Ghosts of Gettysburg II

by Mark Nesbitt

  Suddenly, her attention was attracted by some movements at the door. As she watched, the key in the old door slowly turned by itself, the door came unlocked and swung open as if letting someone out of the kitchen and down into the darkened cellar.

  As if something was trying to say that it was sorry for breaking the figurine and was banishing itself from the house, it was the last thing, to her knowledge, that ever happened in the cottage.

  * * *

  Eventually the cottages were torn down and the new dining hall addition was constructed. Just fifty yards or so from where East and West Cottages once stood is the Health Center for the college. From the Health Center you can look out across West Broadway, across the broad, grassy athletic fields where now rich boys play and once brave boys died, to the ridgeline of Oak Ridge, from which streamed the destroyed remnants of a portion of the Union Army’s First Corps. You must also remember that the 47 barren acres between Oak Ridge, Broadway, Howard Avenue, and the Carlisle Road were irreverently and irreversibly altered by Gettysburg College in the last few years, filling in with thousands of truckloads of fill the valleys and small defilades which saved soldier’s lives, for their fields of play. “Hallowed ground” means different things to different people.

  Somewhere in those fields between the ridgeline and the college retreated what was left of the 11th Pennsylvania, losing sight of their little mascot in the confusion. Their small war dog “Sallie” got lost in the melee then stayed behind to guard her fallen masters. Guard them she did with the unconditional, selfless, mysterious love given only by dogs, going without food or water for three stifling days, ferociously keeping Confederates—or anyone—away from the bodies of the dead Pennsylvanians until the survivors of the 11th returned to bury their brother soldiers. Then and only then, when she recognized her comrades would the brave little terrier yield the high ground of Oak Ridge and allow the bodies of her slain masters to be touched. Yes, “hallowed ground” is understood differently by different creatures.

  Across the fields tumbled the men from Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, New York and Maine. They retreated into the town along the railroad bed to the west and the Mummasburg Road, with ragged edges of their retreating lines making their way through the crop-filled fields. If they could have looked into the future (or we into the past) they would have been seen passing through the brick walls of the modern building of the Health Center.

  Time is such a mysterious thing. The different ways we measure it, loosely based upon the turning of the earth relative to the sun, or even with atomic clocks, seem inadequate toward understanding time’s true nature. There is the time which flows forward and is measured by pieces on our wrists or on the walls or in towers and keeps us coordinated with the rest of the world. More important is the time ticked off by our own bodies that represents the gradual decay of our physical forms, because when that clock stops, so do we. The only real reason time matters is death, and so we must be very careful with the way we kill time before it eventually kills us.

  But what happens to time when we die?

  Some parapsychologists believe that the sightings of apparitions indicate life after death, that the dead person is the one sending the telepathic message to the living.2 And if we do indeed move on, into another form or world, certainly some form of time must occur, because in order to exist in any form, something must be in existence for at least some time. Some philosophers have called it universal time, or even God’s Time, wherein time travels not forward—in fact, doesn’t even flow—but merely exists as “now.” The existence somewhere of an ageless, timeless, non-decaying, “now” certainly explains the immutability and eternal nature of those gone before us.

  One of the nurses who worked the night shift at the Health Center in the mid-1980s recalled some experiences she had—as well as others—in the center established for the healing of students.

  Alone in the semi-darkened Health Center at night, she would often hear footfalls coming down the hall toward the nurse’s office. She would leave her desk to try and help whatever student had gotten up to wander the halls, but no one was there. The only times that the sounds of the footsteps up and down the halls were frightening were when she knew that no one was checked into the center that night. Those times she called College Security, who came promptly and found no one to arrest.

  There were odd noises as well. For some of noises she could locate the source: photos falling off the wall; radiator covers being flung from the radiators. Yet, even though she could locate where the noise came from, she was still anxious about just how frequently the photos would fall. How many times in a week or two do several different radiator covers have to end up crashing to the floor before one suspects something odd: eight, ten times? How often should a picture fall, the nail inspected, the picture re-hung only to fall again, before one is convinced that someone unseen is trying to do a little re-decorating: six times, eight times?

  Finally, when the odd noises continued one night as she was catching up on backlogged paperwork to the soft background buzz of the television, they became so loud and irritating, she simply accepted the cacophony and turned up the volume of the TV to cover the noises so she wouldn’t be distracted from her work.

  She said that her evenings there alone were usually filled with the constant feeling that someone else was around. Her sense, which may be colored by her devotion to her profession, was that whoever was walking the halls was not malevolent, but merely checking in on the sick students, whether there were any in the building or not. And yet, even with knowing the kindly nature of the invisible, caring spirit who paces and re-arranges things, she admits to being much happier about not working nights anymore.

  ***************

  Chapter 13: Death’s Feast

  These were my men, and those who followed were familiar and dear.

  They belonged to me and I to them,

  by bonds birth cannot create nor death sever.

  More were passing here than the personages on the stand could see.

  But to me so seeing, what a review,

  how great, how far, how near!

  It was as the morning of the resurrection!

  —Major General Joshua Chamberlain

  There is always a momentary pause upon confronting a great anachronism that looms before our senses occasionally in life. The tangle of thoughts when we discover that someone we love and just saw alive is suddenly dead; the image that rises, in some strange way, upon being hurt or wounded, that the person I have known all my life—“me”—might be in danger of dying at this moment; the mistrust of the senses before any of us is willing to surrender what we believe is true to what is reality. Yet, when you have lived in one of the historic houses on the battlefield of Gettysburg, the occasional suspension of reality is acceptable. So it was with two of my friends who lived in houses that rest upon the hallowed ground of Gettysburg.

  I received a letter from a good friend now living in Washington who, for a time, worked for the National Park Service at Gettysburg and lived in at least one of the historic houses on the battlefield. She told me of two events in the letter of which I was unaware.

  First, she mentioned a mutual friend who was living in the George Weikert House; the same Weikert House that contained the upstairs door that refused to remain closed no matter what anyone did to it, including nailing it shut.1 Her roommate travelled frequently in her job for the National Park Service and she was alone in the house watching television one night. The drone of the TV had gone on for a while, when she was suddenly aware of another noise in the house besides the TV—what some acoustics experts might call “white noise”—a sort of underlying, background noise which is so monotonous in pitch that it is hardly even noticeable without paying strict attention to it. She got up and walked to the TV and turned down the volume. The sounds became more distinct now, and she heard the unmistakable murmur of what she called a “party” going on somewhere within the confines of the house. People were chatte
ring, glasses clinking, movement of bodies. She distinctly heard it on the second floor of the house.

  The Weikert House.

  The sounds of the party went on as she became more and more aware. Laughter, faint music, doors opening and closing, glasses with ice tinkling quietly above her head.

  She turned up the TV volume again, wandered back to the sofa with a slight smile growing on her face, knowing exactly what was happening but still unwilling to surrender all of reason to the unreasonable. Again she rose and turned down the volume, and again listened to the polite hum of her uninvited guests upstairs.

  Finally, gaining enough courage from the fact that this, indeed, was her house, she began to ascend the stairs as the festivities continued and she listened, a reluctant party-crasher. As she approached the second floor, the sounds slowly began to fade, as if a heavy, dark curtain were pulled across the entranceway to another era. By the time she reached the second floor, all the sounds had ceased.

  A few weeks later she was sitting with her roommate who had returned from her trip and casually, and somewhat reluctantly, mentioned the strange party noises that stirred her to try to join the festivities on the second floor of their home: the laughing, the glasses clinking, the sounds of low voices, the music. Related to her roommate, it was almost as if she were trying to elicit the comforting response of “how strange…may be you were dreaming...couldn’t have happened.”

  Instead, her roommate listened, smiled and said, “Oh. You heard it too,” and told of the number of times she had heard the ghostly revelry on the second floor of Mr. Weikert’s old stone house.

  Further on in the letter, my friend from Washington described a quiet evening at home she and her new husband were having, relaxing in the brick structure they rented we all called “The Schoolhouse,” which sits on the northeast slope of Little Round Top. It probably wasn’t there at the time of the battle, but is very old, and actually had been, at one time, a one room schoolhouse. It retains much of the ambience of a little red schoolhouse and, if the interior had not been remodeled, upon approaching the house you would swear that when you opened the door you would be greeted by the murmur of children learning their lessons out loud in the old style “blab-school” fashion, and be met by the icy gaze of a stern, tight-laced “school-marm.”

  As she and her husband sat there that particular night, slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, her antique rocker began to rock back and forth. Gradually, the rocking motion grew as she and her husband watched. She looked at him, then at the windows to see if perhaps a breeze had moved it. But all the windows were closed, and the rocking continued. Slowly, just as it had started, the rocker gradually swung to a halt.

  The Little Red Schoolhouse.

  It was almost as if the spirit of one of the teachers long gone had returned to the beloved old one-room schoolhouse, one more time, to teach one last lesson about life and what appears to be death….

  * * *

  We return to the area of Iverson’s Pits, that one spot on the battlefield where over 500 North Carolina soldier-boys were sent on the last long march toward eternity at virtually the same moment by thousands of Yankee minie balls, and were buried where they dropped in a common grave a furlong wide.2

  The story comes again from one of Dr. Charles Emmons’s students who had done a paper on supernatural occurrences on the battlefield.3 A student from Gettysburg College had taken his girlfriend from another college out on the battlefield around midnight. The Peace Light Memorial and its parking area are a short drive from the Gettysburg College Campus, and the light from the monument provides a romantic setting. An observation tower on Oak Ridge is located nearby and is another popular spot from which to view the town at night.

  The young woman was described as being “quite psychic,” one of those individuals tuned in, so to speak, to the quiet, unseen stirrings in the other world. She had seen, one night, an old woman appear in her apartment and walk into her closet only to vanish amongst the clothing stored there. Later she learned that indeed, an elderly woman had entered that closet decades before, but left it only as a corpse separated from its departed spirit. She died by hanging herself in that very closet the young woman once watched her enter, but never leave.

  It was a foggy night. They had left the car and were sitting near the small tower, by one of the stone fences that once sheltered Union infantry from Confederate gunfire, near where the battlefield road from the Peace Light crosses the Mummasburg Road. It was from that site where the Union line was “refused”—doubled back upon itself in the direction of the town—and from where their musketry delivered virtually a solid wall of lead to the west: Hundreds of minie balls launched within a tenth of a second of one another, against the men of Iverson’s Brigade. Confederates just eighty or so yards from the wall by the hundreds felt the electric shock to the nervous system, the total disruption of senses an intrusion upon the body like that produces. The lucky ones died instantly, struck in the head or the heart. The unlucky ones fell writhing, only to be wounded again and again. All, no doubt in their last moments, after being caught in the open, desperately thought of rising and trying to make it to cover. None did, except in his final, dying dreams.

  The young man was looking out towards the northern end of Gettysburg and she towards the Peace Light. Suddenly, her eye was caught by a rapid motion in the misty dark fields not more than a few dozen feet from where she sat. Her breath caught in her throat as she realized it was a “grayish figure,” carrying a rifle and running quickly through the field just beyond the low stone wall. Whoever it was appeared to take cover behind two trees. Though close enough to see both her and her boyfriend, the misty figure was more intent upon finding shelter than making contact with anyone. She quickly grabbed the arm of her boyfriend and hurried back to the parked car.

  She refused to tell him why she was in such a hurry to leave the place until they were safely within the car. As they drove out of the parking lot, the car headlights illuminated the two trees, and both passengers peered into the mist to see if the strange figure was to be seen behind the foliage. He was apparently well hidden, for they saw no sign of him behind the twin trees.

  Later she was to describe the figure as “real”—meaning humanlike—appearing “unfocused,” lit only by the flickering, uncertain light from the Peace Light. Its sudden appearance and lack of interest in the two other people just yards away sent a queasy feeling through her stomach.

  The morning after she had seen the image dart behind the two trees in the fog, they drove out to the tower again to examine the site in broad daylight. As they parked the car and re-created the night-scene which occurred just hours before, they were shocked by one unexplainable fact: There were no longer two trees which they so clearly saw the night before, but only one. As they approached the single tree they realized that right next to it was the stump of another. But instead of being freshly cut, it was gnarled and rotted and weathered, obviously the work of some woodsman of decades before, now himself probably long dead.

  Tree and stump near Iverson’s Pits.

  Like Iverson’s Burial Pits, where the poor souls whose last wish for a few horrifying minutes on July 1,1863, was to find shelter from the burning lead being fired at them, the protection they coveted with the last of their life’s blood also had disappeared….

  They say there are no atheists in foxholes. There can be no doubt that the experience of combat, the unreal-ness of the scene surrounding a soldier when watching close friends pass from animation to something else either causes him to abandon completely any faith he may have had, or believe more deeply in an afterlife. Shakespeare’s admonition that “there are few die well that die in a battle,” is no doubt true: Soldiers, before they have reached a certain fatalistic stage while facing combat think back on all the things they will miss; on their wives and sweethearts and parents and children; on the worldly possessions they may be leaving behind; on home. But soon the fatalism takes over, the realization—or th
e coping device—that makes them believe that if their time is up, it is up; that there is a bullet out there with their name on it, so don’t worry about all the other bullets flying by.

  Perhaps it is then that the concept of an afterlife crosses the soldier’s mind, as it has for untold centuries. Paradise. Heaven. The Happy Hunting Ground. Valhalla. The place where warriors go when they die if they’ve done their duty.

  The belief that he and his loved ones will meet again permeates many soldiers’ letters and diaries, and though they may have never had any organized religion in their lives, they seem to understand and accept the concept and hope for some sort of afterlife, perhaps because they realize they will leave something behind, something quite unfinished….

  In the past several years a number of America’s finest artists have turned to recreating the past in their paintings. Following “in the brush strokes” of military artists like Frederick Remington, Eduoard DeTaille, and some contemporary masters like Tom Lea and Tom Lovett, they have chosen to represent men at war. Since no photos were ever taken of a Civil War battle, we must rely upon an artist to show us the look on the men’s faces as they moved into combat, the posture of their bodies, the fear in their eyes. From this we learn even more of the awful details of the American Civil War.

  Most of the artists painting today are fine researchers as well. Since a soldier’s kepi sometimes fell top-down on the battlefield, they must know what the inside looked like. Since Shiloh doesn’t look like Gettysburg, and Antietam doesn’t look like Stone’s River, the artists visit the sites where the battles took place.