Ghosts of Gettysburg III Read online

  An experience that can perhaps be explained by too much late-night coffee? Or by the heightened imagination perhaps brought by an over-tired mind? We can try to explain it away, but the former student will not. He knows what he experienced that night, when he stood on this side of the door to another world.

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  Chapter 9: Eden Abandoned

  …this fell sergeant, Death,

  Is strict in his arrest…

  — William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act V, Scene ii

  Of primary importance in the early history of our country were taverns where travelers, weary from a long day on horseback or in a carriage, could rest, eat, and sleep before continuing their journey.

  Gettysburg’s location on one of the main roads from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh made it one of those stopovers containing a number of public houses scattered along what is now U.S. Route 30.

  After the decisive battle, several Gettysburgians remembered a number of strangers who arrived a few weeks before the battle, drank at the local taverns, conversed with some of the locals asking questions of roads and their composition and where they led, and generally observing the amounts of cattle and horses in the vicinity. No doubt this was happening in most of the towns in southern Pennsylvania; that Gettysburg would later be the battle-site made their presence before the battle more exciting and noteworthy.

  Some of them probably stopped at Frederick Herr’s tavern and “publick house” on the road to Cashtown. Some may have stopped at the Eagle Hotel on the corner of Washington and Chambersburg Streets or the old Union Hotel on Chambersburg Street midway between Washington Street and the “diamond,” as the town square was called.

  Regardless where they stopped, they soon left with their heads full of knowledge about the nearby towns and roads. No doubt the Confederate officers used the information gathered by the “strangers” in this, their northernmost invasion of the war. Shortly, the spies were replaced by men under arms: first, Confederates under Gen. Jubal Early marching through Gettysburg on June 26, 1863; then Union cavalry clopping out the Chambersburg Road on June 30. Union infantry arrived, marching hard to relieve the cavalrymen after their fight on the morning of July 1. Finally, the Union army retreated rapidly past the old hotels on Chambersburg Street with Confederates of the Army of Northern Virginia in pursuit.

  After the battle was over, no one really knows what happened in the old Union Hotel. Most likely it too became a temporary hospital for the wounded; practically every other shelter in Gettysburg did. If it did, that may help explain the remarkably vivid—and remarkably frightening—experiences owners and employees of the hotel have had.

  Over the years the old hotel changed hands a number of times. It was finally bought and renamed the James Gettys Hotel after one of Gettysburg’s earliest settlers. In 1983 the hotel was remodeled by the Crist family, relatives of the owners. They were cleaning the interior of the structure. As a rule they would leave all the interior doors propped or standing open and unlocked. But there was one seemingly self-propelled door to one room that would be closed and locked whenever they returned in the morning or after taking a break. The occurrence was written off as merely a coincidental nuisance until one particular day.

  Their son was in the room cleaning up, when suddenly the door to that room (and only that room) slammed shut and locked. The family had to come and get him out. Try as he might, he couldn’t unlock the door and was frantically pounding on the door for someone to release him.

  His mother later casually mentioned the incident to the woman who ran the American Youth Hostel next door. The Youth Hostel would rent rooms from the hotel when it was overbooked. The woman just stared at her with a look of incredulity on her face. “I had two men staying in that room,” she finally said. “One was out and one was left behind. The one left behind had the same experience of the door closing, by itself, and locking him in. He had to crawl out the window and onto a roof to escape.”

  Sometime in the mid-1980s, the manager for the hotel had closed everything up for the night and had gone next door to the Blue Parrot Bistro. A friend came in and mentioned to him that he must have left the basement lights on in the hotel. The manager disagreed; he was certain he had turned all the lights off. Before he left for home, however, he decided to check anyway. Sure enough, as he peered in the door to the old hotel it looked like the basement lights were on.

  He unlocked the place again and went to the cellar door. He opened the door. Emanating weirdly from the cellar was indeed a light. But oddly, as the manager checked the light switches at the top of the stairs he found that he had been right: he had turned them all off when he locked up for the night.

  Not knowing what to expect, he cautiously descended the stairs to see what was causing the mysterious light. He said he was apprehensive because, as he carefully descended, he got an incredibly eerie feeling. He got down three or four steps—enough to look into the basement toward the light source, and there, standing in a vaporous cloud of light, was a lone Confederate soldier.

  Frightened completely now, he yelled at the apparition, “What are you doing down here?” and “Who are you?” several times. At that, the apparition seemed take a few steps backward into a dirt-floored room, the farthest one back into the basement. The room, according to legend, had been used during the Battle of Gettysburg as a temporary hospital. The soldier backed into this room and continued to back up until he got to the farthest wall…then vanished through the back wall and into the very earth behind the hotel. With that, the vaporous light extinguished. Now in the dark, the manager rapidly found his way to the top of the stairs and out of the building.

  When he told the owners what had happened, they first teased him: perhaps he had spent a little too much time at the Blue Parrot before returning to the hotel. But, in a conversation with his wife later, she assured them that her husband had been totally and truly frightened by whatever it was that he saw in the basement that night. He certainly wasn’t making it up, and, for a long, long time he refused to descend into the basement for anything.

  James Gettys Hotel on Chambersburg Street

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  Chapter 10: The Woman In White…Revisited

  A strange and somber shadow rose up ghost-like

  from the haunts of memory or habit,

  and rested down over the final parting scene.

  —Joshua L. Chamberlain

  If indeed the original legend of “The Woman in White” at Spangler’s Spring is true, then there may be more than one female spirit who wanders eternally the few hundred yards encompassed by the battlefield and the roads leading south.

  The original “legend” was of a woman who had committed suicide over a broken love-pact, who now, whenever a promise is broken, strides the misty grounds of the area, never to rest until promises are no longer broken.1

  But subsequent sightings, and the input from one of the country’s most renowned psychics, have either added more information to the old legend, or indicate still another “Woman in White” who walks endlessly and forever.

  Of course, there have always been the stories coming from dozens of graduating classes from Gettysburg College of the apparition seen at the Pennsylvania Monument. For years, some of the fraternities were allowed to conduct their initiation rites at midnight at the Pennsylvania Monument—appropriate in the past when the school was called Pennsylvania College; appropriate even in recent years, since the college was renamed after the town and the battlefield upon which the magnificent monument stands.2

  Upon occasion, after the ceremonies were over and the men were preparing to leave the site, a glance back at the woods to the west or to the east of the monument would reveal a pale wraith, floating above the ground toward them, a diaphanous, white gown flowing behind her. The congratulations were cut short and the battlegrounds departed posthaste.

  This author was attending a program put on by the Gettysburg Civil War Round Table. Some local historians had enlis
ted the aid of a psychic in a trip around the battlefield and she was explaining her feelings on, as Joshua Chamberlain called it, “this deathless field.”

  After the talk a man and a woman approached me and asked, since I had written about her, did I know the name of the famous “Woman in White”? I had to admit that I had no clue as to her name, but was curious enough at their question to ask, “Why?”

  “Because we think she lives in our house.”

  My surprise was probably written on my face. They proceeded to tell me how, since they bought their Civil War-era house on the Baltimore Road, they have seen at the top of their stairs a young woman walking—no, floating—along the upstairs hallway.

  I made an appointment to visit with them, and when I arrived at their house, I realized that it was, as the crow flies, only a couple hundred yards from Spangler’s Spring. The woman explained, as we stood out on the porch, an unusual architectural feature of having two doors almost side-by-side in the front of the house of that style of farmhouse. The one door was used daily as an entrance and exit; the other door led into what was once a formal parlor, and was used by each family member only once—when he or she was being carried out of the house in a casket. An old Pennsylvania Dutch superstition, no doubt.

  Entering the house (using the correct door) she pointed to the stairway just to the left of the entrance. At the top of the stairway was where she had seen the ghostly woman in white. The woman described her as having long hair, wearing what seemed to her as a sort of gown. She distinctly remembered three buttons at the front. The woman’s hands were indistinct, as were her facial features.

  She said that almost immediately after they had moved in, her young son came down from his bedroom upstairs and asked to have his bed moved against the wall. She asked why, but the youngster refused to explain. The bed was moved and no more was said about it, until she mentioned seeing the female apparition to her family for the first time around the kitchen table. Her husband poked fun at her, as did the rest of the family, until the youngster piped up, “I saw her too! That’s why I wanted my bed moved.” Their laughter was silenced.

  All of the family members saw her, at one time or another, in one stage of materialization or another. The husband saw her once, but an incomplete image. Their other son saw her too. But the woman has seen her at least a dozen times.

  I had no explanation for her. I knew that the house had no doubt been used as a hospital; it was directly in the rear of the Union fishhook line on the main road to Baltimore. So when Jim Cooke, a local radio personality asked me to set up a couple of “haunted” houses for him to broadcast from on Halloween, Joe and Collette’s came immediately to mind; it would be an opportunity to bring psychic Karyol Kirkpatrick in to give her impressions of the house.

  As always, we didn’t tell Karyol where she was going, or any history of the house before we got there. As soon as she stepped out of the vehicle, she began talking about Native American spirits in the area. She felt the strong spirit of the hawk and the bear; she smelled the smoke from what she thought was a peace pipe; there were the spirits of slaughtered animals lingering; and graves—Native American graves—somewhere to the north of the house.

  Inside the house she got the distinct impression of “irons in the fire”—cauterization of bleeding arteries and veins ongoing. She felt the presence of a veterinarian who had been pressed into service to practice on people. She got the feeling of someone of French ancestry inside, and felt some bad, or “heavy” energies. Then she began picking up on the battle: there were “confronting” energies, and the image in her mind of a white flag. “This area is peaceful,” she said. (At least it was relatively so, being behind the Union lines.)

  In the second floor bedroom she felt Confederate and Union soldiers: “Lots of soldiers died here.” Not just dying, she said, but being killed. The damage was not intentional, but just came this way. She felt a German doctor there once, giving guidance. She said the dying were sent to the cellar so the noise wouldn’t bother the others. She got the smell of dying in her nostrils.

  She felt that there were religious persons who had moved in—Amish perhaps—who brought the strong energy of healing. There had been a “lot of praying to create a lighter force in order for the men there to journey to a higher level.”

  Descending into the cellar, she felt the remnants of six or seven people dying: she smelled again the odor of death. There once was an entranceway to the cellar, she felt, one that has since been closed off, and had been used for removing the dead.

  Once upstairs again, she felt the strong presence of a priest and a nun who had come to help with the dead and dying. Suddenly Karyol got the feeling that a child was taken by scarlet fever in the northeast bedroom. The baby’s name was “Gay, or Jay…Iva, or Eva Gay,” who had died. Suddenly switching topics again, according to what she was allowed to see, she said it was the priest who was of French descent.

  She went up into the attic while the owners and I stayed at the top of the stairs where the apparition in white had been seen so many times. The woman was surprised—in fact, seemed a little disappointed—that Karyol, after nearly forty-five minutes in the house, hadn’t mentioned a thing about the woman in white. Karyol came down from the attic with her impressions.

  She received the name “Garland.” She thought that the attic—stifling as it might have been in July 1863—was used as the recovery room for the men who had been operated upon in the house.

  Things got quiet as the owners and I looked at one another wondering whether we should say anything about the apparition in white which had appeared so many times right on the very spot where Karyol stood. Finally, the woman piped up. “This is where I have seen a woman in white, Karyol. Did you get any impression of a woman dressed in white while you were up here?”

  “Oh,” said Karyol, almost casually. “That’s the nun.”

  Of course, I thought. Not all nun habits are black; some dress in white. Could this be our woman in white, who reappears year after year, caring beyond the grave for those once placed in her tender care?

  “Maria was her name,” Karyol said. She felt a very good energy from her. She is, however, “not a constant presence,” Karyol observed.

  Of course not, I thought. She’s splitting her time between here, the Pennsylvania Monument, and Spangler’s Spring.

  What did we witness at the Civil War house on the road to Baltimore? Historians will say that very little of what Karyol said can be documented. But how much of what happened during the battle of Gettysburg has gone undocumented? Of course not every word was written down; not every name of every nun or priest or doctor or townsperson who volunteered his or her services was recorded. We historians are constrained to only write about what can be documented; and so much more happened here that remains undocumented. Should we claim it never happened just because no one wrote it down? Of course not. Is Karyol really tapping into undocumented history, a residual energy that remains behind as a sort of spiritual history of places? For those questions, we only have an incomplete, tattered fabric of answers. And continuing experiences with the woman in white that no one can explain….

  In November 1994, I received a letter from two women who had just visited Gettysburg. They had come to town specifically on Halloween to participate in the “Ghost Tour” of Gettysburg, and then to explore the battlefield, skeptically, jokingly, in search of ghosts. Their skepticism, like so many others’, would soon turn to belief; their frivolity concerning the spirit world would soon descend into abject fright.

  It was about 6:00 p.m.—after the November darkness had descended upon the fields of battle—when they first drove to Little Round Top. There was no moon, no lights. They spent an uneventful ten minutes and continued their drive along the battlefield road.

  If they had only known what had happened along their now-peaceful route, of the horrors and ironies and savage tricks fate played upon the unlucky men and boys who had once occupied the same space they did—
but at a frighteningly different time. And in all the immensity of time, past and future, the distance between those traveling through the present and those gone before was a mere blink, a tiny flicker in all the light that has shone on the earth. As if to confirm that time is at best illusory and its passing not much more than that, the women found themselves at Spangler’s Spring, approaching the small parking lot there, about to get a glimpse through seam in time.

  Approaching the Spring area, according to their testimony, an owl flew directly in front of the car, startling both women. Pulling into the small parking area, they turned off the car. To the left was the Spring; to the right was a small, rocky hillock, with some monuments and trees. The woman who was driving thought she had heard a loud popping sound to her left and rolled down her window.

  As the woman in the passenger’s seat gazed at the trees to the right, to her bewilderment, one of them seemed to be brightening. She turned her head away, blinking her eyes, figuring they were having trouble adjusting after the car lights went off. She looked back at the tree. This time the light seemed to be coming through the tree itself. She blinked again; now the light seemed to be coming around the tree, not more than fifty feet from her. Her friend was still looking in the opposite direction, and neither had spoken since hearing the popping sound. Her description from her letter is probably best:

  As the light became brighter I could distinguish what appeared to be a skirt billowing around the base of the tree. I gazed part way up this light and realized I was looking at the impossible—a very bright human form. As I began to look up, my friend turned to enquire if I had heard the sound at all. I did not answer nor indicate to her what I was seeing. Suddenly she said, “do you see that tree?” My only reply was “uh-huh.” I then realized we were both seeing something. I turned my head forward and was more than prepared to leave the area. My friend continued to look at the light and said, “oh my God, her face is so beautiful.” I could not bring my self to look again. My friend then stated “this is so sad, so terribly sad,” and began to cry having tears stream down her face without apparent reason. She later told me a feeling of overwhelming sadness came over her, as well as what she describes as a feeling of electrical shock or current, so much so that it caught her breath. As she continued to look the area of brightness began to move toward our vehicle and I wanted to leave….