Ghosts of Gettysburg III

by Mark Nesbitt

  The priest came and indeed confirmed that there was a spirit trapped inside the small room, desperate to emerge and move on. The ancient words were said; the holy water was sprinkled; the sign of the cross within the circle was placed upon the door. No other sounds were heard from the stone room.

  But the family had had enough. Soon after they sold the house and moved. The house, with its cold stone room, now belongs to the Lutheran Seminary. If the spirit of the young soldier should somehow find itself locked in the room again, there will be a number of new people of the cloth available now who can help him find his way out again.

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  Chapter 3: Tourist Season In The Other World

  Vex not his ghost: O! let him pass…

  —William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act V, Scene iii

  On the southern edge of Gettysburg rests a quaint stone building, owned during the Battle of Gettysburg by a man with the redundant name of Mr. George George. Historical records trace the one-story, fieldstone house back to one of Gettysburg’s earliest settlers, the Rev. Alexander Dobbin. Though several hundred paces away from the main house, the structure was probably part of the original Dobbin homestead, perhaps acting as servants’ quarters. It is, therefore, one of the oldest structures still standing in Gettysburg.

  Looking from the Dobbin House to the south on present-day Steinwehr Avenue (formerly the Emmitsburg Road) toward the George George house, you can allow your imagination to wash away the two centuries that have passed since the Dobbins owned the land you stand upon. Allow, if you will, the frame houses and brick commercial structures between to melt, and observe the lush open fields and dirt road materialize again. For eighty years from the Dobbins’ first settling, the earth and road remained pastoral and unchanged. Who can ever know the joys and sorrows that were born, lived, and died within the sturdy, cold walls of that little house? Grief too, no doubt, imbedded itself within those walls when children or parents died and left the structure filled with mourning.

  Using your imagination again, you can perhaps see, late one June afternoon, dusty columns of blue cavalrymen come riding up the road, sabers clanking, nervous, and with that certain look men have in their faces when they know they are about to become far too intimate with death.

  And on the forenoon of the next day, out from the heavy firing of two great armies engaged to the west of town, you’ll see a forlorn group of soldiers, bringing mourning and grief, come again to this small stone house along the main road to Maryland. Their burden is what used to be Maj. Gen. John F. Reynolds, his earthly body with its handsome face upturned, sightless to the July heavens, emptied of his essence by a Confederate’s one-ounce, .57 caliber minie ball. His loyal aide, Charles Henry Veil, remembered with sadness the event: “The ball had entered the back of his neck, just over the coat collar, and passed downward in its course. The wound did not bleed externally and, as he fell, his coat collar had covered the wound, which accounted for my not discovering it at first. With the assistance of the men I found, we carried the body across the fields over to the Emmitsburg Road, the one we had marched in on that morning…we carried his body to the little stone house on the Emmitsburg Road and laid it on the floor in the little sitting room.”1

  For a while, in the George family’s fieldstone house, the curtains are drawn and the general’s body rests in the little sitting room while his loyal aides leave on the task of finding a suitable coffin.

  Coffins are hard to find on this tumultuous day in Gettysburg. Up until the first horrid day of July 1863, Death was an infrequent caller to this town of about 2,400 souls. Suddenly, however, Death was the unwelcome visitor who wouldn’t leave. Instead of a coffin, all Reynolds’s aides could find was the box one was delivered in. They took it, but it was too short, and they had to break out one end so the general’s body would fit.

  Soon Reynolds would be taken to Baltimore for embalming, then to Philadelphia to lie in state in his sister’s home, then to Lancaster to be buried with great honor. But from just before noon on July 1 when his body was brought off the battlefield until that evening, the earthly remains of Maj. Gen. John Fulton Reynolds, highest-ranking Union officer to die in the battle lay like a common soldier within the cold stone walls of the Georges’ house.

  Some say that, even today, if you enter the crawl space of the George George house, you may see the life’s blood of the great general stained deep into the ancient wood on the underside of the floorboards and along the joists. Some of General Reynolds remains in Gettysburg into our day. Others have told of even stranger evidence of the man’s passing, evidence that shows, perhaps, that he is not quite all gone from the town he helped make famous, and which repaid him with death.

  Over the years, the George George house became part of the 20th Century. Though still quaint in its design and retaining much of its historic ambience, it has been rented out at various times to entrepreneurs of the tourist industry to be filled with relics and souvenirs of the battle. One couple opened a craft shop in the building and filled the place with counters and shelves and put pegboards on the walls to hold the various crafts.

  The George George house on Steinwehr Avenue

  One summer morning, two women entered the shop. They attracted the attention of the shopkeepers with their strange behavior. Pointing at the walls and murmuring between themselves, they wore looks of confusion. They left the building and the shopkeepers saw them walking back and forth, looking at the front of the house peeking in the windows, still with confused looks on their faces. Reentering the stone house, they continued to act confused, peering at the contents of the shop. Finally, one of the shopkeepers asked if he could help them.

  “Where are the wax figures?” they asked.

  “What wax figures?” he replied.

  “The wax figures that were in this room last night.”

  The shopkeepers looked at each other.

  “I’m sorry,” one replied, “We don’t have any wax figures in here. We’ve never had any wax figures here; just crafts and a few souvenirs.”

  “That’s strange. We were walking around late last night and passed this house. We stopped and looked in that front window. The room was empty except for a woman dressed all in black sitting over there,” she pointed to a corner filled with crafts, “in a rocking chair. Right in front of her,” she pointed to a spot where a counter stood, “was a cot. Lying on the cot was a man, dressed in something dark. The woman looked like she was in mourning. The man seemed…dead.”

  The shopkeepers smiled politely. “Are you sure this was the shop you looked in last night? As you can see, the place is filled with crafts. We’ve never had any wax figures in here. You must be mistaken.”

  “No,” said the other woman. “This is the place. Over there,” she pointed to a wall covered with a pegboard and hanging crafts, “over there in that wall was a door. It must be behind that pegboard. Is there a door there?”

  The shopkeepers were suddenly taken aback. Indeed, in the back wall, covered over by a pegboard several months before, was a door, original to the old stone building.

  The sudden and temporary rip in time between this world and the next can apparently happen at any moment, in any space. When it happens through a normal portal, like a door or window however, it seems even more a part of the reality in which we exist.

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  Chapter 4: Actors Or Reenactors

  There must be ghosts all over the world.

  They must be as countless as grains of the sands,

  it seems to me.

  And we are so miserably afraid of the light, all of us.

  —Henrik Ibsen, Ghosts, Act II

  The experience of collecting well over one hundred stories of the paranormal experiences on and around the Gettysburg Battlefield sometimes seems very much like a sociological study in that certain patterns have emerged. One pattern is that whenever there is a change in the physical state of a place with historic significance that is when psychic a
ctivity seems to be at its peak.

  We can see it whenever someone restores a historic house. Numerous unexplainable events occur when old walls are being altered and ancient wood is given to the saw.

  Bud and Carol Buckley, who beautifully restored the historic Cashtown Inn, saw what they believed to be a Confederate soldier standing in the doorway between the old part of the house and a newer section. Not once, but several times they saw him, as if he were inspecting their handiwork. Above their heads in the dark of the night from their bedroom, they heard heavy items being slid across the attic floor. Morning inspections always showed that not a thing had been moved.

  When the restorations to the building that once beheld the passing of the magnificent rebel army were complete, the activity nearly stopped. Nearly, but not quite.

  Other houses that felt the great pull of history from the whirlpool that was the Gettysburg Campaign have also shown an increase of paranormal activity when restoration-minded individuals have begun their work. A private home south of Gettysburg displayed several manifestations of unexplainable events to its owners as they were restoring it.

  The owner is a historian and former professor at West Point and is currently director at the Center for the Study of the Civil War. The house pre-dates the Civil War. Union cavalry no doubt passed the house, since scouting every byway was standard operating procedure for cavalry. The Union Army’s 11th Corps marched within a half-mile of the house on its way into the maelstrom that was to become the Battle of Gettysburg. Someone found the tip of a bayonet scabbard in his garden. There is documentation that an ordnance train from the 6th Corps parked on the property for a while during the battle. Karyol Kirkpatrick, a psychic, felt that much of the energy, however, predates the war.

  During a visit Karyol felt that there was an “alley” of energy to the east of the house, as if a whirlwind or storm had come through there. She felt a woman being “hit”—perhaps by a tree or by lightning attracted to the tree. The woman, she felt, was a horsewoman, and may have been riding when it happened. As Karyol mentioned this, the woman who owns the house said that she had often gone into the barn and seen the normally calm horses suddenly spook for no reason at all. Karyol thought that there might be a connection between the dead woman’s spirit and the stable she once frequented.

  The owners of the house recall that much of the activity occurred while they were restoring or remodeling parts of the house. The bathroom in particular seems to be a center of high psychic activity. One night, the children were upstairs preparing to bathe before going to bed. Suddenly they came running down the stairs, panic-stricken, yelling something about having watched as the shower curtain wrapped itself completely around the shower rod. Both parents inspected the curtain. Between the looks of panic on their small children’s faces, and the way the curtain was wrapped tightly around the rod, out of the children’s reach, they realized that there was no possible way the kids could have accomplished the task.

  Whatever it is in the bathroom seems to enjoy teasing little children. The two children would be upstairs and suddenly the water would be turned on. The same thing happened to an unsuspecting young nephew. The window curtain in the bathroom has been seen being pushed out into the room as if someone were behind it or some strong breeze had blown against it. The children and their mother have all witnessed the phenomenon. She confirmed that indeed, while the curtain was actively moving into the room, the window was closed.

  There is a door just off the children’s bedroom that opens and closes, by itself. Before the couple moved in to the house, before there was even any furniture inside, the woman was upstairs and watched as the door between what was to become the children’s bedroom and another bedroom slowly opened and then closed.

  On several occasions the couple found that the heat had been turned way up. The children were questioned but neither had touched the thermostat. The affected thermostat was in the children’s room on the second floor, seemingly a vortex of spiritual energy.

  Once, the couple had heard banging on the second floor; bolting upstairs the husband was about to tell the children to quiet down, but they were already quiet—sound asleep in their beds. Their confused, sleepy eyes told their father that they certainly were not the source of the banging. It is in this room where the door opens and closes by itself. It was also in this room that their youngest son continually had horrible nightmares. He doesn’t sleep in that room anymore. “He hates that room,” said his mother. The youngest in the household—the most vulnerable—hates the upstairs entirely.

  And there were even stranger noises emerging from the second floor. Everyone in the family was downstairs watching TV. They remember that it was a Saturday night and after 11:30 p.m. Suddenly they heard what could only be described as a heavy stomping all across the second floor, “from one side of the house to the other.” The man was so convinced that he had heard an intruder that he grabbed one of the Civil War sabers in his collection and ran upstairs to confront the intruder. No one was there. Although he hasn’t heard the stomping sound since, she has, often enough to be teased by her husband about it.

  Once, on the other side of the house, just a week after the family had moved in, the woman was alone in the house cleaning the back bathroom. She heard the heavy stomping around the upstairs, and for a moment was afraid that someone had broken into the house. She looked out of the bathroom and saw the shadow of a man on the wall. Curiosity overcame her fear and she went to see who it was. As she approached, the shadow vanished, but the family dog was sitting, staring at the space from where the shadow would have been cast, growling. Completely unnerved, the woman left the house.

  During a visit to the second floor, Karyol distinctly felt that there was a column of energy—a vortex, if you will—leading directly through both floors and into the cellar. After Karyol left the second floor, a reporter for The Gettysburg Times who was covering Karyol’s visit walked into the area between the children’s beds and said she could feel something strange—like a concentration of static electricity—in an area about eighteen inches in diameter. As she stood in the spot I noticed that her legs were vibrating—as fast as a shiver produced by a cold chill—but not the same motion. She stepped from between the beds and we went downstairs. I asked her about her legs shaking.

  “My legs were shaking?” she asked, incredulous.

  “You didn’t feel it?” I responded.

  “You’re kidding. My legs were shaking? I didn’t know that.”

  She kept talking about the event, and made me describe exactly how her legs were moving. She hadn’t felt it at all.

  After Karyol’s visit, the wife had an opportunity to do a little research. The family who owned the house just before the Civil War was the Cromers. In 1858, Sarah Cromer, a 14-year-old girl, was tragically killed in a horseback riding accident. The owners speculate that this might be the young horsewoman Karyol spoke of who causes the horses to spook inexplicably.

  Even more bizarre was that one Walter Cromer was injured during the Civil War, wounded or (the records are unclear) perhaps kicked by a horse in the leg. Did the animal that kicked him partially cripple him, inflicting a lifelong limp? Or, like thousands and thousands of others hit in the leg by a minie ball, did he suffer through an amputation, and was he forced to stomp his way on a wooden leg through the rest of his—and perhaps this—life?

  But the strangest occurrence involved the second floor hallway. The husband was working there when his eye was attracted to the end of the hall. There, on the original bathroom door was, as he described it, a “luminescent glow,” “a phosphorescent spot or rather, a ball of light.” So unusual did the light appear that he was compelled to walk to it to see where the source of the light was coming from. He looked for a round hole in the wall or window shade for the source, but there was none. He moved his hand completely around the circle of light but cast no shadow on it; the light seemed to be its own source. He went to touch it…and it vanished, an elusive remnant
of some unknown and unexplained energy.

  Though he believes that there is something to supernatural phenomena, he did not feel uncomfortable, and had no eerie feelings—-just wonder at what this disappearing light with no source might have been.

  Evidence of this heightened activity when restoration is taking place occurred on a large scale during the encampment of the reenactors who participated in the filming of the movie “Gettysburg.” Several thousand authentically dressed Union and Confederate reenactors lived like soldiers, some of them for two months, in the summer of 1992 in the fields just west of Gettysburg National Military Park. They actually “restored” the fields of Gettysburg to the way they looked nearly thirteen decades before.1

  Historically, the area was the rear of the Confederate lines where wounded were taken, supplies kept, and troops reorganized in preparation for going into battle. After the armies left, the land returned to its original use, as grazing land or perhaps farm fields, and remained that way until the summer of 1992. Once again it was populated with thousands of soldiers preparing for a different kind of war.

  Suppose that our glimpses into the spiritual world—our “ghost” sightings— are not just a one-way view. Suppose, as some of the events documented appear to show that, as we can see them, they can see us. Could it be possible that as these thousands of authentically dressed soldiers assembled upon the fields of conflict in 1992, other entities from another time, when the battlefield was first filled with soldiers, were looking out across time and watching?

  Security was tight as the reenactors bedded down for the night upon their wool blankets and straw. Security guards watched through the darkness so that no local pranksters, or even tourists, would disturb the “background artists.” It was late one sultry night, long after lights out for the reenactors. Though some would venture into town for dinner or drinks, they always carried their background artist badge to display upon reentering the compound.