The Norfolk Day Book openly boasted . . .

. . . that the rebels made candles from the bodies of the dead.  The statement was too monstrous for belief; but since the evacuation of Manassas, there is said to be undoubtable evidence that the Mississippi soldiers did disinter the bodies of our troops buried at Bull Run, boil off the flesh, and make rings and ornaments of the bones.  Members of the Sanitary Committee assert this positively and taken in connection with the assertion made by the Day Book last fall, the scalping of our dead by the savage allies of the rebels in Arkansas, less savage and brutal than the Mississippi troops and the advertisement in a Southern Newspaper for blood-hounds to track Federal soldiers, it becomes no longer incredible.

– Published in The Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, March 22, 1862, p. 3