Ghosts of Gettysburg II

by Mark Nesbitt

  Karyol has appeared on the “Donahue” and “PM Magazine” television programs and numerous times on local radio stations. She has helped several police departments solve “unsolvable” crimes, and at least half a dozen murderers are behind bars now because of her efforts. There was the phone call from a policeman on the car phone in a police van: He was transporting a body in the van to the local morgue. Over the phone Karyol described the body to him while she was hundreds of miles away. Every detail matched. The policeman listened patiently while Karyol described the deceased vividly, impressed—but not surprised—at her accuracy. He was used to working with her and her remarkable gifts.

  Cooke and Crockett arrived at the house on Baltimore Street at about 6:00 a.m. The first thing they must do on all remote broadcasts is to tap into the phone lines in the house from which they are broadcasting. Walking up the steps to the house, Karyol started smiling. She felt that odd, familiar feeling upon approaching the house that the living weren’t the only ones present and that her friends Cooke and Crockett were about to be treated to something strange.

  Immediately the deejays had problems with the phone hookup. Pressed by a rapidly approaching airtime, they suddenly realized that every one of the several lines into the house was dead. No dial tone, no lights on the phones, nothing. They hurried to patch into a line in a nearby house. By then they were behind schedule, but Karyol had already begun to visit some of the rooms in the house and receive distinct psychic impressions in each.

  She took notes, then came down to discuss her impressions over the radio. She had never been in the house before and knew nothing about what had transpired within the walls of the house during the savage fighting that occurred in the first three horrid days of July 1863.

  Karyol had several distinct impressions while she was in the garret, but only one that seemed out of place. “Clay,” she said. “Red clay,” was an impression that come to her and brought confusion to many of us, until the owner’s daughter told us that her father had discovered in his research that the Confederate troops stationed in the garret had been from Georgia. And while the distinctive red clay from Georgia had long before been worn from their shoes on the tedious march to Gettysburg, the homesick thoughts of some Georgia boys longing for their red clay farmland certainly must remain floating in that garret to this day.

  Karyol also mentioned that someone was trying to get across to her the distinct impression that there was a traitor somewhere in the house and that he didn’t want that traitor to give away their position. It only occurred to Jim Cooke later that, in this Confederate stronghold, by coincidence, all the men were wearing blue—blue shirts and blue jeans—and that their contact whom they kept calling back at the station, had a radio moniker of “The Captain.”

  It was time to move on to our next “haunted” house. Still the phone lines into this house were dead, as they had been since our entering it. Karyol and Davey had gone into the kitchen when he suddenly came running out and waved to us. “You’ve got to see this!” he said. As we jammed into the kitchen, Karyol was standing about five feet from the telephone on the wall. As she drew to within a foot or so of the phone, the LED lights on the dead phone suddenly went berserk, flashing up and down like a Christmas tree. She backed away and they stopped. She approached the phone and they started again. Then, suddenly, only one light, the one signifying “intercom”—meaning someone within the house—began flashing.

  Karyol reached for the handset and picked it up. The flashing stopped, but no one was on the inoperative line. She hung the phone up and the intercom light began flashing desperately again. The lines were still dead, but someone within the walls of the house still wanted to communicate with Karyol—someone they perhaps knew would be sympathetic to their pleas.

  She picked up the handset again. The flashing stopped and she listened. Again, no audible voice. Karyol closed her eyes and began talking. “You’re trapped in the past. You’re not needed there anymore,” she said eerily. “Walk toward the light. You don’t have to be a soldier anymore. Walk toward the light.” She hung up the phone.

  I asked her if she had heard anyone on the other end of the line. Karyol shook her head no and, pointing to her head, said that she’d heard him up here, inside. Suddenly the intercom light began flashing again. Everyone in that kitchen, from the owner’s daughter to the deejays, to the cook, to myself, was flabbergasted at the persistent flashing, the desperation with which this poor lost soul was trying to communicate with one he knew was sympathetic and who could guide him from his entrapment.

  Again she lifted up the receiver; again the flashing stopped; again she spoke to the spirit imprisoned in a time long past, of being able to free himself if he only tried, of walking out of the abhorrent darkness toward the light so often described by those who have had near-death experiences. “Walk toward the light.”

  But by now we were in a hurry. Cooke and Crockett had to move their equipment to the next house and prepare to broadcast. This unexpected brush with an unseen resident of the house had held us up. Yet, as we left the kitchen I looked back to see the intercom light flashing yet again in a desperate, lonely plea for release from an invisible spiritual prison.

  The Jennie Wade House is located at the edge of Gettysburg on the road to Baltimore. Actually there are three houses in Gettysburg associated with the young woman who would gain dubious fame through the odd circumstances of her single death during the three days in American History when death reigned over a small, fetid kingdom. There is the house on Baltimore Street where she was born; there is the house on Breckenridge Street where she lived; and there is the house at the edge of town, never owned by a Wade but rented to her sister, where she came to die.

  The facts surrounding her death are basic: She was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Compelled by sibling love to take care of her sister who had just given birth, she had temporarily moved into the house before Union and Confederate maneuvering placed it between their lines. Compelled also by the eternal pleadings of hungry soldiers, she was at her dough tray about 8:30 in the morning when a stray minie ball penetrated two doors and struck her in the back.

  The Jennie Wade House.

  Yet the rumor and innuendo about her life and family continue to this day, whispered and giggled about, but with very little substantiation. However, it appeared to Karyol and at least five others that morning, that someone associated with the Wade family was still not resting easy, vexed still after years of icy eternal sleep.

  That the Wade family was not well-off was common knowledge around Gettysburg in the decade before the Civil War. That the family was destined to struggle through hardships fated to be upon them now seems true. What the weird winds of time would do to disrupt even their memory was still to be seen.

  Jennie’s father had been convicted of larceny and sent to prison when she was 7-years-old. How prison life twisted him is evident: When he came home two years later, his wife was compelled to request the court to declare the former tailor insane. Off he went to the Adams County Alms House and left the family without a provider. Mrs. Wade and her daughters Georgia and Virginia (Jennie), took up the tailor business, probably raising some Gettysburg eyebrows in the process: Victorian women just didn’t run businesses; that was for the men. But the three women had to put food on the table for themselves and the three little boys in the family, and so they endured the whispers.

  And while the monied ladies of the town talked, the young Wade girls went on with their lives. Georgia married Louis McClellan—a Gettysburg boy already a soldier for the Federal cause—in 1862. They rented the north half of the house on the Baltimore Road where soon Georgia’s sister would die.

  Jennie was apparently in love with a childhood playmate, Johnston Skelly, known to all in Gettysburg as Jack. I say apparently because fate intervened before any public announcement could be made. But there is evidence: Found in the apron pocket of the girl upon her death was a photograph of handsome Jack Skelly, his image car
ried close to her even as she baked bread. It is almost certain the two had a relationship deeper than just friendship, yet that too would be marred with vows broken by destiny and an irony only death can orchestrate.1

  Some say they were engaged to be married, but that is a question that will remain forever unanswered. It took three deaths to silence the truth.

  Jack took a bullet in the battles around Winchester, standing in battle line with his other friends from Gettysburg who wore the blue on June 15,1863, in one of the dozens of fights that occurred during the month-and-a-half long Gettysburg Campaign. Lying wounded and helpless, dying as a prisoner of the rebels, he was surprised to see at his pallet an old friend from Gettysburg, Wesley Culp, in the uniform of the South. Wes had gone to Virginia before the war to follow his employer, and when conflict broke out, he stayed with the Virginia militia unit he had joined. Fate threw his unit against his boyhood playmates and then brought him face-to-face with his own past as he knelt next to Jack’s dying form.

  It is said that a deathbed request was made: If West ever made it back to Gettysburg, would he find Jack’s sweetheart and deliver one last message. Of course Wesley Culp agreed to his friend’s dying wish. He would find Jennie Wade and deliver the missive.

  Killed in the early morning hours of July 3, 1863, on the hill that bears his family name, Wes Culp was buried, his body lost, and Jack Skelly’s message with it. Not that it mattered. The would-be recipient of the message, Jack’s sweetheart Jennie, lay cold in the cellar of her sister’s rented house, by then unable to hear any more earthly words of love, forever.

  The deejays had set up in the Jennie Wade House and Karyol had been visiting the rooms, getting impressions and jotting down notes. Bob Wright, Assistant General Manager of the Jennie Wade House Museum was with them. Karyol had never been in the Jennie Wade House before and, as with her visit to the other house, was told nothing about the history of it. The taped narration was not on while she visited, and so any information about the Wade family tragedy was unknown to her. They moved through the house, generally following the same journey Jennie’s lifeless body made as Union soldiers carried her from the kitchen upstairs, through a shell-hole in the dividing wall and into the other half of the house, then downstairs and into the cellar, the safest place in the house from the battle that still raged about them. There they laid her on a makeshift bier in the corner of the cold stone cellar, the family huddling in the claustrophobic damp, keeping their macabre vigil, mostly in shock, next to the body which moments before had been vibrant and moving, now releasing the vital spirit which was Jennie Wade.

  The cellar has since been a place of uneasiness, even fear. Many visitors to the house, after paying their entrance fee and touring the rest of the house, will refuse to descend into the makeshift mausoleum, or, once there, will hurry out before the taped message is through. Video cameras, while working well enough just outside the cellar, will record nothing once below ground level. Karyol Kirkpatrick felt an unusual presence there, something she described which possessed the emotion of something left undone—a mourning unfinished perhaps, she suggested.

  Considering the three souls tied forever together in an eternal quest to deliver a last message, the uneasiness concentrated in that temporary subterranean tomb is understandable. Yet Karyol also mentioned, rather casually, something about a father. A father, she said, who had not been allowed to mourn properly.

  The group began to ascend the stairs to the sunlight. Bob Wright, the manager, was the last to leave with Karyol just in front of him. From the first step she turned and glanced back into the cellar, her eye drawn by some movement. “Oh, look,” she said to Bob, pointing across the room at the small chain that ran from a pillar to the stone wall across the cellar, separating the area for visitors from the spot where Jennie had lain in state. “I think it’s Jennie’s father,” she said matter-of-factly, “He’s trying to tell us something.”

  As Karyol and Bob stood there in the dark cellar, the chain began to sway back and forth, with no one near it, with no one visible having touched it. For a full minute it swung as the rest of the visitors to the house clambered back down the stairs to see this physical manifestation of some spiritual uneasiness.

  The chain’s movement was odd: It swung as if it were a solid piece of wire, or as if each link were attached to one another, or as if all points on the chain had been touched at once. (Subsequent examinations by Bob and Dr. Charles Emmons, the Gettysburg College professor who wrote a book on ghosts, showed that even during the busiest times on Baltimore Street, the heaviest trucks failed to produce any movement in the chain. As well, when Dr. Emmons touched the perfectly still chain in my presence, the movement was of the wave variety, clearly visible running back and forth along its length, and not the solid movement he had seen before.) And when the chain stopped moving the first time, it slowed far too quickly to allow for simple momentum: something unseen had stopped it.

  Jennie’s father, John James Wade, Sr., died in 1872 in the Alms House, his mind still not able to cope with the realities of this world. Perhaps it is from the Other World that he is finally allowed to mourn the passing of the daughter he lost, first when she was seven, and again when she was twenty.

  ***************

  Chapter 10: Off-Off Broadway

  There are more things in heaven and earth Horatio,

  Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

  —William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, Scene v.

  Most people who visit Gettysburg are under a misconception as to where “The Battlefield” actually is. The monuments and markers for the most part, delineate the battlelines of the two armies. They stretch down the two major ridges once splashed with human blood—Cemetery and Seminary Ridges—and in a wavy arc a mile and a quarter west and north of town where fighting occurred on the first day. The United States Government owns much of the land, or at least the right of way where the monuments stand, along these major battlelines. Many visitors to Gettysburg ask the question, “Where’s the battlefield?” expecting, perhaps, a fenced-in area they can see with one sweep of the eye.

  While the government owns or has right of way to some 6,000 acres, “The Battlefield”-—where close to 175,000 men fought, maneuvered, were wounded, bled and died—must cover several hundred square miles. Nearly every road from Chambersburg to Carlisle to Harrisburg to York was crossed and criss-crossed by cavalry, and infantry marched a good bit of that area as well. The web of roads between the small towns were all covered too. You can hardly drive along a road in Adams County, York County, Franklin County and Cumberland County that, at one time, wasn’t used by the two armies. Fights and skirmishes associated with the world famous Battle of Gettysburg occurred in towns with hardly recognizable names like Fairfield and Hunterstown, Carlisle and Wrightsville and Hanover, Monterey Gap and Zora and Cashtown.

  So, the answer to the question, “Where’s the battlefield?” is: you’re standing on it. Whether you’re in a modern motel lobby or sitting in a Gettysburg resident’s fancy dining room on Broadway, you’re on a part of the Gettysburg Battlefield, probably in the same space (but at a different time, of course,) where men struggled, or charged, or retreated, or perhaps were wounded, or died.

  And Gettysburg has expanded from the somnolent, dusty village centered around a crossroads established for farm commerce containing about 2,400 souls, to the small, busy town it is today of about 8,000 people. After the great battle, in the 1880s someone discovered that the hilly land a few miles north and west of Gettysburg was perhaps the finest soil God ever put on earth (or 50 at least in Pennsylvania) for growing fruit trees. An industry was born, and Gettysburg grew a bit to accommodate it. Someone also realized that, even after the soldiers were gone and the Civil War was softening into a musty but still horrible memory, people—Americans, Europeans, Asians—eventually by the millions, were drawn in an unexplainable way to visit this place of vast human carnage to ponder the reasons why men did what they did here, and t
o scrutinize and study and eventually wonder what good could be found in the suffering of one generation for the sins of others. Gettysburg again grew, and continues to grow, to accommodate another industry, this one of tourists of the heart and explorers of the American conscience.

  And, of course, Pennsylvania College (which sometime after the battle changed its name to Gettysburg College since people just wouldn’t quit calling it that) grew and expanded, adding buildings and staff who needed housing. So some of the fields that once thundered to thousands of marching men were eviscerated for cellars and foundations.

  Martin Winter, a local insurance agent, was responsible for most of the development of Gettysburg to the east and north during the first decade of the 20th Century.1 The fields to the north, of course, were the scene of the Union retreat—actually a rout—after their defeat on the first day of July 1863. Men crossed those fields in desperate, panic-stricken haste to escape a pursuing enemy. They were shot in the back and brought down with shrapnel whipped into their legs as they tried to run. It must have been like one of those dreams we’ve all had where something evil and life threatening is approaching us and we cannot run, our lower limbs being suddenly and inexplicably leaden. Except this, for the soldiers, was their own horrifying reality.

  Winter purchased the fields of war, subdivided them, and sold them off to people of apparently substantial means; most of the houses on Lincoln Avenue and Broadway, about three-quarters of a mile north of the square in Gettysburg are large, well-designed, and attractive structures, many of classic architectural designs.

  So the small hills and ridges you see today north of Gettysburg when you visit are indeed the fields of carnage—“the Battlefield” all seek. And where the many lovely homes lie north of town were also the spots of untold suffering and heartbreak, of families broken apart by the sudden, swift death brought by a minie ball or other fragment of whistling ordnance. And it seems that some of those who fought and died in the fields whereupon spacious homes for the well-to-do were built—and even some who never fought there—are not quite satisfied to repose in the supposedly eternal rest of the ages.