Ghosts of Gettysburg V
Spirits, Apparitions and Haunted Places on the Battlefield
by
Mark Nesbitt
Published by Second Chance Publications at Smashwords
Copyright 2012 Mark V. Nesbitt
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Photos by Mark and Carol Nesbitt unless otherwise credited.
Original cover design by Ryan C. Stouch
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To Katie
Yours to count on….
Sit down again together, Army of the Potomac! all that are left of us,—on
the banks of the river whose name we bore, into which we have put new
meaning of our own. Take strength from one more touch, ere we pass
afar from the closeness of old. The old is young to-day; and the young
is passed. Survivors of the fittest, it seems to us, abide in the glory where
we saw them last,—take the grasp of hands, and look into the eyes,
without words! Who shall tell what is past and what survives? For there
are things born but lately in the years which belong to the eternities.
—Major General Joshua Chamberlain
The shadows deepen. It has passed—the splendid pageant; it is gone
forever,—the magnificent host that streamed from the mountains to the
sea; that flaming bolt which cut the Confederacy in two,—or shall we
say that left its deep track upon the earth to mark the dark memories
of those years; or to shine forever as a token of saving grace in the galaxy
of the midnight sky?
—Major General Joshua Chamberlain
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Table of Contents
Chapter 6 - Climbing To Golgotha
Chapter 7 - Those Who Cast No Shadows
Chapter 8 - Pageant of The Macabre
Chapter 9 - Masters of The Ruins
Chapter 10 - Mysteries of Oak Ridge
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Chapter 1: Acknowledgements
Once again, scores of individuals were helpful in putting together this work. My sincere thanks go out to those who, out of the goodness of their hearts, a love for Gettysburg and a more or less forced interest in the paranormal, have shared their strange, yet fascinating and undeniable experiences with me.
Those who related stories to me include Denise and John Ackerman, Mary Adelsberger, Jennifer Hodge and Ann Leifert, Mollie Back, Andrew Batten, Harry Borger, Corinne Brownholtz, Sara Callen, Richard Capiccioni and family, Deborah DiCaro, Duke Conover, Jim Cooke, James J. Corsetti, Jr. Esq., Suezette Dunham, John Dynia, Dr. Charles Emmons, Donald E. Evans, John Fenstermacher, the Rev. Mark Fischer, Rick Fisher, Jim Garrahy, Jason Gross, Bill Hallett, Harry I. Halloway, Aloma Handshew, Dave Hann, Michael K. Hollahan, Steve Kovall, Suzanne M. Ledger, Dianna Loski, Wendy Miller, Jennifer Moyer, Edward Newhouse, Ron Ogburn, Lorraine Ortiz, Danny and Terri Potter, Cheryl A. Raimondi, Katherine Ramsland, Betty Roche, Kerry J. Ryan, Bruce A. Sigmon, Karl Silvius, Michael Smith, Terry L. Smith, Rachel Stombaugh, Shelley Sykes, Sally Thomas, Mark C. Wilson, Sue Wilson.
I have endeavored to include everyone who contributed to this book in this list, but papers get shuffled and names get misplaced until after the book is finished. If I have not mentioned you, my sincerest apologies. Look for yourself in my next book!
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Chapter 2: Introduction
The distinction between past, present, and future
is only an illusion, however persistent.
—Albert Einstein
To those who say, these are good stories…if you believe in ghosts, I say: You don’t have to believe in ghosts to believe these stories. All that you have to believe in are the powers of human observation, for these stories are eyewitness accounts of experiences at Gettysburg.
Still there are those who doubt what I have written and collected from the “percipients” of the paranormal at Gettysburg.
Scientists are great skeptics since paranormal experiences, they feel, cannot be recreated in a laboratory. I saw a recent TV special in which scientists had been shown photos and videos of paranormal events to watch on TVs in their labs. They proceeded to explain how easily the videos or photos could have been faked.
I am not a scientist, but I know that if you want to find out if things are faked or not, the first thing you do is watch the experiment being done. The next thing you do is try to do the experiment yourself. Not one of the scientists pronouncing the “fakes” had ever been along when the videos were being made.
I have. I have accompanied numerous “paranormal investigators” on forays into “haunted” houses, or cemeteries or battlefields. Intrigued, I purchased the equipment and have made videos and taken photos and asked questions in the silence of the darkened battlefield and have heard noises and voices recorded when there were none to be heard while recording. Nothing, I can say unequivocally, in my presence, was ever faked.
You must realize that it is obviously not the “ghosts” fault that they cannot be explained scientifically. The “ghost” is merely evidence of something that our current definition of science is too narrow to explain. Because we cannot explain why something happened or repeat it in a lab does not mean it did not happen or was not observed. Perhaps it is science that needs to change to accommodate what is going on, like it did when Newton explained through mathematics about motion and gravity, or when Einstein’s theories forced science to expand even more to encompass the unseen interior world of the atom. Eminent scientific scholars once believed the universe revolved around the Earth too.
The problem with science denying the existence of “ghosts” in spite of all the collected data, is that it fails to take in the future, the potential or the possibility that one day we may have an explanation for the sightings and experiences: it may come from a newly developed method or device; or perhaps from something—an offshoot—of paranormal studies, some pattern we haven’t noticed before because there wasn’t enough data.
I mean, if you would have told someone just fifty years ago that sand would be doing our thinking for us in the 1980s and 1990s—our calculations, our writing, our editing, our printing—they would have considered the concept nonsense. And yet, that is just what is forming the letters I write now—sand— silicon—computer chips.
We’re not at the end of our knowledge, so please do not sell us humans short. About reality and what exists, we haven’t yet scratched the surface.
Another group of disbelievers are the historians, especially around Gettysburg, yet their motives are still unexplained. I consider myself an historian and admit that our own discipline is far from scientific, history being, as one wag once wrote, a pack of lies everyone agrees upon.
But the concise definition of history is the collection of eyewitness accounts to an event in the past. It’s as simple as that. There’s no cut-off date; it can be as recent as ten minutes ago. Strictly speaking, history doesn’t even have to be eventful—doesn’t have to be the Battle of Waterloo—but can be something as simple as diary entries, which a number of historians now publish.
The only real criterion is the veracity and the reliability of the eyewitness.
The soldiers who fought in the battle were under tremendous personal stress: They could have been sent to their Maker at any second. So it can be forgiven if two soldiers, fighting in the same battle within yards of one another remembered differently the events that took place. Yet some historians are willing to take a soldier’s recollections of the events on the Gettysburg battlefield observed while under awful duress as more believable or cogent than the recollections of a family, safe in their own automobile, under no stress whatsoever, who happen to witness an unexplainable and possibly paranormal event.
Finally, and perhaps the most vociferous of all doubters to the existence of ghosts are devout religious-types who claim they are “demons” sent by the devil to “confuse” us. Some quote scripture denying and warning about the existence of ghosts.
And yet, in the Bible—and in other religions’ primary literature—there are found numerous references to life after death. Sixty percent of Americans believe in a final judgment, that is, a reckoning to a higher being after one is dead.
You who are not a scientist, or historian, or particularly religious may view the sightings of “ghosts” with skepticism because you have never experienced one. Subscribing to that theory, however, means that Paris never existed until I personally visited it this past June.
But collecting close to 400 stories of peoples’ paranormal experiences (and adding to those the 300 others Dr. Charles Emmons collected in China and in America) does two things.
First, it puts the burden on skeptics: if it were one or two sightings we’ve collected, well, maybe our sources are suspect. But hundreds? Could they all be mistaken as to what they witnessed on the fields of carnage?
Second, it gives us an opportunity to analyze data. Here’s what we know about whatever it is that people are experiencing here at Gettysburg and other places as well:
— The subjects (aka “ghosts”) may represent some sort of energy because they give off cold and sometimes heat that can be felt by persons coming in contact with them or being near them.
— The subjects reflect light and so must have some substance to them that is sometimes seen by the naked eye, but more often shows up in photographs. They may even generate their own light.
— The subjects sometimes appear white, with a bluish core and tint; other colors, particularly red, red-orange, and gold are seen. Occasionally, the entire rainbow spectrum is displayed.
— The subjects are in motion: they even rise, something cold air does not do on its own. They have been videotaped moving toward, away from, and perpendicular to the camera’s viewpoint.
— The subjects have electromagnetic properties. Gauss meters—electromagnetic detectors—have been seen to spike when coming in contact with the subjects. The subjects also seem to drain energy from batteries in cameras. They will activate or de-activate electronics in cameras. Perhaps it is through this electromagnetism they communicate, since magnetic tape and digital recording chips will capture sounds when there are no sounds being propagated through airwaves.
— The subjects sometimes “gather” about a human as if curious.
— The subjects sometimes move intelligently, responding to requests to move. Sometimes, it appears, they even provide answers to specific questions.
— The subjects sometimes change shape, going from “orb” shaped to a misty, ropey, cloud some refer to as “ectoplasm,” to full human body (or body part) shapes.
Now, think about your own classic definition of a “ghost:” They are white and change shape; they sometimes communicate; they make the hair stand up on your body, apparently from the cold, but perhaps from electromagnetic energy; they move and seem to follow us or are at least curious about us and sometimes, for seemingly no reason, appear and disappear.
So, perhaps its time we took a closer look at what has been so vehemently denied by some, yet have been as close to us for millennia, as our own skin, our own minds, or our own souls….
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Chapter 3: Mad Carnival
When you’re quartered safe out ‘ere
An’ you’re sent to penny-fights an’ Aldershot it;
But when it comes to slaughter
You will do your work on water,
An’ you'll lick the bloomin’ boots of ‘im that’s got it.
—Rudyard Kipling
On July 1, 1863, it was merely a meaningless, rock-strewn little hill with no name. By the next afternoon it would become an angry God’s bloody anvil, roaring and flaming, with men and nations being shaped and forged and tempered upon its rocky slopes, and souls sparking off into the black abyss.
Even the soldiers did not know what it was called, this rise where they were summoned to die. Officers sometimes referred to it in their reports as “Granite Spur,” or “Sugarloaf,” and sometimes confused it with the larger hill just to the south. That hill eventually became known as “Round Top,” probably from military necessity and perhaps coming from a colloquial name. Thus, the smaller hill became “Little Round Top.” Because of the fact that it, and not its higher counterpart to the south, had been stripped of timber the autumn before, the smaller of the two became militarily significant.
By the end of the war it would be injected into the American military lexicon of elevated killing fields, like Bunker and Breed’s Hills, Malvern Hill, Marye’s Heights, Lookout Mountain. It remains in the common language of America, and the world, alongside other names that reverberate synonymously and imperishably with bloody courage: San Juan Hill, Pork Chop Hill, Hamburger Hill, Mount Suribachi. It echoes in the soul like other heights of glorious sacrifice: Masada, Gethsemane, Golgotha.
Military men always look for “the high ground” to defend. Tactically a hill gives the defenders a good view of the enemy. He must show you all his attacking troops while you can hide your reserves behind the hill. On Little Round Top, artillery had a clear field of fire from its summit, the only drawback being, as attacking lines got closer to the guns, they could not depress the barrels enough to hit the enemy. Yet they could still boom away, lending moral support to the infantry engaging the foe.
And even the most unsophisticated private realized that the enemy is just a man, and if he has to climb a hill before he reaches you, he’ll be tired and out of breath. The chances of hitting a slow, winded target were a lot better than one running downhill at you. The enemy’s chances of shooting you with a trembling rifle, or fighting effectively hand-to-hand were greatly diminished after a hard climb.
Before about 3:00 p.m. on July 2, 1863, the fate of that small hill—along with the fate of thousands of soldiers—was being decided by a handful of men.
One was Robert E. Lee, who by natural inclination and circumstances dictated by the overwhelming victory the day before, wanted to attack. He sent out scouts at dawn, and by 9:00 a.m. they were back. They had reached the summit of the smaller hill yonder and found no Yankees. Lee determined to push forward.
Another player was Major General Daniel Sickles, commander of the Federal Third Corps. Disappointed with the positioning of his troops in the low ground north of the two hills, he began a massive move of his entire corps westward to higher ground near a peach orchard on the Emmitsburg Road. His forward movement stretched his corps too far to cover Little Round Top and put his left flank in a jumble of boulders named by the locals, the Devil’s Den just below the hill.
Another participant was Confederate General James Longstreet. After reluctantly receiving orders from Lee to have his corps attack the Federal line, he marched his troops methodically—some say too methodically—to the attack position. Because he had orders to avoid detection by signalmen now posted on the smaller of the two hills, he had to reverse his course and reroute his march, giving a certain Union engineering officer time to mount the small hill and discover a remarkable fact.
That engineer was Major General Gouverneur K. Warren, who found himself at the summit of the smaller hill along with some signalmen on the afternoon of July 2, sent there by Union Army commander Major General Meade. Longstreet had gotten his men into position, and found Sickles’ Corps in advance and isolated from the rest of the Union army. Longstreet promptly attacked. Longstreet’s line overlapped Sickles’ line at Devil Den, and units swept around south of the bigger hill. After climbing the precipitous south face of Big Round Top in the heat of the July afternoon, one unit, out of water when the detachment sent to fill their canteens had not returned before sudden marching orders, collapsed to a man. Five…ten minutes passed.
Military men call it the god of battles…they mutter it in their fervent prayers or solemn afterthoughts, after having sent thousands of men to their deaths. Others have called it fate or “fortunes of war.” Military historians, try as they might with complete hindsight to explain why battles were won or lost, still come up empty-handed because the tiniest mistake that should or would have never happened did happen and altered the course of an action, a battle, a war. Some with a more mysterious bent say that it was all preordained: that the Southern Confederacy was doomed from the first cannon shot at Fort Sumter because this Union was meant to be indivisible. But in reality, all the military schooling in the world will not help if your men are hungry or out of water, so parched they cannot move, because orders to attack came before canteens arrived.
Meanwhile, Warren is observing Sickles’ battle from the smaller of the two hills, from the great boulder which now bears his likeness in bronze. Suddenly his attention is pulled to the woods on the northwestern slope of the larger hill. He steadies his glasses but can see nothing. He sends a galloper down the hill to order a cannon in the valley to lob a shell into the wooded side of the large hill just to his south. When the shell crashes through the trees, Confederate infantrymen—in a perfectly natural reaction—flinch. The subtle movement causes burnished rifle barrels and bayonets to glint in the afternoon sun. Warren now knows that there are a large number of troops about to advance upon this undefended hill. He looks about and realizes that Confederates on this hill could be a threat to the Federal position stretching out to the north…that they could cut off retreat routes for the Union army should they capture the hill. In other words, from this small, rocky hill, the Rebels would be between the entire Union Army and the northern capital of Washington!1
He sends couriers to bring troops. He finally rushes down the hill himself and, through channels, gets couriers sent for some troops. Colonel Strong Vincent—movie star handsome with his high forehead, straight nose, and flaring mutton-chop sideburns so popular during the war—stops one of the couriers, wheedles the orders out of him, and rushes his own brigade—without orders— to the hill. Thus he seals his own fate.
Colonel Joshua L. Chamberlain, huge drooping moustache covering his mouth, and his two brothers, leading the 20th Maine up the slope, are almost killed by a passing shell; he sends one to the front of the line and the other to the rear. No more riding together into battle for the Chamberlain boys, for “another shot like that might make it hard on Mother.”
Hazlett’s Battery eventually summits the hill behind them with Warren himself leaning his Major General’s gilt sword against a tree and helping to haul cannon like a common artillerist.
If not for that five or ten minutes of complete exhaustion on the top of the big hill…if not for those damned lost canteens….
The fighting is hand-to-hand in some cases. Big guns are booming from the Confederate side. Northern guns reply in a cacophony of death.
Chamberlain’s and the 20th Maine’s fight for the southern cusp of Little Round Top is now the stuff of legend—placed at the spot by the doomed Colonel Vincent himself: “I place you here. You are to hold this ground at all hazards!”
They repulsed several Confederate assaults, ran out of ammunition, and drove the Rebels off with a downhill bayonet charge that some would have you believe was a stroke of genius on the part of their commander, Chamberlain. With no disrespect meant, Chamberlain only did what any good colonel under the same orders and out of ammunition could have done: to save the high ground he had to leave it to drive the enemy away. It was a vicious fight: his antagonist, Colonel William C. Oates of the 15th Alabama recalled that, the soldiers’ “blood stood in puddles in some places on the rocks.”2
Dashing, intelligent Colonel Strong Vincent, on Little Round Top via Erie, Pennsylvania, and Harvard University, has given up a law practice to join the army. In the court he is about to enter, the verdict is not always just, but the sentence is always carried out. Married to his college sweetheart, the beautiful Elizabeth Carter of Newark, he had been noticed riding gracefully with her around the camps when winter duty was light. “Their love was ideal,” wrote one comrade. But he had another love, one for which he would die. Near Hanover, Pennsylvania, on the march toward Gettysburg, he orders the color guard of the 83rd Pennsylvania Volunteers to the front of the column to lead them into his home state of Pennsylvania. As the flag is unfurled and flutters by, he remarks to his adjutant in a haunting, patriotic prophecy: “What death more glorious can any man desire than to die on the soil of old Pennsylvania fighting for that flag?”
Part of Vincent’s line begins to crumble, and he personally rallies it and leads them forward. A volley of fire from the advancing Confederates and the “glorious” death he had predicted was his to embrace: he falls heavily onto the rocky slope mortally wounded. Beautiful Mrs. Vincent would ride no more with her handsome, bewhiskered husband.
Brigadier General Stephen Weed’s Brigade was ordered to help Sickles in his predicament, but General Warren rides down and remonstrates with Colonel Patrick O’Rorke, left in command of the brigade while Weed queried Sickles. Warren agrees to let the rest of the brigade go to Sickles if O’Rorke and his 140th New York—the largest regiment in the brigade—come to the summit of the hill. Patrick O’Rorke, first in his class of ’61 at the United States Military Academy, sees immediately the danger and detaches his regiment. His Irish luck is about to run out.
The men rush over the crest of Little Round Top and down into the faces of the Rebels without stopping to align their ranks. There is a volley and two dozen of the 140th New York topple.
Clara Bishop O’Rorke, married but a year to Patrick, becomes a widow in that instant because of an impetuous charge over the crest of that rocky little hill at Gettysburg. Her beloved Patrick, doing his duty, is made extinct by that cruel volley. Eighteen months later Clara enters a convent, to spend the rest of her life in holy devotion, for there had been only one man for her in this life.
Weed finally gets the rest of his brigade to the summit of Little Round Top, but he is shot and falls hard upon a flat rock. Hazlett, the artillerist, leans over to see about his commander and is shot dead and falls across his body.
Hundreds of other not-so-famous boys are taking the .577 caliber, soft lead minie ball deep into their bodies at 900 feet per second as well. Being hit is bad enough, with its electric-shock-like effect upon the nervous system. But upon being struck, the limbs go weak, legs buckle, and you tumble, headfirst perhaps, down upon the rocky slope. Raise your arms to stop the fall, the brain commands, but your arms cannot move, and on this hillside, more often than not, you will slam full-face into a sharp rock, perhaps fall on your musket, your cartridge box or haversack full of hard junk, perhaps even on your own bayonet. You will lie there then, for long minutes, or hours in the hot sun, and perhaps even days, head throbbing from the pain, body tormented by fever and chills and fear of death. Some soldiers are shot again and again; so thickly fly the minie balls in this battle for Little Round Top.
* * *
Reenactors inhabit Gettysburg often. It is fortunate that so many individuals in the “hobby” visit Gettysburg on a regular basis. They faithfully spend their Memorial Days, July Fourths, Labor Days, and Remembrance Days in Gettysburg. In recent years, the Remembrance Day parade (commemorating the November 19th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address) has had more “soldiers” and 19th Century ladies in it than the original parade in 1863.
Their motive is sincere—a desire to honor the soldiers who fought here. While some question their methods—dressing up like Civil War soldiers—of honoring them, if the dead can see us like we can—occasionally—see them, they must be honored, or at least appreciative that some of us are willing to dress in the uncomfortable clothing, march in the hot sun, camp in the rain, and breathe in the sulfur smoke of battle once again.
I have only one complaint about the reenactors: they are often mistaken for ghosts!
People approach me, or write to me and tell me stories of their personal experiences on the battlefield or in the town, and of seeing in the distance a single soldier or groups of soldiers marching around or just hanging out. My first reaction is to ask the date. If the date is that of any major holiday when reenactors throng to Gettysburg, my skepticism increases.
But knowing that on the anniversary of the battle paranormal activity increases, I must question further. If they tell me that they drove away and just left the soldier staring at them with a spooky look in his eyes, he probably went back to his campsite and shared a good laugh with his fellow reenactors about the spoof he just played upon some tourists. But if an observer sees what he or she thinks is a reenactor, and that reenactor suddenly vanishes, then obviously, something took place that does not follow the physical laws of this world as we know them.
I received two letters from a woman dated approximately eighteen months apart. Both letters recounted a visit she had in 1995 that appeared to have been an encounter with one of the spirits that continue to patrol Little Round Top.