Civil War Ghost Trails

by Mark Nesbitt

  Gettysburg Ghosts

  I have been writing about ghosts in Gettysburg for more than two decades and have heard many stories. Many have been published in the seven-volume Ghosts of Gettysburg series. Below are some of the most notable, along with a few recent ones.

  The Elevator at Gettysburg College

  Probably one of the most famous ghost stories of Gettysburg is the tale of two female administrators from Gettysburg College who were working late one night. The building was once used as a hospital by Civil War surgeons during the battle. Exhausted, the two women left their offices on the top floor and entered the elevator to take them to the first floor where the exits to the massive white-columned building were located.

  One woman pushed the button for the first floor and the elevator dutifully announced each floor as they descended: 3 . . . 2 . . . 1. It then went past the first floor and headed to the basement.

  The two women rolled their tired eyes, and the one pressed the button for the first floor again, but the elevator continued down and stopped in the cellar of the edifice. The doors began to slowly open on a scene out of time and reason.

  Wounded men lay writhing in blood-dampened corners, orderlies of a century before moved about carrying crimson rags, and a surgeon stood with an uplifted saw about to amputate the leg of a semicomatose soldier lying on a makeshift operating table.

  Now, not knowing into what hell they had descended, the women panicked and slammed at the buttons in the elevator to no avail. The elevator remained frozen. Just then from around the corner, not two feet from them, came an orderly in a blood-stained apron. He caught them with his gaze, pleading with his eyes to either let him on the elevator with them and remove him from the hideous scene in which he had been trapped for twelve decades, or to come with him, come off the elevator to help with his never-ending labors forever.

  Slowly, mercifully, the elevator doors began to close. The women ran immediately to the security office. The officer on duty, who I interviewed, said, indeed, the women were sincere in their report. This was no hoax; they were almost literally scared to death. Yet, when he asked if they would return to the scene with him, they reluctantly agreed.

  The elevator at Gettysburg College’s Pennsylvania Hall sometimes delivers visitors into a Civil War hospital scene.

  Perhaps it was because he had mentioned something about being able to catch one of the college fraternities, obviously conducting a stunt, that they felt less apprehensive about revisiting the scene.

  Within two minutes they were back. They boarded the elevator and descended to the basement. The doors slowly opened, but to a scene of pristine cleanliness, the reams of paper and spare printer cartridges all lined up neatly in the locked cage where they had been stored, the white-painted cinder-block wall holding the electrical boxes not ten feet from the door to the elevator. Disappointed, the security guard pressed the button to ascend to the first floor. Perplexed, the women left the building wondering what had just happened to them.

  In paranormal theory, what those who rode the elevator into hospital hell experienced is called a warp, or a tear in the fabric of time. Strictly speaking, virtually every sighting of a ghost or scene from the past could be considered a warp.

  Their experience could be written off as just two tired women experiencing what is clearly impossible—a dream of exactly the same scene. Except for one thing. It happened again.

  I was autographing books at the Gettysburg College Bookstore a few years back. A young couple came up and purchased some Ghosts of Gettysburg volumes. They said that they already owned the first book. The man leaned a little closer and said, “You know your elevator story? We’re friends with the woman that happened to.”

  I was interested that these two strangers and I had a mutual friend, “Oh,” I said. “Then you know . . .” and I mentioned the names of the two participants in my original story. The puzzled look on their faces was disturbing.

  “No. We’ve never heard of those people. Our friend’s name was . . .” and they gave me a completely different name.

  At first I was confused. “That’s not the name of either of the people I wrote about.”

  The looks on their faces were just as adamant. They knew this woman personally; she was a solid, upright individual. She wasn’t the type to make things up. I asked them what she had told them.

  She had been working for an accounting firm out of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. They were doing an audit at Pennsylvania Hall because it was the administration building for Gettysburg College. Someone had asked her to go to the cars parked outside and get some papers. She got in the elevator. The elevator malfunctioned and, instead of stopping at the first floor, it descended into the basement and into a scene for which she was not prepared: men being sliced up like pieces of butcher’s meat by a bloody surgeon; men in dank, rust-colored corners, quivering from shock and loss of blood; and orderlies carting piles of crimson limbs from operating table to weltering corners, dark and slick with blood.

  I asked them if they were still friends and they said yes. I asked if she still lived in Lancaster and they said no. She lives in Denver, Colorado. I asked if they minded if I called her. They said no problem and gave me her number.

  A few days later I called. She was pleasant and not reluctant to talk about her experience, although still, in her voice, was that tone that can only be described as questioning what exactly had happened to her that afternoon. She repeated the story I had heard from her friends almost verbatim. She added a few details that her friends had not known about. It is my experience after interviewing hundreds of witnesses to the paranormal that the events leave an indelible impression on people’s minds that is usually never forgotten until death—and perhaps not even then.

  This, then, makes three individuals at two separate times who have experienced a descent into what would seem to be the impossible. (At this writing I am tracking down what may be a third incident involving the elevator that drops into a man-made hell on earth.) Of course, if these separate incidents were all that has occurred in “Old Dorm,” they would be enough to convince even the most ardent skeptic that something out of the ordinary was happening there.

  The Blue Boy at Stevens Hall

  Other stories from Gettysburg are nearly as legendary. There’s the Blue Boy of Stevens Hall on the Gettysburg College campus, whose face—and face alone—hovers on cold winter nights outside the window to peer in at the young women studying on the third floor.

  The fact that the youthful face levitates to the third floor is strange enough. Stranger still is the fact that it is tinged a deathly blue, as if the boy has spent too much time out in the cold. Rumors from the college hint that his countenance has been seen recently as well. And an experience by a family on a ghost tour places a sighting within the last year.

  Gettysburg College’s Stevens Hall, home to the famous Blue Boy.

  In 1994, I created walking tours based upon my Ghosts of Gettysburg books. The first route took our customers down Carlisle Street and through the Gettysburg College campus.

  Nearly everyone who takes our tours wants to know: Have the guides ever seen anything spooky or heard any stories of the supernatural at Gettysburg? The answer is yes, and at least one guide on our Carlisle Street tour took the time to record a bizarre and unexplainable sighting at Stevens Hall.

  During his tour he noticed a man, woman, and boy standing by the pine tree near Stevens having an animated conversation. After every other person in the tour had left, they approached the guide. The man, referring to a statement our guide had made at the beginning of the walk, asked, “You said you don’t set anything up on these tours, right?” Our guide answered in the affirmative and, curious, asked if the man had seen anything. The man began to say something, then stopped and said, “No, forget it. You’ll just think I’m crazy.” Our guide assured him that, in our business, we hear a lot of weird things from completely sane people.

  Convinced that he would not be ridiculed, the
man began his story. He said that while the guide was telling the tale of the Blue Boy, he had noticed a movement in a bush at the northwest corner of Stevens Hall. He claimed that there was a face peering out from the bush. His wife concurred: She saw the same thing. Both said that it appeared to be the face of a young boy, perhaps fifteen or sixteen years old, and that the face had a strange bluish tinge to it. Interestingly (and perhaps a clue to the paranormal nature of the sighting), the man saw the figure from the waist up, yet his wife only saw the face. Whoever it was, he appeared to be playing hide-and-seek with them. Whenever they would look toward the bush, the indigo-tinged face would pull back into the foliage; when they looked away, he would appear again. The guide asked if they could see any style of clothing or hat. The husband said that he appeared to have some type of hat. The guide, who was dressed in period clothing, pointed to his own slouch hat, but the man said no, it was more like a cap. The guide was a reenactor, and the headgear the man described sounded to him like the famous short-brimmed forage cap so common to the American Civil War soldier.

  The Woman in White at Spangler’s Spring

  Gettysburg has its own Woman in White who roams the battlefield near Spangler’s Spring for some unknown reason. She seems to be searching for something known only to her. Although the original story I heard came from unknown sources, at least six others have had eyewitness encounters with the Woman in White.

  One gentleman who grew up in Gettysburg recounted how, as a boy, he rode his bicycle out to Spangler’s Spring at dusk and saw, across the fields, a particularly upright column of mist that would move and then seemingly collapse to the ground, then rise up again as if it were intelligently searching for something, or someone, lying on the ground around it. For several minutes, he watched the “mist” doing something he’d never seen mist do before or since.

  A woman in white is said to roam the area around Spangler’s Spring, at the base of Culp’s Hill in Gettysburg.

  Then there were the two nurses who went out on the battlefield one Halloween night in search of ghosts. They both were amused about their quest, being solid, no-nonsense individuals both by temperament and vocation. Yet when they parked at Spangler’s Spring and began to see the apparition of a young, lovely woman grow from a small ball of light at the base of one of the trees, their reactions told of the strange alternate reality whose horizon they had just crossed.

  One was so moved she began to cry. “She’s so beautiful . . . and so sad.” The other in the passenger’s seat was so frightened she started the car and helped the driver, who was nearly blinded by tears, to steer out of the area.

  The Phantom Battalion at Little Round Top

  Another sighting that would seem to take on legendary status is the famous Phantom Battalion, or Phantom Regiment. The story was originally told to me by one of the older park rangers at Gettysburg and apparently happened to him sometime in the early 1960s, before the reenacting craze had taken hold. He was accompanying some dignitaries around the battlefield and they had stopped at the summit of Little Round Top for the view and an explanation of the fighting there. Just as they were about to leave, a unit of soldiers marched from the woods below, began a demonstration of their military skills maneuvering about the field, and then retreated back into the woods.

  The dignitaries were impressed that the National Park Service thought they were so important as to put on such a demonstration just for them. When they returned to the park headquarters, they demanded to see the supervisor and proceeded to thank him vociferously for the battle reenactment he had arranged just for them.

  Needless to say, both rangers were utterly confused because no program was scheduled, nor were there enough reenactors in the entire nation at that time to put on such a show, but managed to assure the visitors that they were glad the dignitaries enjoyed their “experience.”

  Since I heard the original story, several more have emerged, mostly centered on the same base of Little Round Top or the Wheat-field area of the battlefield. The best example is the story of a family out on an early-morning battlefield tour.

  The Phantom Battalion has been seen in this area of the second day’s battlefield at Gettysburg.

  A woman, her son, and their dog were on a dawn excursion. They had just turned off of the Emmitsburg Road onto the Wheat-field Road and were cresting the hill at the Peach Orchard when they saw a large unit of Union soldiers marching across the misty field. She stopped the car to watch, but something seemed out of place. Their dog was growling, apparently seeing the same thing the humans were witnessing. Impressed with what they thought was a crack reenactment unit in an early-morning drill, they watched for several minutes. The group of soldiers, in perfect alignment, wheeled, about-faced, marched around, and then did something no reenactment unit has yet to accomplish. As some joggers crested the hill, the soldiers vanished into thin air.

  The dog growling at the Phantom Battalion is more important than it would seem. When humans witness a paranormal event, we do it with numerous explanations as to why what we are seeing cannot be real—something under my contacts, my imagination, I must be hallucinating, I had too much to drink, and so on. Animals, especially dogs, simply become “alert.” If they are alert to something, it must be there; they must be seeing something. That is why accounts of animals “seeing” ghosts—and they are numerous—are indicative of the existence of ghosts.

  The Cashtown Inn

  During the off-season in Gettysburg, with the interest in ghost hunting piqued by various television programs, we conduct paranormal investigations with our team of experts in the field. We’ll offer a weekend stay in one of the local haunted hotels or bed-and-breakfasts and conduct several investigations of known haunted sites.

  One of the more active and perennial haunted sites is the Cash-town Inn, a restaurant and bed-and-breakfast about seven miles west of Gettysburg. It dates back to the late eighteenth century, and during the Civil War, it served as both the headquarters of Confederate general A. P. Hill and a field hospital on the Confederate retreat, so the potential for ghosts lingering there is quite high. Scores of experiences from overnight guests, former and current owners, and our investigations confirm everything that has been said about the place is true.

  One night another member of our team and I placed a Bushnell infrared gamecam in the bar of the Cashtown Inn. This type of camera was designed to take pictures of animals at night moving along a trail in the woods using infrared technology. We knew that the owner locks the bar every night after he closes, so it would be secured until morning. The nice thing about the gamecam is that you don’t have to stay up all night to capture any activity. As well, everything is time-stamped. The next morning when we examined the camera, at 35 minutes after midnight, there’s a bright, human-shaped figure moving past the trip zone. It’s a great picture of the owner as he is finishing locking the bar. Then, at 44 minutes after midnight, there is another figure that trips the camera. No one was in the locked bar when the photo was taken. There is no explanation—no natural explanation—as to what the image is. But there certainly is a supernatural explanation.

  An infrared camera captured this image of an entity after closing time at the Cashtown Inn.

  Gettysburg ɛ Northern Railroad Engine House

  One of the other highly active spots is the Gettysburg & Northern Railroad engine house, which sits on a part of Gettysburg’s first day’s battlefield not owned by the National Park Service. Since the railroad is privately owned and the engine house is posted, the house is another site exclusive to our investigation team. Two-hour investigations there have yielded numerous EVPs, including communication from “Em,” who was originally very loud—so loud as to make the EVP unintelligible. Finally, I asked Em if she could talk a little more quietly.

  Upon playback, in front of a number of skeptical railroad executives, a female voice whispered, “I’ll be quiet.”

  On later investigations, a road safety barrel was forcibly kicked by an unseen f
oot from a tire upon which it was resting, and footsteps on an engine were heard by everyone in the group. The sounds of someone invisible walking lasted for eight minutes. I asked the manager if that engine might be cooling off and contraction of the metal the cause for the noises. He replied that the engine had been parked there for a month, was cold, and had been drained of all liquids.

  Ghosts of Gettysburg

  Another site we investigate is the Ghosts of Gettysburg Candlelight Walking Tours® headquarters, a structure which dates back to 1834. One of the misconceptions visitors to Gettysburg have is that the ghosts only hang out on the battlefield. What they fail to realize is that the town itself was battlefield, too. Several spots in the town were fought over, such as Kuhn’s Brickyard in the northeast corner of town. Confederates chased down and shot Federals on the streets visitors drive on. A chaplain was mistakenly killed on the steps of a church on Chambersburg Street. A “rubble” barricade was built across Baltimore Street right in front of the Ghosts of Gettysburg headquarters building for Confederates to fight behind.

  There are several resident ghosts in the tour headquarters building, including the feisty Mrs. Kitzmiller, who bought the house right after the battle and owned it longer than anyone; several soldiers from Georgia who may have been wounded and brought to the house; and “Hank,” a Louisiana soldier who goes on duty after the lights are turned off. Several people have literally “run into” Hank and all report he is “linebacker-sized.” At least two children’s spirits remain in the house. In a recent experiment, they moved pendulums on a rack while setting off an EMF (electromagnetic field) meter, all recorded on video, of course. Members of our group have been pushed by the invisible children. The bathroom door handle has been jiggled by tiny, unseen hands. And three distinct footsteps coming down the wooden steps were heard by me and the group members—and everyone in the group was already downstairs! Mrs. Kitzmiller, a proper Victorian lady, tells our mediums she’s upset that my wife Carol doesn’t put out cookies and tea for our guests, not realizing that in modern times, without a food license, that might be illegal. After Carol put out some tiny wafer cookies as a gesture, I asked Mrs. Kitzmiller how she liked the cookies. The EVP was adamant: “I hate them,” a disembodied voice said.