by Mark Nesbitt
Perhaps that is why there are some places along the route of Jeb Stuart where strange, unexplainable occurrences continue to happen.
Carlisle Army Barracks, 28 miles from Gettysburg in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, may seem too far away to be included in a book on the ghosts of Gettysburg. But aside from the fact that it held great emotional ties to Jeb Stuart and many of the officers under his command who fought with him at Gettysburg, there is indeed, at least one recurring link which, for a while, found itself back in Gettysburg frequently.
Stuart had approached the Carlisle Barracks during his ride to Gettysburg. There were a number of Union soldiers there and he didn’t want it to threaten the rear of Lee’s invading army which he knew to be in the area. In spite of the fact that as a pre-Civil War Cavalry training center it held special attachments for many of the men in the ranks with Stuart, because of military exigencies, he was compelled to set it to the torch.
Many of the barracks, where men like Fitzhugh Lee lived when he was instructor of cavalry, had to be burned. Stuart’s own wife had lived at the barracks as a young girl when her father was commandant of the post. In fact, the daughter of Captain D. H. Hastings, Commandant of the post, was named Flora, after Stuart’s wife. Stuart, before he ordered the burning to begin, spoke with some townspeople about little Flora.2
Carlisle Barracks ca. 1861 (Miller’s Photographic History of the Civil War).
Stuart, according to the Stuart family, had visited Carlisle in October 1859, while he was showing off a device he had invented which facilitated a mounted-man’s wearing of a saber. While many of the visitation records at Carlisle are sketchy (since many had been burned in the fires Stuart set and the pandemonium and looting after his departure) and his visit is not documented in writing, still it would make sense for him to display his device to the Cavalry Board of officers there.3
Other officers in his ranks as well held fond memories for the old post and barracks where pre-war friendships were forged. And, of course, even if they had never attended classes in Carlisle, they certainly had heard of the fine cavalry school there.
It must have been with great regret and sorrow that Stuart ordered the firing of the place that held so many memories for so many of his officers and was the childhood home of his wife. But there was a battle at Gettysburg to fight…
The barracks have been remodeled to accommodate not the spartan life of soldiers being trained for a career on horseback at the frontiers of the American West, but for the lifestyles of modem professional soldiers and their families. Where austere dormitory-style rooms once heard the pencil-scratchings of men figuring appropriate quantities of fodder and horseshoes for a staff ride, officers now key in to personal computers the logistics of freeze-dried Meals Ready to Eat, the number of armor-piercing shells needed, and the effects of wind-blown sand on thermal imaging devices. Almost every remnant of Stuart’s burning of the barracks is gone.
It is a guarded qualification: Almost. It seems that someone or something is still not happy with Stuart’s decision to leave the Federal Army he once pledged his allegiance to, and then burn the United States Cavalry Barracks at Carlisle.
Several years ago, I had the opportunity to work with Michael Gnatek, one of America’s finest painters whose art graces the walls, in mural form, of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington D. C. His subject this time was Jeb Stuart. He produced, in colored pencil, a remarkable likeness of he great general and called it ”The Last Cavalier.“ It was printed up as a fine art, limited edition print, and purchased by Civil War aficionados across the country. One who bought one of the prints was himself a soldier and was being sent to the prestigious school at Carlisle Barracks to further his studies in the military arts. With him he took his magnificent print of Stuart to hang on the wall of the restored barracks in which he was billeted.
Soon he was in Gettysburg at a local shop which did the framing of the piece. The framed print had dropped from the wall and the glass had smashed. But the circumstances were rather odd. The nails holding the print on the wall still remained in the wall; the strong wire behind the frame was intact; the frame itself was not out of line or damaged as it should have been had it dropped several feet to the floor; and the glass was broken in a strange way, pushed in, it seemed, by a force from the front. The people at the American Frame Shoppe in Gettysburg recently described it to me. It was like someone had lifted the print off the wall, set it down on the floor, and planted a heavy, booted foot on it, right in the middle of Stuart’s image.
They fixed the glass and mitigated the scratches on the print as best they could. They returned it to its owner and thought no more about it…until he returned a few weeks later with the glass again smashed in the very same way. He explained to the framers the circumstances: again, the nails remained imbedded in the wall; again inspection revealed the wire well-attached; again the frame itself was undamaged; and again, the heavy smashing to the front of the glass right over the famous Confederate general’s face. The glass was replaced, the print restored, and sent on its way back up to the barracks…only to return again a few weeks later, smashed.
This time the officer and his wife were awakened in the night by the sound of their print being broken. The sound was not the sound of a picture falling from the wall, but a popping, crunching sound, like a heavy foot on the glass. In the middle of the night he had gotten up to find, once again, that the image of the famous cavalryman who ordered the burning of the United States Cavalry Barracks at Carlisle had been desecrated. Again it was fixed and returned. Perhaps he was too embarrassed when (or if) it happened a fourth time to bring it back to the same frame shop; perhaps he was transferred from the Carlisle Barracks to another billet which proved safer for his much-loved print of the man who ordered Carlisle Barracks burned.
No doubt Stuart made enemies by his decision to burn the barracks. But for some loyal spirit—perhaps a former commandant and angry father-in-law—to hold a grudge for six score years waiting for just the right moments to avenge his old post, is indeed a study in eternal patience.
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Chapter 8: Lower Than Angels
All go to one place; all are from the dust,
and all turn to dust again.
Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward,
and the spirit of the beast goes down to the earth ?
—Ecclesiastes
Not every apparition seen on the Gettysburg College campus can be associated with the college itself. Once again, anyone interested in studying what appear to be visions of individuals who lived in another lifetime must realize that the world did not look to them as it looks to us now.
During the Battle of Gettysburg, there were only three buildings on the Pennsylvania College Campus (which is what Gettysburg College was called prior to the notoriety the great battle brought to the name ”Gettysburg“) and they were in the general vicinity of where Pennsylvania Hall is today. The area to the north of what used to be the three buildings comprising the college was open farm fields out to the road to Mummasburg. There, along the roadside, stood a brick structure some call the toll house. It remains today, but it would take a great imagination to stand on the wide porch of the old toll house and try to peer through the houses and dormitories that have been built since the battle.
Glatfelter Hall is a magnificent brick edifice built in the late 1880s, with a classic, dark clock tower that seems to glower over most of the campus. The chimes bellow on the hour and, depending upon which way the wind happens to be blowing, can be heard around the north and west end of town.
The Glatfelter clock tower already has a reputation of being the site of a vision of a woman dressed in Victorian garb who can be seen floating back and forth through the openings in the bell section. The legend goes that, beautiful as she may appear and beckoning as she may be, it is unwise to climb the stairs in the tower to meet her. Broken-hearted by her betrothed's death in some unnamed battle, she leapt to her own demise f
rom the clock tower years before. Like the ancient sirens, she is said to try and seduce young college men into climbing the tower and taking one last eternal step with her from the tower to the ground.
Jose Pimienta, in a study for Dr. Emmons, did some crackerjack research, speaking to college historians, librarians and archivists, and determined that no female student had committed suicide by leaping from the tower—or any other way—during the time period from 1888, when Glatfelter was built, and World War I. He covered two wars, and no grieving woman cheated the grim reaper for the lost love of a man. Still, there were those original sightings of the woman in the tower….
Glatfelter Hall and Stine Hall lawn.
Yet another story has arisen concerning Glatfelter which, considering the source, may have more credence.
The security people at Gettysburg College no doubt know more than some of them are willing to tell. Pinning them down is sometimes easy, sometimes difficult depending upon with whom you’re talking. For Jose’s paper, the onetime head of security at the college was very helpful.
He had an experience in the spring of 1971, and then another three years later, both at night as he was patrolling the campus and locking up Glatfelter.
He had completed his rounds through the majestic structure, locking all the doors to the outside, from the clock tower to the basement, and had been through every area shutting off lights to make sure no professor was working late. He had paused to use the restroom facilities before leaving and locking himself out. Suddenly, he was jolted by the deafening sound of chains in the hallway outside. He described the sound as very loud but short in duration. Rushing into the hall to see what it could have been, he was confronted by a set of wet footprints in a perfect pattern that ran across the hall. The problem was that there were no doors at either end of the prints: they entered the hall through one wall and left it through the other.
Three or four years later, he was parked in the college security vehicle, in the parking lot (now gone) of the old dining hall. It was approaching the end of his shift, about 5:20 a.m. on a cold, damp November morning. Early morning frost had settled in a fresh, hoary coat upon the land which, before the expansion of the college, had felt the cadenced shuffle of uniformed men at arms advancing to battle and then the broken hobble of the wounded as they made their way back from combat. The security man’s eye was caught by a figure crossing the yard in front of Stine Hall advancing from where Plank Gym stands. A student out that early on a cold November morning might seem out of place, but not unusual, except for the attire. The officer thought he was wearing some sort of uniform—a postman’s uniform, he said—but of gray, heavy material. The security officer saw white socks and only one dark glove on his left hand. But the man’s gait was stuttered, a strange, uneven limp. He continued to observe the man make his way across to the middle of the dormitory lawn and then…vanish.
Perplexed at this totally unreal vision, yet with a police officer’s professional curiosity to find out the facts, he left his car and walked over to the area. There, in the fresh frost before him were the uneven footprints of a person hobbling along. There could be seen the evidence, clearly cut in the white mantle, of a man’s passing. And there, before him where the footprints abruptly ended in the middle of the snow-covered lawn, was the undeniable evidence as well of a human’s sudden disembodiment.
We return to Pennsylvania Hall, scene of the unreal and accidental descent of two administrators late one night, into the Hades of a Civil War hospital somehow resurrected in the basement of the structure.1 Over the years there has been the recurring sighting of what some have called “the signalman” in the Cupola of Old Dorm. A student of Dr. Emmons recorded a strange occurrence one October evening that adds one more witness to whomever is doomed to stand guard eternally above the campus.
As a first year student, the young man had been an avowed skeptic. Like all the students, he had heard of the ghostly sentry who walks his eternal post above the campus late at night, following long forgotten orders and adhering to a duty with a supernatural compulsion. He laughed off the stories, because, of course, anyone who believes in ghosts must be crazy.
Then, one night, the student was walking across campus to relax after a particularly hard evening of studying. It was late, about 11:00 at night, when the student was strolling from the circle just to the north of Brua Hall toward towering Glatfelter. He noticed that night the beautiful full moon and as he walked he heard what he described as a ”rustling“ above and to his right. At first he thought it was a bird, but was compelled to look up at the cupola of Old Dorm. There, to his amazement, he saw the blurred shape of a human, half hidden by the lower rails of the cupola and the trees. The image was a foggy white color and wore a hat. The student could distinctly see what appeared to be a dark rifle upon his right shoulder and a lantern being held in his left hand, and though misty in color he seemed to be solid. Blinking his eyes to make sure he wasn’t seeing things, the student observed the ghostly soldier scanning the surrounding area as if on the qui vive, as all good lookouts should be. Then, suddenly, he began to peer in the direction of the student.
An icy chill ran up the student’s back. Was he now suddenly intruding upon the other world? Had he accidentally crossed that thin essence that separates us from them? Whatever the realization in his mind, he felt for the first time that he might become a victim of the dangerous-looking weapon the soldier carried. He turned and began to run as quickly as he could back to his dorm. In a few short minutes, with that brief glance across the great chasm, he was a skeptic no more.
His roommates reported that when he got back to the room he had broken into a cold sweat, was pale, shaking, and visibly upset. Convinced by his demeanor of the sincerity of his confession to what he had seen, they decided to call some friends and return to Old Dorm to investigate. Perhaps gaining courage from numbers, the brave young man decided to go with them, but only after he was assured that from their window in the dormitory, no one was visible in the cupola.
“Old Dorm” now called Pennsylvania Hall
Photo Courtesy of Darlene Perrone
As they crossed campus his fear was contagious: All were beginning to feel something strange under that full moon. They stood gazing up at the cupola when a security guard approached them to ask what was wrong. The young man told him of his experience and the officer recorded the information in his report book, seemingly finding the tale amusing.
Then, as they all stood there, growing louder and louder in the deathlike silence of that evening, a horrifying, cold, unearthly wail cut through the moon-flooded night. They later described it as ”high pitched, agonizing, and distinctly male,“ and lasting at least five long, blood-chilling seconds. On the battlefield where the rebel yell, a keen like the shriek of a banshee, once echoed among granite stained crimson, again it came to them across the centuries.
They all instinctively looked toward the cupola. They were convinced the horrible sound came from within the walls of Pennsylvania Hall. Amused no more, and convinced that what he heard signaled something completely out of the ordinary, the security guard called the Gettysburg Police Department for backup. When the other officer arrived, they searched the building together. The doors and windows were all locked. The entrance to the cupola was bolted shut. No one could have left the building without leaving a ground-floor door or window unlocked or without being seen by the several people gathered near Old Dorm.
The researcher verified all the facts later with the security office’s records and was told one other interesting thing by the chief of security and his assistant: This wasn’t the first time something of this nature had happened.
One doubts that it will be the last.
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Chapter 9: Castaway Souls
…alone I see this passing pageant,
—worn, thin hostages of the mortal.
—Major General Joshua Chamberlain
Jim Cooke and Davey Crockett, two morning deej
ays from a local radio station, called me just before Halloween 1991, to come on their program and talk about Ghosts of Gettysburg, which had just come out a couple weeks before. I did the show, read some stories and accepted phoned-in questions about the existence of ghosts on and around the Gettysburg battlefield. But more interesting than the experience on the radio was the invitation I received to accompany them—on Halloween, naturally—to two local houses in Gettysburg that were purportedly haunted.
The first was a local eating establishment and bed and breakfast, formerly a private home on Baltimore Street. While it remained a private home, the Civil War era house withstood numerous renovations to keep it in style with the changing times. The current owner has restored much of it to its quaint, 19th century appearance. It has become a Gettysburg landmark for outstanding food and exquisite Victorian ambience.
But being of the Civil War era, the edifice, like many Civil War houses in Gettysburg, contains more than just furniture and draperies, wall hangings and living people.
In fact, on sultry summer nights similar to those during which the battle was fought, the owner’s daughter gives “ghost tours” of the house, relating to visitors the uncanny noises and the unassisted movement of objects about the rooms reported by guests. One visitor incredulously saw her small baby levitate from one of the beds, lifted by some unseen matronly hands, perhaps to be comforted—or perhaps for some other more sinister reason—before the infant was let down gently once again.
But Cooke and Crockett decided they wanted something more from their broadcast that morning. They invited renowned psychic Karyol Kirkpatrick to accompany them to the two “haunted” houses in Gettysburg and do some psychic readings.
