Ghosts of Gettysburg III Read online

  Panic grew as a palpable presence as the whispy, brightening figure approached. The driver was virtually blinded by her tears and could not see to drive. They got the car started and the passenger, desperate now to leave, actually helped steer the car. As they began slowly to leave the area lighted by some unearthly glow, the owl passed in front of the car again. The driver’s tears suddenly ceased and she said that her feelings of sadness were now gone.3

  They debated for a while whether they should return—flipped a coin as a matter of fact, and the passenger won: they would not return that night.

  Later, the passenger had the driver tell her what she saw:

  My friend reports the following. To the right of the tree was a bright mist, as she watched, it rapidly coalesced and took shape. She feels she was looking at a woman with a long dress, shoulder-length hair and a heart- shaped face. She saw the dress blow around the bottom of the tree and the hair move as if blown by the wind. She did not feel any harm would have come from what we saw but did feel an emotional imbalance especially as we’ve already said: the sadness.

  They returned to the area during daylight. Nothing they saw during the day could have explained what they saw the night before.

  Rocky hillock north of Spangler’s Spring

  At a local bookstore they picked up a copy of Ghosts of Gettysburg, and read, for the first time, the stories of the sightings of the “Woman in White” at Spangler’s Spring. “It was not until then,” she wrote, “that we read of the ‘Woman in White’ or the feelings experienced by the psychic at that area. We were not aware of this until after we read it in your book. Now we are both curious. Did we actually see the ‘Woman in White’? Did the emotion of sadness emanate from her? We know that we saw a bright human female form, that was not of this world.”

  No one knows why she remains or why she continues to bear a sadness that is so deep it affects others, drawing them helplessly into her melancholy. Only one thing is known: the legend that comes down to us from voices long stilled is less a legend now than before.

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  Chapter 11: Love Conquers Death

  I long to talk with some old lover’s ghost,

  Who died before the god of love was born.

  —John Donne, “Love’s Deity”

  In this world, miracles do occur.

  Though the name “Gettysburg” is linked imperishably with the three horrible days of battle in 1863 that helped determine the fate of nations—those existing then and those yet to be conceived—it has another history as well.

  There are the gentle, conservative folk who have made their livings attending the farm fields and orchards, or serving the millions of visitors who make the pilgrimage to Gettysburg as a sort of American hadj; as devout Muslims make one trip to Mecca in a lifetime, so it seems with Americans and Gettysburg.

  And the people of Gettysburg over the years have lived out their lives on the outskirts or in the midst of the scene of the great conflict like so many others in other venues, in love, in pain, in jealousy, in ecstasy, in fear, inebriate, in sobriety, often in boredom and sometimes in awe. In 1918 it was in sickness and in health.

  The great worldwide influenza epidemic struck Gettysburg. It hit hard at Camp Colt, the large U.S. Army tank-training center where a newly graduated army officer named Dwight D. Eisenhower commanded. It was noted that the townsfolk of Gettysburg were charitable in their ministrations to the young soldiers struck down by the disease. Sadly, a number of Gettysburgians were infected as well.

  One of those was Annie M. Warner. She had been married for many years to a fairly prominent and well-to-do Gettysburg businessman whose love for her was greater than any wealth he had acquired and whose faith, like some biblical parable, conquered even death.

  Many Gettysburgians remember well the name of the hospital before it was changed, since it was where most were born or were made well or had loved ones pass on: Annie M. Warner Hospital on South Washington Street. The hospital was the gift John Warner promised in his prayers if the Almighty would only make his beloved Annie well again. Though near death from the influenza, she recovered, and Gettysburg got its hospital.

  In Gettysburg there are some noble philanthropists, too.

  The Warners lived for a time in a lovely house on Baltimore Street. The house was built in 1901 and has a formal parlor, numerous ornate rooms and a broad staircase that beckons as soon as one enters. Lately it has been an art gallery and an antique emporium, and is open to the public.

  Annie Warner, as her obituary stated, was known by all for her acts of charity. Sadly, in her later years, Annie Warner’s health failed. When she was 73 years old she had a bad fall, breaking one arm and badly spraining the other. Tragically, she was blind for the last four years of her life. And yet the story of the profound faith and love that John Warner had for her—literally bringing her back from the doomed—remains as a part of Gettysburg’s non-battle legacy.

  At one time the house was rented to college-age students. Often they would hear footsteps in the halls outside their rooms at night. At first they assumed it was one of the roommates using the facilities. But questioning one another, they discovered that none had been out of his room the entire night. They were constantly perplexed as to why their decorative posters would never adhere to the walls of their rooms. They tried everything, even tacks, but, after a while, the posters would end up on the floor. But they were really confused when framed pictures hung on nails ended up on the floor, below where they had been hung, not smashed, but seemingly laid there gently.

  Some painting or prints would be lifted off their hooks and placed just below, reversed, with the image facing the wall.

  One of the young men began to ask around about the history of the house and heard that Annie Warner had once lived there, and that, for some reason, she had particular tastes in wall hangings. Often, he was told, she would leave the walls bare when she couldn’t find something to please her, rather than hang something she did not like.

  A second witness to some of the events confirmed that he too heard footsteps across the hallway when no one could be seen. He watched from across the hall as one of the pictures fell off the wall to the floor. He also mentioned that when the art gallery was occupying the structure he had heard that the owners often found framed or unframed prints, which had been facing where the customers could see them, turned completely around facing the wall in the morning when they arrived for work. Obviously, since they were interested in selling the prints to the customers, neither the owner nor his wife would have spent their last few minutes before closing turning prints to face the wall.

  This witness felt that the spiritual presence belonged to another former resident of the house who did not like any wall ornamentation whatsoever in her home.

  This, of course, is hearsay. Whether it is the charitable and much beloved Mrs. Warner who returns to her house on Baltimore Street or some other devoted to interior decorating to own her tastes, is merely legend. That someone unseen returns to walk the halls and stairs, and redecorate the walls, however, is fact.

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  Chapter 12: A Short Walk To The Other World

  At the weird midnight trumpet-call they rose from their sepulchral fields as those over whom death no longer has any power. Their pulling out for the march in the ghostly mists of dawn looked like a passage in the transmigration of souls—not sent back to work out the remnant of their sins as animals, but to be lifted to the “third plane” by those three days of the underworld—eliminating sense, incorporating soul.

  —Joshua L. Chamberlain

  East High Street in Gettysburg is only a block long, running from Baltimore Street to Stratton. But, for some unexplained reason, East High has a relatively large share of the numerous brushes with the supernatural that have occurred within the borough limits of Gettysburg.

  For such a short street, its history is rather remarkable. On the Baltimore Street corner is the Gettysburg Presbyteri
an Church where Abraham Lincoln worshiped before he delivered the Gettysburg Address. President and Mrs. Eisenhower, after they retired to Gettysburg, worshipped in the church; the pew where they sat is still there.

  East High Street has a slight hill in the middle of it, so, if standing at one end of the short street, you really cannot see completely to what is going on at the other end. At the other end of High Street from the Presbyterian Church is the site of the old German Reformed Church and its graveyard. The graveyard once held the body of Jennie Wade, the only civilian killed in the battle. That was her second burial: First interred in the garden behind the house where she was killed, she was removed to this cemetery; when the cemetery was removed, Jennie finally found eternal rest in the Evergreen Cemetery on Cemetery Hill.

  During the battle Confederate soldiers wandered between their main line on Middle Street and their advanced pickets along the edge of the hill where East High Street runs. One of the buildings on East High was the old jail. It still stands today, formerly the Adams County Library, currently the beautifully restored Borough Office Building. It is believed that Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee ascended to the roof of the building at one time to observe the position of the enemy on Cemetery and Culp’s Hills, both easily visible from the spot. But it seems that any residual paranormal energy remaining in the building does not necessarily come from the great commander, nor the thousands of soldiers under the ultimate stress of possibly losing their lives at any given second. Instead, at least according to those who have worked in the building, the energy comes from one held in forced incarceration for some wrongdoing perpetrated in Gettysburg before the war came.

  For years while it was the Adams County Library building, the librarians would talk about “Gus,” an apparently playful spirit who would move objects, turn on the water fountain to quench an eternal thirst, ride the elevator alone and, of all things, cook food in the building. At least one librarian, just before closing the building for the night, would feel an unexplainable coldness. She reported strange odors and noises when no one else was in the building. Often, employees would enter the building in the morning after it had been closed all night and would be delighted by the smell of freshly cooked food somewhere in the edifice. They could never find the source. Someone speculated that the spirit was an inmate in the prison, or perhaps the prison cook. Someone else named the busy chef “Gus.” During 1950 “Gus” was so active that at the annual dinner meeting of library supporters, an extra chair was placed at the head table so that the meeting could continue without interruption.1

  While “Gus” rules his domain inside, the general vicinity outside the building seems to be filled, at least according to some local residents, with the spirits of those seemingly trapped in the Civil War-era.

  Built as the County Jail, the former Adams County Library is now the Gettysburg Borough building.

  A former resident of Gettysburg wrote to the author in 1994. He related an experience that happened one night in the late 1960s. He had just attended a high school dance—the high school sits just below the present borough building—and had walked up to his car parked in the library parking lot. He had gotten in his car and placed the key in the ignition when something caught his peripheral vision. There, sitting in the back seat on the passenger’s side, was what appeared to be a soldier. The young man got enough of a glimpse of him to see that he was in his late teens or early twenties, wore some sort of a short jacket, “not ornate, but not ordinary,” the color of tan or butternut. When he turned to fully confront the unwanted passenger, he was gone. He said that recently seeing a Civil War reenactor wearing a short, butternut jacket reminded him of the incident.

  At the corner of High and Stratton Streets was the site of the old graveyard for the German Reformed Church. A young woman once related how she and a friend were walking down the street from about where the Borough Building is, to the Trinity United Church of Christ. It was between 9:00 and 10:00 p.m. It just so happened to be Halloween, for they were returning home from the Gettysburg Halloween parade. Suddenly, she saw a tall man dressed in a long black coat with tails and a stovepipe hat emerge from the solid brick wall of the United Church of Christ—which replaced the old German Reformed Church—as if it were not even there. Though there was a door nearby, he apparently didn’t even need it. He “sort of floated across the street in front of us,” she recalled. His face was not distinguishable, but existed only in outline form. He floated over to the house that now stands on the corner, then drifted to the area where the old cemetery used to be. At first she thought he was an undertaker. But once he reached the site of the old cemetery, he disappeared, absorbed by the earth as if returning to his permanent resting place. But when he vanished at the former site of the cemetery, she and her friend didn’t stay around long enough to observe more—they ran for home.2

  Upon particular—and peculiar—occasions we are waking dreamers, one and all, following our future, walking slowly toward Death as Death walks quickly toward us. For aren’t we all merely ghosts in waiting?

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  Chapter 13: Stone Shadows

  Knowledge by suffering entereth,

  And life is perfected by death.

  —Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  We turn again to Gettysburg College, once called Pennsylvania College, made notorious by the great carnage around its hallowed halls. A tiny school then, its few buildings filled almost immediately with the helpless wounded. They suffered under the surgeon’s heartless saw, languished for a few days, suffered more, and then, often as not, passed on. They were taken outside to the once-manicured grounds of the college, and buried, without tender words, without grieving family, and without holy ceremony.

  While the Union soldiers were exhumed in the few months after the battle, Confederates awaited in their uneasy graves until the first years of the 1870s, then were unearthed and packaged—what was left of them—in boxes and shipped to several railroad stations in the South, there to be picked up, transported and buried for the most part en masse.

  “Did they get all of them?” is the macabre question everyone thinks and a few even ask. The answer: No, probably not. And what they “got” was certainly not much: Tattered bits of muddy cloth, chewed by insects for its sweat and blood; skulls and soil-clogged teeth, the brotherly grins or fatherly smiles sloughed away into the loam below now; large bones of the arm and leg, the muscles made hard by months of marching and carrying the heavy musket gone, reabsorbed into Mother Earth—ashes to ashes and dust to dust. What once constituted the noble sons and brothers and fathers of the South was mostly left forever in this one corner of hated Yankeedom. It would have galled them, if they only knew….

  As the college expanded over the years, buildings rose over some of the erstwhile graveyards, the bits and pieces of butternut cloth (and the far more valuable bits of men) were displaced again and again by the shovel and later the backhoe. The buildings became modern and numerous, the grounds manicured again. One can almost forget, strolling across the lovely green campus, what hideous mulch once fertilized the lush green below.

  We return to Stevens Hall, apparent home of the Blue Boy, who hovers outside a third floor window on certain cold nights and is seen peering in at the warm students within.1 One room on the third floor seems particularly susceptible to the earthly wanderings of unearthly creatures.

  Sometime in 1977, a woman living in this particular room was alone one night. Her eye was drawn to the corner of the room where, suddenly, out of nothingness, appeared a young man. According to her interview, he was “semi-transparent,” seemed to her to be in his “early 20s,” and radiated a light of some sort. The transparency evidently affected his ghostly clothing as well, for she could not identify the historical period of his attire. As weirdly as he materialized, so did he de-materialize.

  Same room, two years later in October: a different woman was also alone in the room. The door was locked. Suddenly, as if propelled by some powerful force,
the locked door flew open. Later she mentioned this strange experience to two of her roommates. To her surprise they both confirmed that in the past month or two, the same thing had happened to them as well.

  A month later, just before the Thanksgiving break, the first woman was standing in her room facing her stereo system when she felt something—a presence, she described it—staring at her back. As she swung around quickly to see who had entered her room, her arms passed through an incredibly cold spot hanging in the air. No one was in the room with her.

  At a later time, another of the roommates felt the same weird presence, the same staring from behind, with no one else in the room.

  View on North Washington Street

  Finally, one evening, the women had all retired for the night, but none was yet asleep. Suddenly, a light shot across the room from the door to the window. Two of the roommates saw it. Both agreed that it came from the door and not the window where a light from outside should have emanated. Both agreed that it was something inside the room. As they all lay there wondering what the strange, darting light was, they were startled by the loud sound of something falling to the floor from the table upon which the stereo was placed. Jumping from bed, one of them flipped on the light, and to their amazement, absolutely nothing was on the floor next to the table. The noise itself was a phantom.2