Ghost Soldiers of Gettysburg

by Patrick Burke

  Devil’s Den Apparition

  During one of our visits to the battlefield, we were walking among the rocks in Devil’s Den when Jack felt the urge to meander into the wooded area to the south of where the heavy fighting took place. He walked down a small pathway about two hundred yards from the big boulders where he felt a profound sense of quiet and stillness. His intuition told him to take photographs of the surrounding area. Nothing of particular interest stuck out in this thicket of trees, yet he felt the need to shoot around fifteen frames of film with his still camera (no flash). He stayed there for about twenty minutes and then caught up with the rest of the group, who were making their way over to the Triangular Field.

  When Jack developed the film, he noticed something strange in one of the photos. He knew immediately that it didn’t belong there, and when he looked closer, he saw a white figure walking among the trees. Startled, he produced a close-up of the image and knew he had captured something interesting—a figure of a person walking with some type of satchel or small suitcase in one hand. This “individual” also appeared to be wearing a hat and a dress, which made me surmise that it was a woman. The analytical process kicked in as he tried to make sense of the photograph. How did he photograph a female form walking behind Devil’s Den? Why is she, or he, carrying a bag? And the obvious question: Why did he capture something that he didn’t see with his naked eye?

  One of the fun things about ghost hunting is that you get to immerse yourself in history. In fact, the historical context of what you might be experiencing can shed a great deal of light on the phenomenon itself. Nothing (that we know of) happens in a complete vacuum. The philosophical concept of cause and effect still seems to dictate the “who, what, when, where, and why” of paranormal activity. By thoroughly studying the history of a haunted location, you can create an accurate road map that can guide you through your investigation and give you a better idea of what you’re dealing with.

  With this photograph, Jack knew he needed more information in order to make a better assessment of it. He researched why women might be on the Gettysburg battlefield and was thoroughly enlightened. At night, when the fighting usually subsided, nurses and doctors searched the terrain for wounded soldiers in need of assistance. They usually did this with a lantern and a bag full of medicines they needed to ease the soldiers’ suffering. At Gettysburg, the carnage was so great that wounded men often lay where they fell for days before receiving any help. After the battle was over and the remnants of the two armies left, the townspeople and a small group of doctors and nurses were faced with what must have been a daunting and emotionally draining task—taking care of the dead and wounded.

  We now had a reference point from which to objectively quantify the photograph. Women did indeed walk on this battlefield in July 1863, and they would most certainly have been overwhelmed with strong, intense emotions as they performed their grisly tasks as caregivers among some of the greatest carnage ever manifested on American soil.

  We also realized that the nature of a haunting can sometimes be more mundane. Gettysburg represents more than just a three-day battle that took place almost 150 years ago. Many generations of individuals lived and died in this area over the course of time without having been privy to the horrors of war. Native Americans also inhabited the area for hundreds of years before Europeans began to settle on the continent. Therefore, from a logical standpoint, the apparitional form in the photograph could be anyone from any number of time periods. However, considering the history of this specific location and the details in the photo, it seems more likely that this could be an energy imprint from the actual battle (or its aftermath).

  Baladerry Inn Soldiers

  The Gettysburg battlefield is dotted with farmhouses, some of which were standing during the time of the battle. In just about every case, these homes were used as either field hospitals to accommodate the overwhelming amount of wounded men or as headquarters for the highest-ranking officers. Located behind Little Round Top on the eastern edge of the battlefield, the Baladerry Inn was no exception. Now a bed and breakfast, it stood witness to the horrors of July 1863 and still bears the bloodstains on its dining room floor to prove it.

  Over the years, we’ve enjoyed great accommodations and warm hospitality at the Baladerry, whose guests have had their fair share of ghostly encounters. We learned from the proprietor that people often see soldiers peering through the windows as if they are curious about what’s happening inside. Witnesses have also reported seeing a particularly mischievous soldier who enjoys playfully annoying female patrons. Once, during a meeting we held in the living room, we heard a loud popping sound directly above the head of a young female investigator. Her digital recorder ceased to function, and she became hot and exasperated, as if something, or someone, was purposely encroaching on her personal space.

  Late one evening, we were reviewing evidence in the living room while one of our weekend investigation participants took random photographs in the house. After taking a picture from the staircase looking out onto the back deck, she suddenly gasped and said, “Guys, you need to come look at this.” We immediately walked over and crowded around her digital camera.

  “See outside the French doors, by the lattice?” she asked.

  At first, we didn’t notice anything because we were looking in the wrong area, but we eventually focused on the right spot and let out a gasp of our own.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” said Jack.

  Standing outside by the deck were two men dressed in uniforms, looking directly into the living room. They seemed semitransparent, but we could clearly make out the shapes of their bodies, including heads, necks, torsos and arms. They also appeared to be wearing hats.

  “Is anyone outside?” asked Jack.

  We were pretty sure everyone had already gone to bed, but we needed to confirm this. We cautiously ventured out the patio doors and thoroughly checked the entire property, but we found nothing. After downloading the picture onto a computer, we approximated where the figures had been standing when the picture was taken. The next day, we compared the angle of the photo to the deck area and determined that the figures would have been standing in a row of large, thick bushes. This was a problem for several reasons. First, two people couldn’t have been standing in that row of bushes because there was absolutely no room to do so. Additionally, the deck was raised, so if the men had actually been standing there, they would have been at least eight feet tall! As with most paranormal photographs, we were left scratching our heads.

  Two interesting factors make this photograph worthy of serious discussion. According to the owner of the property, dozens of individuals have reported seeing soldiers looking through the windows, gazing into the house. As such, this represents supportive evidence. Also, their presence fits the property’s historic profile. We didn’t capture two people wearing Polo shirts and shorts; we photographed two men wearing what look like uniforms. During the battle, hundreds of soldiers wandered around this property, either because they were wounded, lost, or looking for fallen comrades. It is at least plausible, therefore, that we may have photographed the spirits of two of them.

  Triangular Field Soldiers

  Capturing an apparition in a photograph is rare; capturing three of them—all dressed in Army of the Potomac uniforms—simply strains credulity. We discuss the Triangular Field a great deal in this book for good reason. With so much paranormal activity reported on and around this small patch of land, we tend to spend a great deal of time there performing all manner of experiments.

  We love twilight on the battlefield. Also known as “the gloaming,” this is the period after sunset but before dark when the environment seems surreal. As our eyes adjust to the coming darkness, our surroundings feel different, as if we are teetering on the edge of two separate realities. And so it was on this day, as we attempted to capture some of the anomalies so often described in the Triangular Fiel
d.

  During this particular investigation, we were fortunate to have a well-reputed psychic medium with us. At dusk, the area was devoid of people, so we thought it might be a good time to follow her into the field and document her reactions. With Jack’s camera at his side, he instructed her to start at the fence and walk slowly down to the bottom of the field. Halfway down, she stopped in her tracks and told us to take pictures of the area below her by the tree line. As she continued to walk, she picked up on the presence of both Union and Confederate soldiers.

  “The air is very heavy here,” she observed. “There are men just wandering all around us. It’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced before.”

  Happy with the results, we finished the experiment and returned to the Baladerry Inn (aka our base camp), where we began to analyze our video and sound recordings, as well as our photographs. This process is often tedious and unrewarding, but on this night, we were in for a big surprise.

  “Were there any reenactors on the field tonight?” asked a team member.

  “No, the field was empty. Nobody was there,” Jack responded.

  “Well, if that’s true, you better come look at this,” she said.

  What we proceeded to look at was nothing short of astonishing. Beyond the forward glance of the psychic, down by the tree line to her right, were two figures wearing light blue pants and dark blue jackets. They seemed to be either walking or running. To the left of the psychic, we noticed another man down by the edge of the woods. Sitting on a rock or tree stump, he was wearing light blue pants and a dark blue jacket, as well as a dark blue kepi. We hadn’t seen these men in the field, and there’s no way we could’ve missed them, so where did they come from?

  Capturing the spirit forms of three Union soldiers in one photograph seems most implausible … yet there they were, doing whatever soldiers do when wandering around the place where they probably met their demise. Did the camera catch a glimpse of the actual battle, which manifested at that particular moment due to residual energies still present—yet not visible to the naked eye—on the field of battle?

  It’s very difficult to verify anomalous photographs as proof of the existence of ghostly phenomena—whether genuine, residual, or otherwise. On the other hand, we can’t simply dismiss all of these photographs as camera glitches or user error because they often show clear, identifiable images that corroborate unexplained activity that occurred in those specific locations. In the examples above, we feel these images represent strong evidence in favor of the presence of either spirit or residual energies. We’ll probably never know for sure if these pictures have revealed a glimpse into the spiritual realm, but we owe it to ourselves to consider all possibilities.

  [contents]

  Day One

  July 1, 1863

  On July 1, 1863, the lead elements of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia moved toward Gettysburg in the belief that much-needed shoes for rebel soldiers (who often marched barefoot) were being protected by local militia. Confederate Gen. Henry Heth of Gen. A. P. Hill’s Third Corps soon found out that instead of militia, he faced the seasoned veterans of Gen. John Buford’s First Division of the Union Cavalry of the Army of the Potomac. Buford engaged Heth at Herr’s Ridge and applied a tactic called depth-in-defense, in which a smaller force engages a larger number of troops and fights them long enough to slow their advance, then falls back and deploys in a new line of defense. Buford’s goal was to slow the Confederate advance until Union infantry could arrive and engage the enemy on equal terms.

  Buford held off the Confederate advance long enough for Union infantry to arrive, with Gen. John Reynolds First Corps positioning on McPherson Ridge and Gen. Oliver Howard’s Eleventh Corps defending the area just north of Gettysburg. The initial Confederate assaults down the Chambersburg Pike were repulsed, but at great cost to the Union First Corps, as General Reynolds became the first general killed at the Battle of Gettysburg. The Confederate Second Corps, under Gen. Richard Ewell, then began a massive assault from the north, with Gen. Robert Rodes’s division attacking from Oak Hill and Gen. Jubal Early’s division attacking across the open fields north of town, crashing into Howard’s Eleventh Corps, crushing the left flank of the Union line. At the same time, Confederate Gen. Dorsey Pender’s Division struck the First Corps, who had fallen back to Seminary Ridge. Their attack was so ferocious that the weary men of the First Corps began to give ground, and when the Eleventh Corps line collapsed around four p.m., the entire Army of the Potomac was retreating through the town of Gettysburg. They took up good defensive positions on Cemetery Hill and waited for additional attacks. Despite discretionary orders from General Lee to take the heights “if practicable,” General Ewell chose not to attack. Historians have debated ever since how the battle might have ended differently if he had found it practicable to do so.

  Just over 9,000 Union soldiers were casualties on the first day’s action; of those, slightly more than 3,000 were taken prisoner. For the Confederates, total casualties reached 6,500. To put this into perspective, in 12 hours of fighting, there was a combined causality rate of 1,292 soldiers per hour, which means that for every minute of fighting, 22 men were killed, wounded, or captured.

  Seminary Ridge

  Chapter Five

  High Strangeness on Seminary Ridge

  — By Jack Roth —

  On May 8, 2004, we decided to set up a private midnight tour of Seminary Ridge for the investigative team and our guests. We had heard of many ghostly encounters in this area and, we knew it would be very quiet and free of tourists at such a late hour.

  Seminary Ridge was the site of fierce fighting on the first day of the battle. This was where Union Gen. John Buford’s Cavalry Corps First Division held off Gen. Henry Heth’s superior Confederate infantry forces long enough for corps of Union infantry to arrive at Gettysburg. The beautiful Lutheran Theological Seminary dominates the geography of Seminary Ridge, as it sits majestically on its crest. It was to its highest cupola where Buford, while trying to lead his troops from the field, climbed up periodically to assess a broader view of a very grave situation—pivoting constantly with binoculars to watch both his badly outnumbered cavalry division holding off the Confederates to the north and for any sign of Union General Reynolds’s I Corps arriving from either the south or west.

  Union General John Buford, whose Cavalry Corps First Division held off superior Confederate Infantry until Union infantry could arrive at Gettysburg on July 1, 1863. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

  Union dead next to McPherson’s Woods after the first day of fighting. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

  Our tour began peacefully enough, as our knowledgeable guide gave us a detailed description of both the Lutheran Seminary and the riveting events of the battle’s first day. But then, as is often the case in Gettysburg, what had been an uneventful midnight stroll slowly transformed into an emotional whirlwind of high strangeness. After the tour ended and the excitement subsided, we decided to get everyone back to our hotel in order to lead a roundtable discussion while the night’s “festivities” were still fresh in everyone’s memories.

  One of our guests, Shannon, was the first to describe what she saw. Apparently, as she was listening to the tour guide, she saw a pinpoint of light streak over the top of her head. The light wasn’t visible for very long and quickly disappeared. She described it as moving from left to right over the tour guide’s head.

  “Can you describe the light?” I asked.

  “It was more of a small pinpoint streaking across the sky,” replied Shannon. “Not even an inch, which is why I thought it was a bug at first.”

  Sean, another tour participant, also witnessed something similar. “I think I saw the same thing at a different time,” he said. “I didn’t really think much about it. It was when she was talking about the widow’s house, and I saw it seven to ten feet above her head, starting off a
t golf-ball size and trailing about six feet. It was yellow and reddish. It got no bigger than a softball.”

  I asked if anyone else saw something.

  “Debbie, when you were looking through the window at the Seminary, I walked over and I took a picture of the steps, and then I saw that you were looking in the window,” said Sean. “So I decided to take a picture of you, and just as I lifted my camera I saw a light about ten or twelve feet away on my right-hand side on the ground. And it wasn’t the blue orbs that I’ve seen in your photos. This was something I’ve never seen in digital camera displays, but it was a light on the ground and then it was just gone. Something was definitely there and then it wasn’t there; and it wasn’t somebody else taking a picture because everybody else was standing at another location.”

  “Could it have been a flashlight?” I asked.

  “No,” Sean said. “Nobody else was there. It was totally dark on that side of the steps and I didn’t know she was there. I don’t know why I walked over there. This is the first time I’ve done anything like this.”

  I added that when the tour guide was talking about John Reynolds, I was looking around the street corner where some houses were, in the same direction she said they took General Reynolds’s body. I looked over and saw this white figure moving toward the street corner. There was a big bush on the corner, so I saw this glowing form for about two or three seconds, and it was higher up … it was probably about five or six feet off the ground. It happened really quickly, so I thought it might be a person walking with a bright white shirt. At least that’s what I assumed at first, and then I waited for it to turn the corner and come out from the other side of the bush that was blocking my view, but it never did. I kept staring at the same location and wanted to make sure nothing came out the other side, and nothing ever did. If a person was walking down the street, they would have eventually come out from the other side of the bush because that’s where the street went.”