Ghosts of Gettysburg Read online

  As if to make absolutely certain the message would never be delivered, fate sends two bullets—one into the messenger, Wesley Culp, late of Gettysburg, and one stray shot into Miss Virginia “Jennie” Wade, Jack Skelly’s betrothed, the only civilian to be killed in the three-day carnival of death. So Skelly’s message died with Culp…not that it mattered anyway.

  Apparently, one of Culp’s superior officers, knowing that he was from Gettysburg, delivered the sad news to his family and told them under which certain crooked tree his body could be found.

  Culp’s sisters said they wandered the corpse-strewn hillside looking for the crooked tree and their sibling’s grave. Whether they found their brother or not is still argued. They claimed they never found him; the officer said his description of the site was unmistakably accurate.1 There are theories:

  —The girls were telling the truth. A battlefield is a horrible place after the fighting. Perhaps Culp’s mortal remains are now part and parcel of the clay upon which he played and romped and hid with his sisters as a boy in Gettysburg. Now, once again, he hides…forever.

  —They found his body and carried him, under cover of darkness, to the citizens’ cemetery, and there, like ghouls, buried him secretly, so that no neighbors, filled with the rancor of war, could object to the burial, in their cemetery, of a native son-turned-traitor.

  —The girls, exhausted from their ghastly burden, imposed upon their uncle, living just a stone’s throw from where Wesley was killed, to allow them to bury him where no one would disturb him—in the dirt-floored cellar of the Culp farmhouse.

  Perhaps this last resting place was not suitable for the young man whose homecoming was hideously marred by sleep’s counterfeit; perhaps he himself is eternally haunted and damned by the message that went undelivered; perhaps, somewhere, in the weird world beyond, three friends still seek forever one another and an answer to the unanswerable….

  While working for the National Park Service, I was on night patrol one mild fall evening and heard a call come over the radio to hurry to the Culp House to intercept an intruder.

  The superintendent of the park lived there at the time. I was just a block or so from the house. I was there within thirty seconds of first hearing the call.

  The Culp Farm

  The superintendent was already out the back door as I jumped from the patrol car. “Go around back,” he said. “We just heard him go to the upstairs window. He’s probably crawling down right now.”

  I ran around back and shined the flashlight up to the window, into the large yard, back to the house and up to the second-floor window again. No one. I trotted out to the yard to get a better view and stop anyone trying to run into the fields behind the house. Still, not a sign of anyone emerging from the house.

  The superintendent came out into the yard. “Did you see him?” he asked.

  “No. No one came out of the house.”

  “He must have. We heard him run across the floor to the window just as I told you to look for him.”

  “No one came out.”

  He took the flashlight from me and shined it across the fields beyond the fence that bordered the back yard. “He couldn’t have gotten out of there in that short amount of time,” he said.

  By then the superintendent’s wife and three daughters had emerged from the house, along with an off-duty park ranger who had been visiting. They had just checked the upstairs and there was no one hiding there. The other ranger was strangely silent.

  “What did you hear?” I asked the superintendent.

  “It must have been one of the girl’s boyfriends playing a prank,” he said. “It sounded like someone running back and forth through the second floor.”

  “It was really loud,” one of the girls said.

  “You could hear his feet running across the ceiling,” said another.

  The ranger still said nothing.

  “I’m sure it was one of the girl’s friends,” said the superintendent, still denying what was becoming obvious by now. My eyes kept checking the backyard. “You know how kids are.”

  Later, the ranger who had been there told me how loud the footsteps had been and how no one could have emerged through the second floor window, leapt to the ground, and scampered beyond the yard and out of sight into the field between the time the footsteps stopped and the time I was out back. “He had to be still in the house,” he said. “But he wasn’t.”

  But perhaps he was still in the house. Perhaps the intruder never left the house because he couldn’t. Perhaps he still is in the house, buried just a few inches below the cellar floor, with that mysterious undelivered message haunting him forever through the ages….

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  Chapter 4: The Devil’s Den

  Have they passed…Or will it ever pass?

  Am I left alone, or still with you all?

  —Major General Joshua Chamberlain

  No one really knows how the place got its name. Most likely it was because some early local storyteller let his imagination soar when he tried to describe the immense jumble of boulders and realized that no human could have placed them around in such fashion. Being a lover of words, he (or she) liked the alliteration: The Devil’s Den. Most likely, that’s how the place got its name.

  Or perhaps it was because of the stories handed down from when the Indians hunted and warred against each other in the area. There are legends of a great battle centuries before the white man fought his own brothers on that land. Archaeologists in the late 19th Century found evidence of the fight. It was only recently that historians, after studying aerial photographs, thought they saw a great mound nearby, reminiscent of the Indian burial mounds seen in other parts of the country.1

  Could the name have come from the large number of bewildered hunters who, after having lost themselves in the ancient maze of rocks and twisted pathways of the area, find their way out with the help of an odd and slightly ominous-looking stranger who leads them to a familiar trail then vanishes?

  Regardless of where the name originated, it was never more apropos than on the second sultry day of July in the year 1863. On that day, the Devil did dwell there and held high court.

  Union Major General Daniel Sickles had pushed his Third Corps out from the low ground along the Union line where he had been told to stay, to the higher ground near the Emmitsburg Road. His right flank was floating free—“in the air” in military parlance—from the rest of the army leaving a gap that would be paid for dearly—with some 82% casualties—by the 1st Minnesota Regiment later in the day. His left flank was anchored in the labyrinth of boulders that, if it hadn’t already had the satanic name, would certainly earn it within a few hours.

  Devil’s Den

  Men from New York and Pennsylvania, Indiana and Maine tried to defend the pile of rocks. But the state troops most associated with Devil’s Den were the Texans of Robertson’s Brigade who were attacking, not defending, the area.

  Fantastic stories weave themselves through Devil’s Den like the evening mist: Will Barbee, General Hood’s boyish courier, who should have been at the rear but could not keep himself from a good fight, was dumped to the ground when his horse was shot and climbed to the top of a rock. Beneath his feet those already wounded in the vicious fighting loaded muskets and handed them up to him. His story seemed to end when he was shot off his exposed position by a minie ball to the leg. But he crawled back up and continued to fire until knocked down again by a shot to the other leg. Men dodging behind the rocks were amazed to see him crawl back up to his exposed roost, only to be shot off, sliding down the granite boulders to crumple hard amongst the broken rocks yet again. The last time he was seen, wounded so badly that he could not climb by himself, he was “crying and cursing” because no one would put him back up.

  There is another story which, due to the incredibly destructive power of the soft lead Civil War minie ball, hardly seems possible, at least with regards to the numbers involved. One Joe Smith, a private in the 4th Texas
, suffering from the intense hell-like heat of the Den in July, took out his white handkerchief, dampened it in Plum Run which meanders through the Devil’s Den area, and tied it about his head. In the tumult of battle, when men aim their weapons more by desperate instinct than by calculated malevolence, a flash of white in a dun-colored field is just the thing to attract the wrong kind of attention. Days after the battle, when they buried Private Smith, someone with ghoulish fascination counted eleven holes through the inadvertent target he had made for himself. Joe Smith, formerly of the 4th Texas Volunteer Infantry would suffer from the heat no more.2

  And finally, some superb photographic research done by William Frassanito in his book Gettysburg: A Journey in Time, describes the circumstances around one of the most famous Civil War photos ever taken, of a slain Confederate infantryman lying at his post behind a stone barricade in Devil’s Den. Frassanito discovered the same soldier in a previously recorded photograph some forty yards to the west. Obviously, the poor creature was placed in a blanket (which Frassanito points out in a rare exposure of the same scene) and was carted and posed unceremoniously in death in the role he never played in life—that of a soldier with the romantic cognomen of “sharpshooter.” The fabrication somehow grew to include the highly unlikely tale of the photographer returning to cover Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address four months later, wandering out to Devil’s Den to find a bleached skeleton in a faded southern uniform, rusted musket still propped against the stone where the “sharpshooter” had dropped it. The ignominious death of some Texas mother’s beloved son far from home in some rocky field near a town whose name he may not have even known is horrible enough—to drag him around, pose him, and invent some story to sell photographs of him is bothersome to the soul.3

  Photography was in its infancy when the Civil War occurred. But today you would be hard pressed to find a visitor’s car moving through Devil’s Den without a camera in it. And it seems that visitors to the National Park aren’t the only creatures in Devil’s Den that have an affinity towards cameras…

  In Jack McLaughlin’s book, Gettysburg: The Long Encampment, published the year of the 100th Anniversary of the battle, there is a photograph taken from Devil’s Den by Gettysburg photographer Walt Lane. It shows the rock-strewn west slope of Little Round Top. The people who view the black and white photo are split about half and half as to whether they see, outlined to perfection, the ghostly image of the face of a soldier wearing a Civil War-style kepi.4

  In the early 1970s a young woman walked into the National Park Service information center one morning and queried the woman ranger on duty, “Are there any ghosts here at Gettysburg?” Of course, the official Park Service stance cannot encompass the spirit-world. The ranger explained this, but being naturally curious about the subject, asked, “Why?”

  It seems that the visitor had been in Devil’s Den earlier that morning. She had gotten turned around in the maze of rocks, but the light was right, and she got out of her car to take a photo. Her eye was up to the camera when she said she felt a presence. Lowering the camera she saw a man standing right next to her. He looked at her and said, “What you’re looking for is over there,” and pointed behind her. She turned her head to see what he was pointing at, and when she turned back…he had vanished.

  “What did he look like?” the ranger asked. “Well, he looked sort of like a hippie—long hair, ragged clothes, barefoot, big floppy hat.”

  A month or so later, the same ranger was again stationed at the information desk when a visitor came in and posed the question, “Are there any ghosts in Devil’s Den?” Needless to say, the ranger was amazed to have to repeat the same litany about the Park Service’s stance on ghosts within a few weeks. Once again she asked, “Why?”

  He explained that he was an amateur photographer. A month before he had been to Gettysburg and was visiting Devil’s Den. He had gotten out of his car and set up his camera to take a picture of a barren rock as the sunlight hit it dramatically. When he got home to develop the photo, he saw a man standing on the rock, which, to his naked eye, had been devoid of life.

  Two weeks later he returned to Gettysburg, set his camera up at the same spot at approximately the same time of day, and exposed an entire roll of the barren rock. When he got home and developed the roll, the left half of each exposure was perfect—but the right half, where the man had appeared before, was entirely blurred.

  Now, he said, he was back to take another roll, to make sure that he hadn’t inadvertently ruined the first roll in developing it.

  Asked if he had the first picture of the rock and the man with him, he replied that he had left it at home. Asked what the man in the photo looked like, he answered, “Sort of like a hippie. You know, long hair, barefoot, sloppy hat, ragged clothes.” At the request of the ranger, he promised to send the original photograph showing the image of the man. It never arrived at the park.

  During the Civil War, recruits for the Southern Confederacy came from all over the south. None travelled as far or made a more distinct impression upon the rest of the army than the soldiers from Texas.

  They came from what was then America’s frontier—wild, barren borderlands. Due to the fact that it was a long way from home, the packages containing new clothes from home sometimes didn’t arrive as frequently as did the packages for the boys from Virginia or Georgia.

  Some of the Texans were unkempt, shaggy, poorly dressed and unshod, and often had longer-than-normal-length hair. Certainly it must be only coincidence that the descriptions of the specters the visitors saw fit the Texans image here at Gettysburg. Certainly, it must be coincidence they described virtually the same man….

  In the mid-1980s this author was showing an historical artist and his son around the battlefield. He wanted to do a painting of the 1st Texas at Gettysburg, as they attacked through the so-called “Triangular Field” which borders the road through Devil’s Den. We walked down the slope to the remnant of the stonewall where the Texas and Georgia troops had begun their assault up the slope towards Smith’s New York Battery in Devil’s Den. The three of us carried four very expensive, modern, automated still cameras to record virtually every few yards of our recreated assault for later study in the artist’s studio. About a quarter of the way up the slope, the film in my Minolta X-700 caught. I thought I had hit the end of the roll, but the indicator said I still had more than half the roll left.

  Working on my camera, I called over to the two other photographers to keep going, that I’d be along with them in a second. As I looked up, I saw the artist stopped in the field, fiddling with his camera. It had jammed. Beyond him, his son had also stopped dead in the field, on that once horrible slope. His expensive camera too had frozen.

  The “Triangular Field”

  I walked over to them, and as we continued to work on the cameras, we began to walk up the slope. I told them the story of the poor Confederate “sharpshooter” dragged hither and yon as a photographer’s gory model, and of the mysterious photographic image in McLaughlin’s book, and finally of the two visitor photographers and their unexplainable experiences. By the time we reached the top of the “Triangular Field,” our cameras had all begun working again….

  Somehow, a local public television station got my name as a collector of ghost stories about the battlefield and asked me to be a part of a Halloween Special they were putting together about famous ghosts stories of south-central Pennsylvania. Time limitations dictated that we include only a few stories about the battlefield, all of which are included in this book. After visiting Pennsylvania Hall on the Gettysburg College campus, we drove down to Devil’s Den to recount some of the stories there. I began by telling the seemingly associated stories that linked the Texans and photographers with the fighting for and around Devil’s Den. We moved over to the “Triangular Field” where I was to tell the story of my artist friends and our suddenly inoperative cameras. I was standing at the edge of the “Triangular Field,” “miked up” with microphone cords dangling as t
he cameraman was making final adjustments. I was going over in my mind what I was going to say when I heard him call the producer to come over to the camera.

  As the producer was looking at the camera, the cameraman came down tome. “What’s wrong?” I asked with mild apprehension, already guessing. “That’s a $12,000 computerized video camera. I’ve been working with it for 18 months now, and nothing has ever gone wrong with it. There are six LED lights in the camera that are supposed to be green. They’ve always been green. The camera automatically adjusts for all sorts of conditions. Now, five of them are red. I just had to show John,” he said with a half-smile. Behind him, at the camera, John, the producer, was scratching his head, poking buttons inside the camera, looking through the eyepiece to no avail.

  We shot the story anyway, but before the piece aired, the producer and cameraman recorded a segment to be edited into the beginning of the “Triangular Field” story. The cameraman told of the previously perfect record his $12,000 camera had maintained before and since; the producer apologized for the poor quality of videotape the viewers were about to see. But, you see, it wasn’t their fault.

  Apparently, Halloween or not, there were other unexplained forces at work who don’t take kindly to cameras, who still feel a need to actively participate in this world—and quite frequently—in the place named, inadvertently or not, as the den of the devil.

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