Ghosts of Gettysburg II

by Mark Nesbitt

  Perhaps that is how it will be one day with ghosts and life after death and currently unexplained energies. Perhaps we will understand enough about energy and time and parallel universes to, if not control our journey into the other world, at least know how it happens. Until then, all we can do is ponder…

  ***************

  Chapter 4: A Wrinkle In Time

  I have eaten your bread and salt.

  I have drunk your water and wine.

  The deaths ye died I have watched beside,

  And the lives ye led were mine.

  —Rudyard Kipling

  In recent years Gettysburg has been the scene of several re-enactments of some of the numerous battles that took place during July 1, 2, 3, 1863. They are usually “choreographed” by historians of the various re-enactment units that are to take part in the mock battle.

  Most of the people who do re-enacting nowadays are serious hobbyists and pride themselves upon the accuracy of their “kit”—uniform or dress and accouterments—and their knowledge of the life in Civil War times. As a hobby it combines primitive camping and sleeping, cooking, and eating outdoors with the love of history.

  It is a hobby to many of them in name only. Some spend thousands of dollars just to procure the minimum uniform or outfit necessary to portray life during the mid-19th Century. Those who have chosen to portray cavalrymen spend additional funds in the upkeep of horses, trailering, stabling, veterinary bills, shoeing and tack. The women who participate spend hundreds of hours sewing their own day-dresses and gowns, since that was often the way women actually produced clothing in a barely industrialized North and even less industrialized South in the 19th Century.

  Often when in camp—and nearly always when in “battle”—they remain true to their character, speaking in Civil War lingo and talking of the last fight, of war news, and of war-related social events back home.

  In 1981, on the 118th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, a large reenactment was planned. During the last days of June and first sultry day of July 1981, re-enactors from all over the country converged on Gettysburg to live, eat, sleep, and “fight” near these hallowed grounds. Being the way they are, the re-enactors, as much to enjoy their hobby, were here to commemorate the brave men and women who sacrificed at Gettysburg to make this the nation it is today.

  A friend of mine who is as serious a re-enactor as one can get, who, in fact, actually makes the reproduction uniforms from originals that he has studied, was participating in the mock battle of July 2,1981. He is a collector of original weapons, accouterments and clothing, and studies them almost under a microscope to make sure the clothing he reproduces is completely authentic. He is well known among re-enactors for his knowledge.

  The day was incredibly hot and humid even for Gettysburg in July. The men were soaked to the skin and covered with grime and powder stains from the re-enactment. But, as uncomfortable as they were, they seemed to appreciate it since that was the way it was for their ancestors who fought 118 years before.

  The day was drawing to a close and camp duties were over. My acquaintance and a comrade, still dressed in the uniform of Union soldiers, took a walk on the battlefield to cool off in the misty twilight.

  They reached Little Round Top, the scene exactly 118 years before of some of the most savage fighting in the Civil War, now part of the gentle National Military Park where visitors come to ponder. They climbed the small hill and sat on the slope to watch the sun set magnificently over the South Mountains to the west.

  The west slope of Little Round Top with the Valley of Death below.

  Perhaps there were some moments of contemplative silence between them as they looked out over the now peaceful valley between Little Round Top, and Devil’s Den and Houck’s Ridge. It doesn’t take much in the cool evening, sitting on that historic hill to imagine scores of troops surging back and forth, leaving bloody heaps of bodies like gory footprints through the wheatfields and pastures. Through the valley—now named by someone who knew it well, the Valley of Death—meanders a small stream. Once called Plum Run, it was re-named after the battle “Bloody Run,” for the few horrible hours in American history that it literally ran red with the blood of the men who were wounded and crawled to it for succor.

  Being familiar with the battle, they probably could have named some of the men who fought there, on the slope before them, 118 years ago almost to the hour. No doubt they thought of Joshua Chamberlain and his rugged men from the rocky coasts and forests of Maine, who fought with the desperation of men in the last ditch—which is exactly where they were at the very end of the entire Union line—and died that way as well.

  Looking out over the valley, perhaps they thought of old Lieutenant Colonel Bulger, commander of the 47th Alabama, silver-haired, shot and bleeding through the lungs and slumped down by one of the trees and left behind as his men were driven back. A young, upstart of an officer from a New York unit demanded his sword or he would shoot him. “You may kill and be damned,” the old man wheezed, unafraid of neither the youngster nor that much older imposter, death.1

  They could have remembered Confederate General Oates’s comment that the blood stood in puddles in some places on the rocks. Looking just beyond Houck’s Ridge, they may have seen in their minds’ eyes courageous Colonel Edward Cross who, despite his week-long, recurring premonitions of violent death, still strode at the head of his men into the hissing maelstrom of the Wheatfield. His commander, General Hancock, perhaps noticing the black handkerchief tied bandanna-style around his head rather than the customary red one he always wore into battle, called out to him the promise of promotion: “Cross, this is the last time you’ll fight without a star.” “Too late, General,” replied the morose colonel, already resigned to his fate, “This is my last battle.” He was cut down to bleed and die amongst the rapidly reddening stalks of wheat.

  In the distance they could see the Peach Orchard. Perhaps they thought of young corporal Thomas Bignall, Co. C, 2nd New Hampshire, who had, along with others of his company, been issued the hideous Gardiner’s explosive minie ball. An artillery shell struck his cartridge box driving the 40 or so rounds of explosive bullets into his body and igniting them. For nearly half a minute his friends watched, horribly transfixed, as the bullets continued to explode within his quivering body in its prostrate dance of death.2

  From the scrub brush just down the slope the two men heard a rustling and saw a soldier of the Federal persuasion emerge from the bushes on the rocky hillside and begin wearily climbing toward them amid the lengthening shadows and cooling air.

  “Hello, fellows,” he said with an excellent northern twang. “Mighty hot fight there today, weren’t it?” My friend and his associate agreed as to the heat of the day as well as smiling at the authenticity of the man’s kit. Sweat stained his indigo hat and black grime still blackened his mouth and teeth from where he had bitten numerous cartridges to pour their powder down the barrel of his musket.

  They were about to compliment him upon his authenticity when he reached into his cartridge box and pulled out a couple of rounds of ammunition. “Here,” he said. “Take these. You boys may need ’em tomorrow.” He gave them a strange, wizened look, then turned and began making his way back down the slope of Little Round Top.

  My friend and his companion watched for a few seconds as the stranger began his descent of the slope back into the evening. Rolling the cartridges over in his hand, my friend looked at them more closely, and remarked at the incredible amount of work it must have taken to produce such authentic-looking cartridges. They seemed to be original: Tied, folded correctly with just a hint of beeswax for lubrication, in every way seemingly an exact replica of Civil War era ammunition. Then he felt the minie ball inside each one. Re-enactors are forbidden by organizers and National Park Rangers to carry either ramrods or “live” rounds onto the field of a re-enactment for safety purposes, yet these contained the minie ball rolled within.

  They looked down the slope on
Little Round Top into the Valley of Death but could no longer see the soldier. A few yards down the slope he had simply vanished into the gathering, pale mists which at Gettysburg have that distinctive shape of long, strung-out lines of infantry mustered in formation.

  My friend still has the ancient rounds of ammunition, treasured yet somewhat confusing mementoes of a small hole between worlds, a tiny glitch in the seemingly, but often illusionary, continuity of time.3

  ***************

  Chapter 5: Slaying Days In Eden

  …Three of these, college mates of mine.

  What far dreams drift over the spirit,

  of the days when we questioned what life should be,

  and answered for ourselves what we would be!

  —Major General Joshua Chamberlain

  Gettysburg has changed a good bit since the first three tumultuous days in July 1863, when chaos held high court and the fields around the town were turned from nurturing corn and wheat to the planting of a much more valuable crop.

  Gettysburg today, as it was during the American Civil War, is a small town trying to move ahead in time with concerns for its inhabitants’ livelihoods and welfare. However, growth is and must be controlled more carefully than other small towns since there is so much hallowed ground in and around Gettysburg, sanctified by the blood and suffering of patriots from both sides who believed enough in their causes to die for them. Visitors from all over the world come to Gettysburg to try to understand this greatest of all human tragedies. Thoughtful people coming to Gettysburg are almost like petitioners going to confession: they come; they feel sorrow; most admit a profound shame for this Cain versus Abel play once acted out on a vastly more grotesque scale; their act of contrition over, they go home. We who live in Gettysburg must pay some of the cost for the continued cleansing of the souls of those who visit the fields of valor by carefully watching so that progress doesn’t over-run them. There is even the feeling in those who truly love and appreciate the importance of these fields that those who allow or encourage such incursion of the profane onto the sanctified must someday sacrifice for their mindlessness of the past.

  Yet growth is inevitable. At one time, the time of the Civil War, the dusty roads from Mummasburg, Harrisburg, and Carlisle all came together barely a full block north of the center square of Gettysburg—called in the 1860s, “The Diamond”—and just a hundred or so yards north of where the railroad ended at the depot. Now, of course, all that has changed.

  Around 1860, Jacob and Agnes Sheads built their wooden frame house near what was then the end of town, probably hoping for the peace and quiet living at the edge of town would bring. Little did they know that the juncture of three main roads at their property would make their gentle home a focal point for the fiery emotions of soldiers heading to battle and the fearful despair of soldiers defeated, and of the personally traumatic emotions of one soldier in particular who would suffer and pass into the other world from the calm confines of their abode.

  Carlisle Street ca. 1910 (Gettysburg Bicentennial Album,

  courtesy William A. Frassanito).

  Some of the residents of Gettysburg who remained in the town after hearing rumors of the approaching rebel army heard a more ominous sound carry through the streets and alleyways early on the morning of July 1,1863. It started with a small crackle, a pop…pop…pop, pop…pop, coming from the ridges and roads to the west. Later they heard roars, great sheets of sound tearing in from the west and north. Soon, more soldiers dressed in blue came marching through the town, past where the Sheads had built their home. Some took the road to the left, toward Mummasburg; others marched straight out the Carlisle Pike; still others strode northeast, out the Harrisburg Road. Many of the soldiers spoke little English being of Germanic extraction, members of Major General O. O. Howard’s 11th Corps. Perhaps some soldiers of the 11th Corps looked a little nervous at this, the very next battle after Chancellorsville, where Stonewall Jackson’s men had driven them like sheep.

  It wasn’t many hours before Howard’s men came tumbling back past the Sheads’ house, some panic-stricken, routed once again from their contact with the enemy. Confederates were only a block or so behind them and shooting as they came. Any Union troops who attempted to make a stand—at the county poor house on the Harrisburg Road, or at Pennsylvania College on the Carlisle Road—were soon driven away by victorious Southerners. The entire Union line north and west of town had crumbled. As a South Carolina flag was planted in the Diamond, Confederates no doubt rushed past the Sheads’ simple frame house feeling as if they had won Confederate independence. The small area around the Sheads’ house, where three roads met, became a bottleneck of emotional energies as the hurrying troops—both vanquished and victors—all converged.

  The Union dead and dying were scattered about like leaves and twigs after a windstorm. According to records, one poor Union soldier ended up at the Sheads’ house, suffering through the stifling first two weeks of July until finally, mercifully, he died in the house on July 15.1

  The years came and went. The town expanded, and the farm fields to the north of the Sheads’ house began to fill with some of the larger homes in the area. The fields of fury north of the Sheads’ house where men fought and ran for their lives were, after a few years, hardly recognizable to even the soldiers who had participated in the battle. The “battlefield” became the area a mile or so to the north, considered with each ensuing generation, to be beyond where the town ended. The people living in the houses had little realization of the emotional pain and physical agony once spilled out where they peacefully slept. Even the roads to Mummasburg and Harrisburg were re-routed to make room for the expansion of Gettysburg in the late 19th century. The College grew and changed its name from Pennsylvania College to Gettysburg College, in part to take advantage of the strange kind of fame the great sacrifice of men in battle brought.

  The Sheads house changed hands a number of times. A title search shows that the property passed from the Sheads to one Hart Gilbert who willed the property to Jane Gilbert. She sold the house to Samuel Waltman and Emma his wife, in 1909. George Hemmler bought the house in 1921 and it stayed in the Hemmler family until 1942 when it was purchased by Morris Gitlin and his wife Ester. After Ester died in 1968, their daughter inherited it from Morris. The house eventually fell into the hands of an absentee landlord. They began renting to college students and the Sheads house became the temporary abode of groups of students that changed from year to year. It also seems to have become the permanent abode of some who come from a world unknown, and who remain, over the decades, unchanged.

  Dr. Charles Emmons, Professor of Sociology at Gettysburg College, was gracious enough to open his files to me for both of my books on ghosts in Gettysburg. Dr. Emmons has written a fine cross-cultural study on ghosts in China titled Chinese Ghosts and ESP: A Study of Paranormal Beliefs and Experiences (The Scarecrow Press, Inc. Metuchen, NJ and London: 1982).

  His studies show that there are many commonalities in the spiritual experiences between cultures. His students are encouraged to collect their own data and write about paranormal experiences.2 Needless to say, they have a wealth of primary source material right here in Gettysburg. At least three students submitted papers that include the testimony of two different sets of women who experienced similar occurrences within the confines of the Sheads House.3

  The data was collected first in the winter of 1979. Then, after the students moved out, data was again collected from several other students living in the house in 1983. The interesting part about this house is that two separate sets of data were collected, and the supernatural occurrences continued. There was no connection between the two sets of students except that they happened to live within the walls of the same house. The chronology is most important in that the individuals perceiving the paranormal events have changed, but the events go on. This is a pretty good definition of a “haunting” according to most sources. Therefore, I will emphasize the chronology of the collecti
ons.4

  September 1979—The school year had just begun and a few of the women had moved back in after the house had been vacant most of the summer. The livable areas in the house provide three floors for occupancy. After hauling stereos and clothes most of the late afternoon, it was evening and two women who had just moved in to their downstairs rooms were relaxing in the semi-dark living room. Suddenly they heard the unmistakable sound in the dining room of glass breaking, as if a whole shelf of glasses had torn loose and crashed to the floor. They looked at one another quizzically. Neither of them remembered putting any glassware in the dining room that day. As they rose to get the broom and dustpan to clean up the mess, between the sounds of the cars moving up the dark street outside, they distinctly heard footsteps crunching on the broken bits of glass and moving slowly towards them. They bolted out the door and ran next door to get the young men who had also just moved in to their apartment for the year. Armed with baseball bats to protect themselves from the clumsy intruder, the men came running to attempt to confront the prowler who had either been hiding in the house while the women were moving in, or had slipped in while they were out at their vehicles. Cautiously they turned the corner into the dining room and flipped on the lights. To their surprise, no one was there. And, as well to their surprise, there was no broken glass to be found anywhere.

  September, 1979, one week later—A female friend who was left alone in one of the downstairs apartments told her friends that while they were gone she had heard some strange, distinctly loud, but indescribable noises coming from within the walls of the house and had felt cold flashes, even though it was still warm in early September.