing, tour operators are lining up to explain the conflict to visitors of such parks as Antietam National Battlefield and Gettysburg National Military Park.