Ghosts of Gettysburg III Read online

  Ghosts of Gettysburg III

  Spirits, Apparitions and Haunted Places on the Battlefield

  by

  Mark Nesbitt

  Published by Second Chance Publications at Smashwords

  Copyright 2014 Mark V. Nesbitt

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  Photos by Mark and Carol Nesbitt unless otherwise credited.

  ***************

  To Barbara

  Who always believed

  ***************

  Welcome peaceful bed

  When our camps expire.

  Though no tears be shed,

  Though no tuneful choir

  Chant in mournful strains

  While around our bier:

  Yet a rest remains

  Long denied us, here.

  —Lexington Presbyterian Cemetery

  (burial site of “Stonewall” Jackson, Lexington, Virginia)

  No more the bugle calls the weary one

  Rest, noble spirit in the grave unknown,

  We will find you, we will know you

  Among the good and true

  When the robe of white is given

  For the faded coat of blue.

  —Monument to Union soldiers in Kipton, Ohio

  ***************

  Map Showing Story Venues

  ***************

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1: Introduction

  Chapter 2: The Premature Burial

  Chapter 3: Tourist Season In The Other World

  Chapter 4: Actors Or Reenactors

  Chapter 5: Alone In Hell

  Chapter 6: Hell Is For Children Too

  Chapter 7: Brotherhood Forever

  Chapter 8: Sleep Eternal?

  Chapter 9: Eden Abandoned

  Chapter 10: The Woman In White…Revisited

  Chapter 11: Love Conquers Death

  Chapter 12: A Short Walk To The Other World

  Chapter 13: Stone Shadows

  Chapter 14: Arabesques Upon Water

  Chapter 15: Endnotes

  Chapter 16: Acknowledgments

  Chapter 17: About The Author

  ***************

  Chapter 1: Introduction

  The invisible, ethereal soul of man resisting and overcoming the material forces of nature; scorning the inductions of logic, reason, and experience. persisting in its purpose and identity; this elusive apparition between two worlds unknown, deemed by some to be but the chance product of intersecting vortices of atoms and denied to be even a force…

  —Maj. Gen. Joshua L. Chamberlain

  They come at night often. And often they come into your most private, intimate time: sleep. It is as if unconsciousness—like madness—is some sort of inroad to where they live and play. But they also show themselves in broad daylight, making their appearance even more mysterious by not being so mysterious as to use darkness for a cover.

  They manifest themselves in many guises, using all your senses. Auditory apparitions seem to be the most common, accounting for about 60 percent of the experiences; but all the senses are involved, including that unnamed sense that simply tells you something is not quite right by sending that special chill.

  And they manifest themselves just about anywhere—at the foot of your bed, across a sun-showered field, through a window or door, or sometimes as just light or shadow. But, we know, they especially show themselves at Gettysburg.

  “They,” of course, are “ghosts.” “Spirits” may be a better, less volatile term, but we’re talking about the same thing. A sound, a smell, of something that is long gone; a vision, a touch out of time and beyond reason, of someone who is dead.

  And perhaps “dead” isn’t the right word either, with its connotations of finality and eventual decay. If the spirit is the very essence of the person, and the body is something it just lives in and breathes out of for a while, then maybe the word for the moment of cessation of the living body in terms of what the spirit does is “to move on.”

  Some people even think that these apparitions are demons sent to confuse us. If they are, they’re pretty impotent demons, for only rarely do you ever hear of an apparition harming anyone physically. In fact, of all the stories of ghosts I’ve collected, none has ever harmed a living human being.

  So, it seems that in virtually all the cases, all “they” want is to be noticed. And this is very sad.

  When I first embarked upon collecting, relating, and documenting the ghost stories of Gettysburg, Col. Jacob M. Sheads, the renowned Gettysburg historian, suggested that I might be opening up a Pandora’s box about the battlefield. Again, as one who has been here long enough to know, he was right.

  But his allegory fell a little short. The Pandora’s box that was opened contained not just unanswerable questions about the Gettysburg battlefield. Emerging unbidden from that mythical box were questions about life and death, heaven and hell, time and energy, existence and the eternities. What also has emerged is the absolute assurance that there are far more things in this world that we don’t understand than those we do.

  Mysteries are inherent in all of life. Perhaps that’s all that life is. The questions may sound trite, but they are important: why are we here? Is there a purpose to it all? Is what we see around us real; or is this the illusion and whatever comes after the reality?

  There are the eternal questions: What happens to the dead, or to us when we die? Is the cessation of movement reality or just an illusion, as it is in the autumn when trees and flowers seem to die, but don’t really? Is this life just a preparation for the next?

  Why should we be so reluctant to admit that there are mysteries about paranormal activities? Are we humans such egotists that we think we should or will be able to explain everything in this incredible, fabulous, unexplainable world?

  Why do spirits linger at a place of emotional turmoil? Is a violent, horrible, unexpected death the criteria for remaining behind, for, if you will, life after death?

  Who’s to say, if time is not linear, that we may be able to “circle back around,” and be reincarnated into the past?

  Or that if reincarnation does occur, and we have already been reincarnated, that when we see a ghost, we might be looking at our own previous incarnation, looking at our own self as we were in the past?

  And though it seems that death instigates all these questions, it is more likely that it is death that answers them all.

  There have been other, more personal questions, to me, as well. Have I ever seen a ghost? That I can only answer by saying, “I think so.” I have only had five experiences that I cannot explain while living in Gettysburg. One of the five was visual; one was olfactory; the rest were auditory; and there were the “feelings” I got in certain houses and on certain parts of the battlefield that told me I should not be there at that time.

  Do I believe in ghosts? I respond to that with two answers. First, I know that humans are not at the end-point of their knowledge, that someday we will discover just what kind of energy it is that produces apparitions. Second, I believe, like billions of others on this planet, that something goes on after death; that death is not a closing door, but one tha
t is opening.

  Are these stories true? I can assure people that I did not fabricate a single one. (Although many times, as a writer, I have wished I had that immense amount of creativity!) The stories included in the three books were told to me, for the most part, by the people who experienced them. Some were reluctant to tell them for they were frightened so badly by the experience that it was painful to recount. Some cried when they told their story; others got that certain chill and gooseflesh while telling their stories. Whether I believe in ghosts or not is immaterial; I do believe the people who have told me their stories. I am convinced that what they said happened really happened.

  Some of their experiences occurred before the witnesses even knew of my two previous ghost books. Some stories, such as sightings of the “Woman in White,” have just recently surfaced from notes Dr. Charles Emmons took while interviewing people ten years before Ghosts of Gettysburg was ever printed.

  Unexplainable events continue to happen out on the battlefield, in both new places and some places that have been documented before. So some of these stories are “updates” on stories from the previous books. Some are re-visitations of sites that appear to be permanently haunted that were included in the other books. Some of the stories in this book involve sites that I’d always heard had strange, ghostly happenings but that I did not have a chance to include in the last books.

  I think people feel comforted by the thought that there may be something that goes on after we die. No doubt, for some people, there is a spirit connection of the heart that grows from love and goes beyond life and into the other world, as when people go to gravesites and talk to loved ones gone before them. Ask anyone who has done it: There is a full, enriching communication, an unburdening of the heart.

  Perhaps the place we have named Gettysburg, where at least one great battle was fought, can be thought of as a cauldron, a refiner’s fire, where, while some lives were ended, others were created whose tendrils somehow reach across the ages to us. Perhaps we are forever connected with that “spirit connection” to them. What Maj. Gen. Joshua L. Chamberlain wrote of the soldiers who fought and sacrificed during the war could apply to us as well: “They belonged to me, and I to them, by bonds birth cannot create nor death sever.”

  ***************

  Chapter 2: The Premature Burial

  The boundaries which divide Life from Death,

  are at best shadowy and vague.

  Who shall say where one ends,

  and where the other begins?

  —Edgar Allen Poe

  There can be no horror more acute, more unthinkable, than that of being buried alive.

  Awakening in the dark, your last memory is of your loving family gathered around your bedside. You think your eyes are open, but you cannot be sure, so you lift your hands to turn on the light and they suddenly thump into the satin-lined lid, just inches from your chest. You squeeze your arms between your body and the lid. A panicky tactile search in front of your face, and you touch the satin again just a claustrophobic inch or two from your nose. You lift your body to sit up and your forehead bangs into the coffin lid, and your arms cannot get leverage to push the lid open with tons of earth above. You try and turn on your side to get more leverage, but there is no turning in the form-fitted, eternal reclining-place. Your shoulder, your forearms, your head against the lid, and a push with whatever feeble effort you can muster does no good; the soft satin gives but the lid is locked tight. You scream into the fabric and hurt your own ears…but no one hears. Panic rises with the realization of where you are, that you can barely move and worse—that no one knows, and the only thing you can think of is, how long…how long…how long will I have to wait in the dark before I die?

  Some say that in the old days, when churches were moved and their graveyards dug up, occasionally an opened coffin would reveal a shriveled, dried-up corpse with its fingernails dug into the ancient cloth lining of the casket and the leathery jaw tight against the breast in a scream that was never heard. That is why, when people were thought to have died, a mirror was called for and held under their noses. Even the slightest fog on the surface would indicate life and burial would be postponed, for it is most horrible when an interment is premature.

  Apparently, after the Battle of Gettysburg, there was such an accidental, inescapable incarceration of one thought dead, but under even more horrible circumstances.

  The first day’s fighting of the three-day battle was over. It had swirled across the farm fields to the west, north and east of the Pennsylvania crossroads town.

  Over the ridge named for the Lutheran Theological Seminary it crested, then down into the town itself, leaving the ridge to the commander of the Southern forces, Gen. Robert E. Lee.

  Of course, all about the area was the human refuse of battle: corpses and pieces of corpses, flung like some mad butcher was at work, as indeed Death was that hot first day of July. Perhaps it was because the commanding general was so near that the clean-up crews were in such a hurry to remove the hideous relics of combat. Some burials were going on in the distance, no doubt, but in the vicinity of Lee’s headquarters, it is likely his aides directed the burial crews to expedite their work.

  Often, icehouses, or cool corners of cellars were used to temporarily store bodies until the burial crews could come around and pick them up.1 That is probably what happened in this case, although with an awful twist.

  Like cordwood, the human remains were rapidly stacked in the small stone room below Mrs. Thompson’s wooden barn across the Chambersburg Road from her tidy stone house, piled there quickly out of the hot sun and from the commander’s view for the next three and a half days, while the battle raged on other fronts. Not that it mattered at all to the cold, stiffening corpses in the little stone room. Except that it did matter to one of those piled there….

  The battle was over and the Confederates had begun their retreat westward to the mountains. Slowly, cautiously, the Union skirmishers pressed out the Chambersburg Road. It was probably dreary, miserable and raining—since that was the weather generally in the days following the battle—when someone opened the door on the lower floor of the Thompson’s barn and discovered the gruesome mound of humanity, now putrefying in the small back room.

  One by one they began to pull the bloated, stiff bodies off the pile and carry them out for burial. Slowly the horrid hill began to dissolve. As they grabbed the arms and legs of one of the bodies that had been trapped on the bottom of the disgusting stack, suddenly one of its hands convulsed. The “dead” eyelids flew open and the eyes stared, circled in a madman’s panicked gaze. The startled burial party dropped its writhing bundle unceremoniously back onto the pile.

  For four days he had lain, buried alive under that festering mound of dead men, paralyzed himself by his wound and unable to crawl out. When he did regain consciousness, he found himself under hundreds of pounds of decaying human flesh and bone thrown on top of him. Lying there, with only the dead for company, wondering if he would ever be found, he must have felt very much buried alive, only not in some comfortable, satin-lined coffin, but in a more awful sarcophagus. They say when they brought him out into the fresh air, he was raving. He himself joined the dead just a few days later and was buried properly this time.

  But something of his essence apparently has not altogether left the stonewalled room where he lay buried alive. Some horrified piece of his soul seemingly remains, still pushing in vain against the coffin-lid of human flesh that had entombed him.

  Field of Lee’s headquarters and the Thompson barn site

  Though the Thompson barn burned and a modern dwelling was built over it, the small stone room remained as part of the basement. It had been closed off by a door and contained nothing of importance to the infrastructure of the house—no pipes or ducts or wires and still had the ancient earth floor that had absorbed the juices of the decaying soldiers once placed there for storage.

  Like all houses, this one had its own indigenous moans and gr
oans, its creakings and tappings to which all owners become accustomed. But some occupants recently reported an otherworldly cacophony that defied all logical explanation and seemed to emanate only from the stone room in the basement once used as a makeshift mausoleum.

  It began late one quiet summer night. The family was sound asleep. Suddenly, from within the bowels of the house came an unearthly, incredible roar as if someone had placed a bomb in the furnace. One occupant of the house, crawling bravely from the safety of bed, tried to pass through the kitchen to the cellar, only to realize that everything there was moving. Cups and glasses in the cupboards rattled and fell; toasters and can openers and breadboxes slid about on the countertops; and in the hall, pieces of furniture were being propelled from one wall to the other by some unseen force.

  Descending into the darkened cellar, the occupant, now joined by another, realized that the noises were growing into a steady, heavy pounding, coming from back in the corner. Approaching the rear corner of the cellar confirmed the worst nightmare: the door to the small stone room was the source of the rhythmic, desperate hammering and the door itself was heaving with the blows heavily against its own hinges.

  They fled the basement and realized that there was only one thing that could calm the disturbed presence trapped in the small stone room. Sometimes we must forsake all the logical, earthly solutions for problems that seem resistant to those solutions. Sometimes only a higher power—a supernatural power, if you will—can bring peace. Thus did those experiencing the maelstrom come to call in a priest.