The Eliza Battle was launched in New Albany, Indiana, in 1852, a side-wheeled paddle steamer with a wooden hull displacing 316 tons. Operated out of Mobile, Alabama, by the firm of Cox, Brainard, and Company, she ran the Tombigbee River route between Columbus, Mississippi, and Mobile, threading one of the great commercial arteries of the antebellum South. She was considered one of the most luxurious riverboats plying Alabama's waters. In April 1854, former President Millard Fillmore attended a reception aboard the ship in Mobile, a mark of the vessel's prestige. For six years, the Eliza Battle carried passengers and cotton through the winding, flood-prone Tombigbee, a river navigable to Columbus only during winter high water.

In late February 1858, Captain S. Graham Stone and pilot Daniel Epps guided the Eliza Battle south from Columbus, making stops at Pickensville, Gainesville, Demopolis, and dozens of small river landings. By the time she departed Demopolis on February 28, the ship carried roughly 60 passengers, a crew of 45, and more than 1,200 bales of cotton stacked on her main deck. That night, a brutal north wind drove temperatures down by 40 degrees Fahrenheit in just two hours. At about 2:00 a.m. on March 1, cotton bales on the main deck caught fire. The wind whipped the flames beyond any hope of control. The boat careened downstream with no one at the helm. Passengers, cut off from the lifeboat by the inferno and dressed only in nightclothes, leaped into the icy, flooded river. Some survived by clinging to cotton bales that had blown free of the blaze. The Eliza Battle finally came to rest near Kemp's Landing, close to the modern Alabama State Route 114 bridge near Pennington. The steamer Magnolia and local residents pulled survivors from the water, some plucked from treetops along the flooded banks. An estimated 33 people perished, all from drowning or exposure to the extreme cold. It remains the deadliest disaster in Tombigbee River history.

The Eliza Battle sank to the river bottom after the fire, her hull settling into the mud where it remains to this day. But for the people who live along the Tombigbee between Pennington and Nanafalia, the ship never truly disappeared. Sightings of a burning steamboat have been reported for more than a century and a half, always on cold, windy winter nights that echo the conditions of the original disaster. Kathryn Tucker Windham immortalized the legend in her 1969 book 13 Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey, recording the tale as "The Phantom Steamboat of the Tombigbee." River-men say that seeing the ghost ship is an ill omen, a warning of impending disaster for anyone on the water. The story has been fictionalized in multiple published works, cementing the Eliza Battle as Alabama's most enduring ghost ship.

The Tombigbee itself has changed since 1858. The Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, completed in 1985, reshaped portions of the river for modern barge traffic. But the stretch near Pennington where the Eliza Battle met her end remains relatively quiet, a tree-lined corridor of dark water winding through Marengo and Choctaw Counties. The wreck still lies beneath the surface, a tangible connection to the era when steamboats were the lifeblood of the Deep South cotton economy. Whether the phantom flames are real or the product of imagination sharpened by cold wind and long darkness, the Eliza Battle endures as a reminder that some disasters burn so bright they never quite go out.