by Mark Nesbitt
One lovely, well-kept home on Broadway seems to demonstrate the fact that not everyone is susceptible to visitations by apparitions, even when they legally own the house where the spirits are supposed to reside.
The owners say that they think the home was built between 1917 and 1920. They themselves have never been witness to any strange happenings, but the woman who lives there said that relatives have seen some odd things go on within the walls of the elegant home on Broadway.
Her mother was visiting and using the guest room on the third floor of the house. Everyone had retired for the evening, which passed quietly enough for most in the house. But the next morning, after her husband left for work and the children were packed off to school, the woman listened to her mother tell her a story that hardly seemed believable.
It seems that she was awakened in the middle of the night by the appearance, entering from the dormer window on the third floor, of two strangers who seemed to float toward her bed. Incredulous, the woman’s mother still maintained enough equipoise to notice details of the couple. One she described as a female child, looking to be about ten years old, with golden-blonde ringlets—“Shirley Temple curls” she called them—who stood hand-in-hand with a man dressed entirely in black, almost as if he were in mourning dress. The woman’s mother said that she got the distinct impression that they were father and daughter. They stood together at the foot of her bed and looked at her. As if they had entered the room merely to see who was staying overnight, slowly they turned and began to move toward the hallway. The door to the hallway didn’t open; it didn’t need to. They simply walked through the wall.
Although never having had an experience with an apparition in the house, the woman certainly believed her mother when she told her that morning so matter-of-factly about the odd visitors to her third floor bedroom the night before. And her belief—even without ever seeing the spirits—must have been solidified even more within the next year or two after hearing of the experiences of two other family members who stayed on the third floor.
Her sister was visiting and staying on the top floor. One morning she described a strange experience. Though alone on the third floor, she looked into the hall and caught, out of the comer of her eye, the figure of a man heading down the hall toward the stairs. The owner’s husband had already left for work and so the male presence in the hall was, and remains to this day, unexplainable.
The owner had her interest piqued one more time in recent years. Another family member, an aunt, was staying over, once again on the third floor. Again, the morning coffee was mixed with a tale of a man who simply appeared out of nowhere in her room, stood looking at her for a while, then vanished.
One of the more striking houses on Broadway is a large gray stone house at the end of North Washington Street. Built in 1930 by Dr. John McCrea Dickson, after his death in 1939, it was willed to his wife Marion. After her death in 1971 it was sold to the brotherhood of Sigma Nu Fraternity at Gettysburg College. From the north windows one can see out over the fields of battle that were littered with so much carnage on the first day’s battle at Gettysburg. The monuments to the hundreds of men and boys who fought and were crippled or slain on the fields to the north are visible only a few hundred yards from the house. Yet with all the spiritual energies extinguished within view of the site of this house, the residents unexplainably—and perhaps a little unfairly— continue to blame poor Dr. Dickson for the poltergeist activity that occurs frequently within the solid stonewalls of the edifice.
West Broadway.
One of the students who had interviewed me years ago for research on local folklore and had written a paper on ghost stories on the battlefield was a victim of the poltergeist in the stone house, yet never included it in his paper. Instead he told it to another individual who included the story in his college thesis.
It seems that one night in 1978 he had been studying in one of the larger rooms in the house. It was what the brothers called the “five man” room but the student was alone at the time. Suddenly the door to the room opened, shut, and then opened again. Obviously, one of the other brothers was behind the door playing a trick, so the student got up from his work and walked into the hall to confront the jokester. But there was no one in the hall, and no way anyone could have played the prank and gotten away between the time the door opened the last time and the student reached the hall. As he turned to walk back into the large room, the lights went out. Thinking it an odd power failure that darkened just the one room, he walked to the light switch to test it and…the lights turned on normally as he flipped the switch. Perplexed at all the strange activity, unable to relegate it to reason, but unwilling to accept that something truly paranormal was happening, he returned to his desk and sat to try to resume his studies. Without warning, a large glass mug was thrown—“thrown” according to the student’s own report; not “fell” or “dropped”—from the shelf where it had rested, to the floor of the large room, completely missing, on its way down, a table directly below it.
Another brother reported lights going on and off by themselves one early morning in 1978. He had just pledged the fraternity and had been studying in the house much of the night, and began hearing what he described as loud noises as well…noises that apparently no one else in the house heard.
Finally, two students were staying alone in the house over a college vacation break. It was a rainy night. One of the brothers was on the third floor and the other was downstairs. The one who was downstairs heard the front door open and the unmistakable sound of someone shaking off a wet raincoat. He heard footsteps begin to ascend the stairway. Curious, and a bit cautious as to who might have entered a private fraternity house, he began to follow the sound of the footsteps at a discrete distance. He listened as they went all the way up to the third floor where the other fraternity brother was sitting. Expecting to find two people on the third floor, he was incredulous to find only the one brother who said that, as the first brother was engaged in following the distinct sounds of a mysterious stranger up the stairs, he hadn’t heard a thing.
A woman whose husband was employed by Gettysburg College brought their family to Gettysburg and moved into one of the beautiful Queen Anne style structures on Broadway. Research done by historian Elwood Christ in 1989 indicates that the house was built around 1901, but the lot, like all the lots Martin Winter marked off was part of the land that dates back to the famous Manor of Maske, an immense tract cut from the original William Penn Grant. The house sits (as do most of the buildings in the northwest corner of town) near where the road once known as the Shippensburg Road cut through the fields and junctioned with the Harrisburg Road and the Carlisle Road about a block north of the railroad station. The road, of course, pre-dates even the town of Gettysburg, having been “confirmed” in 1769–1770.2 Perhaps, not surprisingly, it struck the main east-west road near the spot where Samuel Gettys had established his fine tavern as a rest stop for travelers from Shippensburg to Baltimore or Philadelphia.
Within the first year of moving into the house, the woman had strange feelings as if someone was behind her staring. We’ve all had those of course, but when we turn around, usually there is someone there. But when she turned around she saw nothing…at least at first.
She is a night person. She often worked late, after the rest of the family was in bed. The uncomfortable feelings of someone staring at her continued, especially, she noticed, whenever she had her back to the door into the library. And the feelings grew more intense, gradually changing from a slight realization that someone might be behind her, to the strange fear that eyes were indeed upon her, to a distinct, shiver-inducing chill.
The feelings were not new to her. As a child growing up in the South, she and her sister, who shared the same room, would hear, in the middle of the night, footsteps begin in their living room, walk down the hall, enter their bedroom, and stop at their beds. Of course, as they listened and watched while the steps approached, no one was there to make the sounds.
It wasn’t until they were grown up that their mother told the girls that an elderly man had died in that house before they moved there. You can imagine how surprised their mother was when the girls told her that they had been visited by someone fairly frequently over the years who could be heard but never seen, who apparently had some special attraction to the house, and in particular, to the young—and very much alive—children abed there.
But the feelings she had as an adult in Gettysburg had a more frightening effect. They continued to become more intense, until finally one night, unable to take the uncomfortable feeling of eyes boring into the back of her skull and the intense cold in the middle of the summer, she was driven to rise from her chair where she had been working late, and rush upstairs. She had turned out all the lights except for the small one which lit the stairs. For some reason, she stopped on the stairs, turned, and looked back at the door to the library. There, in the doorway to the darkened library, was a tall column of distinctly blue light, glowing. She turned and sprinted up the rest of the stairs.
It was several days before she could bring herself to work late again. With an odd combination of needing to finish some work late at night and an almost morbid curiosity to perhaps again see that odd blue columnar translucence, she began to work her late night hours once more, alone on the first floor. She expected to feel the chill, or turn around to see the strange, electric-blue phosphorescence in the doorway to the library. She expected it, but for a while, nothing happened.
Then, once again, just after midnight, her tranquil work was pierced by the same strange feeling of being watched, and the odd, numbing chill wrapping her. The feelings were uneasily familiar, and she hurriedly finished her work, turned off all the lights but the one in the stairway, and rushed to the stairs. As if compelled, she stopped—not really wanting to—and looked down the stairs to the doorway into the library.
There it was again. The column of blue light stood in the doorway. Perhaps she remained staring at it a little too long, for as she watched, it slowly began to leave the library door and come toward her. She flew up the stairs to the safety of her husband and the warmth of her bed.
In the daylight things seem so reasonable, so commonplace. Lights that appear and flash across the ceiling can be explained as sunlight reflecting off car windshields. Colored lights within a house can come from the sun shining through a blind. A blue light can be merely the daylight entering through a piece of stained glass in a window. A six-foot high, 18-inch wide transparent column of animated blue light, which seems to move in intelligent response to the actions of a human being can certainly be explained…
And deep into the night those logical explanations should hold true. Shouldn’t they? The woman, of obviously superior intelligence, would make peace with what she saw in her own mind, place it behind her desire to finish the work ahead of her, and, within a few nights, be back working late. She returned to her work, and, of course, it appeared again.
For a third time she felt the eyes staring through her, the chill wrapping itself about her from behind like an unwelcome lover’s arms, and the heavy presence of another being in a related space. Out went the lights. Up the stairs she strode quickly, only to stop and turn once more to see the ghostly azure column float from the doorway of the library toward her before she bolted up the stairs. To this day she says she thinks whatever it was just wanted to make sure she was truly leaving its area.
For a while she couldn’t work late anymore. The further away we get from an event in time, the better off we are. The memory has a tendency to lose all the gravel and scabs and fears of even the most recent past, so that we can get on with our lives. So it was.
But then a colleague of hers needed a long dissertation typed. Again she set up her little office in the dining room and went to work. Nearly every night for two weeks she worked while the others slept, usually after midnight when everything on Broadway in Gettysburg was quiet, and sometimes as late as two o’clock in the morning. She was approaching the end of the dissertation when the eerie, unexplainable sounds started.
They began with a slight rustling of papers in the library. Absentmindedly she called out to her husband; perhaps he had awakened, had silently descended the stairs and was looking for something. No one answered.
More rustling. And creaking. What was going on, she thought, and walked to the library to see which of the children had gotten up. Nothing. No one was in the library. She returned to her typing.
Minutes passed and she became absorbed in the final touches on the manuscript. The rustling of papers in the library started again, louder this time. More creaking of the chair, and of the wooden floor. And footsteps.
Determined to finish her work, afraid to go back to the library or even look at the door, she continued to type. The noises in the library got louder, building upon one another: papers rustling, crackling, being crumpled, the groaning of the old chair and the even older floorboards, books falling, and the footsteps hurrying about in an ever increasing rush toward pandemonium. She finally stood, being able to take no more, and ran to the doorway, fully expecting to see the library ransacked. As she touched the doorway, the noises ceased. As she peered cautiously into the room she saw that not a thing had been moved, not an item had been touched. The room was unchanged.
Having only a few pages left in the manuscript and with quietude descendent again upon the house, she returned to the typewriter. Looking at the clock she saw that it was two o’clock in the morning, almost time to stop work anyway. She would force herself to finish this last page, then climb to the sanctuary of the second floor. She had only been typing a few minutes more when she felt it.
Describing it just recently she said it was not like the other times where she simply felt a chill, or felt surrounded by the cold. This time it was the strongest feeling ever, an oppression, as if there was “something over me,” like the heavy, dark, chilling blanket of death thrown upon her.
The “Ghost in the Blue Column” drawn by the woman who saw him.
She turned to see the familiar blue column in the library doorway. But this time something was different. This time she noticed, to her horror, that it had distinct features.
She saw a man standing within the blue column, his hands on his hips, legs planted defiantly apart. He had on a pair of tight riding breeches and high boots. His shirt had puffy sleeves. He had a full head of hair, which hung down over his collar in the back. He had no moustache, but instead wore mutton-chop whiskers, of the variety so popular during the mid-19th century. His head was twisted at an odd angle, she said. He was “not unattractive.” And he wore upon his handsome face, an odd, puzzled, angry look, as if he were about to say, “What are you doing here? How did you get into my world?”
It took her less than a second to realize what she was seeing and exclaim in fright, “Oh, my God!” With that appeal, his features faded into the column of blue and the column itself went back into the library. Suddenly the noises she had heard earlier began again, and rose in intensity to a crescendo of mayhem. Frightened now, nearly out of her wits, the woman heard herself shouting, “Stop it! Stop! I have too much to do! This is my house! My house! Get out!”
As suddenly as it began, the maelstrom ended. The woman, as the echoes from the other world faded, suddenly was overcome by a feeling of calm, of peace. It was as if an uneasy truce was declared between a handsome visitor from sometime in the distant past, and a headstrong woman of the present.
Afterwards, she relates, working late, she sometimes felt a presence, but never heard anything or felt the smothering blanket of cold she felt the night of the final confrontation.
But her youngest daughter would sometimes awaken in the middle of the night, crying. When the woman would go to see what was the matter, her child would complain that there was a man in her room watching her. Other times she would complain that the same man had come into her room and sat down on her bed.
She never said anything to her husband about what w
as happening late at night on the floor below where he slept. He was a skeptic and she was afraid he’d simply laugh at her and make fun. Apparently the sounds never travelled to the second floor: No one in the family ever mentioned any noises or was awakened by the cacophony in the library. But her story finally came out one morning after he came down for breakfast and asked her if she felt something—or someone—lay down on the bed between them that night. Of course she had—and she probably had a pretty good idea of what the unseen sleeper looked like—and she proceeded to tell her husband of the handsome man who had once emerged from the recurring column of blue to scold her for using a space that, once in time, was evidently vitally important to him.
***************
Chapter 11: Townsmen Of A Stiller Town
They will come together again under higher bidding,
and will know their place and name.
This army will live, and live on,
so long as soul shall answer soul….
—Major General Joshua Chamberlain
A battlefield is many things to many people. To some who manage to visit Gettysburg only once or twice in their lives, it is a somewhat mysterious place where something monstrously horrible and important happened a very long time in the past. To others who have an opportunity to study the feats men accomplished here, it is a never-ending source of wonderment. To still others who spend vast amounts of their lives reading and re-reading about the battle, and great amounts of their money to visit and spend days on the field, it is truly a sacred place, truly a land hallowed by a great blood-letting: One gigantic national sacrificial alter for a whole segment of a generation of Americans.
