Ghosts of Gettysburg II

by Mark Nesbitt

  His aides thought first that he had just been stunned since they rolled him over and could find no wound except a bruise over his left eye. Then they realized he wasn’t coming to and began to carry him back to the town. Halfway between the place where he was hit and the Seminary, Reynolds gasped a little. His aides paused with their burden and tried to give him some water, but he was insensible. When they got back to town and placed him in Mr. George’s stone house on the pike to Emmitsburg, they saw where he had been hit, saw that there was very little blood, and assumed that the wound had bled internally.4 From being offered the command of the largest army on the planet—The Union Army of the Potomac—just a week before, he instead became the highest-ranking officer from either side to die in the battle.

  We had just passed the lovely McMillan House on the north end of West Confederate Avenue when Karyol said that she felt something was happening at the beginning. I had a moment of confusion until I realized that we were heading out to where the battle indeed had begun. Then she said something even more confusing when she said she felt a pain in her back.

  The tape recorder wasn’t going at that moment because we weren’t near the site yet. As the van travelled out the Fairfield Road toward Doubleday Avenue, I turned and wondered if she was really in discomfort. She said something to the effect that, “I feel like someone was shot in the back. I feel the pain in my back.”

  We turned onto Doubleday Avenue and she said, “It’s really getting stronger. I can feel the pain in my back.” I noticed that she was actually sitting up, moving her back away from the seat and reaching behind her. Then I realized that she was relating to Reynolds somehow.

  Reynolds Woods.

  We pulled over at the site of the monument to Reynolds on the spot where he was struck. The monument is so far off the road that one would need to know exactly what one was looking for to find it, as well as very good eyesight to read it. I told her that we didn’t even have to get out of the van for this one. I told her the story about Reynolds, ending with the details of his wounding in the back of the neck.

  The suddenness of Karyol’s pain and the growing intensity as we approached the site where Reynolds was struck in an anatomical area which probably produced an immediate, if only momentary shock of pain down his back truly impressed me and the others in the van. As far as an explanation for this remarkable woman’s physical manifestations of empathy for an officer of an army long dead and gone, I have none.

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  Chapter 15: Somewhere Between Worlds

  When that this body did contain a spirit,

  A kingdom for it was too small a bound…

  —William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Act V, scene iv.

  At Gettysburg, in the fields and valleys, on the ridges and from the rocks—wherever you go when it’s quiet—you can almost hear the great breathing of history, barely audible, like a dull, continuous, rumble coming from the very earth below your feet.

  No one is immune to the vortex that pulls us to the place; the high-born and lowly, the common visitor and the diplomat, the mere private soldier and the great general. The whole world comes to Gettysburg, eventually.

  And so it was with Dwight David Eisenhower. The common Texas farm boy, who left the turning of the earth to lead great armies and defeat great evil that threatened to girdle the entire globe in chains, eventually came back to the farm. He had heard the rumblings of history at Gettysburg before he himself had made it, and returned, as great a man as he was, to be near an even greater place.

  If the American Civil War was the great moral crusade of the 19th century, then World War II was the great moral crusade of the 20th. The main issue was virtually the same: Slavery. And while slavery as it was known in the antebellum American South had endured long enough to be a geographically restricted, regionally accepted institution, it was still enslavement. What the Nazis and Japanese warlords did, and what they intended to do with the rest of the world had no restrictions. As well as enslavement, it was what could have become annihilation.

  Some men saw in the rantings of Hitler and the gobbling up of the Pacific Basin by the Japanese, a terror unknown to humankind on a stage of epic scale.

  One of those men was Dwight Eisenhower, and when his time for ultimate effort and hard decisions came, he responded.

  He had been to Gettysburg before—in his mind at least—as he studied the maps and texts as part of his military science courses at the U. S. Military Academy. After his graduation in 1915, instead of being sent to Europe during World War I, he was stationed at Gettysburg’s Camp Colt, the training center for the U. S. Army’s newly conceived tank corps.

  The camp was situated in the middle of the fields once drenched by the rain of human blood during Pickett’s Charge. Even though the youthful officer and his lovely young wife Mamie lived in two homes at separate times in the small town of Gettysburg, the man they called “Ike” had time to spend on the battlefield and learned its lessons well.

  The bucolic fields, the small-town ambience, the friendliness of the people, and the great pull of history kept hold on their hearts for the rest of their lives. Over the next three decades they would travel extensively. After his service in World War II as Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the invasion of Europe and a stint as president of Columbia University, Eisenhower and Mamie began looking for a place in which to retire. Not surprisingly, the soldier turned to a battlefield to find peace. Recalling their happy younger days in Gettysburg they purchased a small dairy farm in 1950. It was located in the rear of the Confederate lines, not far from where Major General Longstreet had his headquarters and within eyeshot of where Pickett’s men mustered for their fateful summer’s charge some 87 years before.

  But easy retirement was not forthcoming. Eisenhower, very much like famous military commander General Robert E. Lee before him, for the first fifty years of his existence had lived his professional life at an exceedingly slow pace, all according to the whims of the army. Then, it seems as if fate wanted him to live two lives in the short time he had remaining.

  Just after they bought the Gettysburg Farm, he was sent by President Truman to take over the NATO forces in Europe. In 1952 he accepted the Republican Party’s nomination for President and served two terms. And while the Eisenhowers continued to maintain their beloved home in Gettysburg, their efforts at using it for anything more than a weekend home away from the White House were continually frustrated.

  Eisenhower as President would bring dignitaries, after their serious meetings at Camp David, to the relaxed atmosphere of the Gettysburg Farm. It seemed in keeping with the man. In the serious business of war, his fine touch for the human element and that incredible grin, as broad as the Kansas plains from whence he came, had melted and forged an alloy as divergent—and as strong—as all mankind for the common purpose of casting off a German tyrant’s chains. In the postwar world, he achieved much the same thing once the “official” serious business was over and he could get the great leaders of the world in amongst his prize-winning black angus cattle and watching where they stepped, or out on the battlefield of Gettysburg where he could explain the horrid, heart-breaking results of the failure of diplomacy.

  But, it always seemed, during the decade of the fifties, the Eisenhowers could never spend quite enough time on the farm.

  Finally, in 1961, after his Presidency was over, he and Mamie retired to the farm where Confederate soldiers had once wandered. Ike worked during the day in an office in what is now the Admissions Office of Gettysburg College, writing his memoirs and meeting with politicos and business associates. Sadly, after fifty years serving his country, Dwight Eisenhower only got to spend eight years living in what he and Mamie considered to be their only home. On March 28,1969, at the age of 78, the general died.

  The Eisenhower Home ca. 1955/56 (National Park Service).

  Mamie Doud Eisenhower lived another ten years at the farm, and although she enjoyed her privacy, she still donated much of her ti
me and her good name to charitable organizations in the community of Gettysburg and nationwide. For the rest of her life, as some of her friends still living in Gettysburg relate, she worried when things were not quite right at the house, because that was not the way “The General” would have had it.

  But the history of the house itself goes back much further than when the Eisenhowers owned it. The General and Mrs. Eisenhower gave the property to the U. S. Government in 1967 with the stipulation that they would be able to maintain a lifetime tenancy in the house. After Mrs. Eisenhower died in 1979, the National Park Service made plans to open the house to the public as the Eisenhower National Historic Site.

  When the Eisenhowers first bought the house in 1950 they remodeled. Underneath the 100-year-old bricks that were part of the original Redding family farmhouse, they were astonished to find a 200-year-old log cabin. Unfortunately, it was so deteriorated that it could not be saved, but Mamie, with an eye toward the history of the place, requested that the architects save as much of the older structure as they could and incorporate it into the remodeled structure. The kitchen fireplace and bake oven and some of the brickwork were retained, as well as some of the ancient shutters, floorboards and beams.

  The old log farmhouse predated even the establishment of the town of Gettysburg in 1780, and so was, no doubt, the nucleus of a hard-working, probably large family of tillers of the soil. Without even a town nearby, they must have been pretty much self-sufficient and independent.

  No one knows whether the Eisenhowers ever experienced any paranormal activity in their farmhouse that might relate back to the original tenants. But since their passing and the opening of the house to visitors, several strange and unexplainable occurrences have happened repeatedly to the government employees who work there.

  The events seem to happen near the end of the day, or in the wintertime when visitors are fairly scarce. The house is normally quiet at those times and there are only one or two people there to witness anything out of the ordinary. One interesting thing about these occurrences is that they have been happening to people who are of fairly high intelligence—historians, college graduates, people with their masters degrees—which may make the events even more believable.

  There is the case of the slamming doors. In Mrs. Eisenhower’s dressing room there is a set of heavy, sliding, mirrored doors. At least two rangers have heard the doors shut with an audible “bang,” as if they were forcibly closed. Being sliding doors, they are not affected by the wind.

  One ranger was standing with another when she suddenly heard the distinctive sound of the doors slamming shut. The odd part is that the ranger with her heard nothing. Other than their supervisor who was in her office in another part of the house, they knew they were the only ones there. The ranger who hadn’t heard the slamming realized something was wrong because of the deathly pale color the other government employee’s face had assumed.

  They went to their supervisor and told her the story. Being a rational individual, she told them to go upstairs and close the sliding doors with some force to experiment and see if that was indeed the sound at least one of them heard.

  Up they trudged. The doors were opened and the experiment took place. The one ranger didn’t even have to ask the other if that was the sound she had heard—her pale, sheet-white face again told the whole story.

  Two other rangers were out at the house, once again on a cold, wintry February day in 1984 when there were no visitors at the farm. A fine day to catch up on research, thought one ranger, and proceeded to go into the kitchen, part of the original section of the house. He had been engaged in research for a half-hour or so when he heard distinct footsteps descending leisurely down the inside back stairs. He knew what the sound was like because he had heard literally thousands of visitors take that same stairway on their tours.

  He called to his associate, assuming she had been checking the house and had come down to find him. No answer. He called again. Still no answer. He got up, walked up the stairs and all through the house, finally finding his fellow ranger. (In a later conversation he stated that he had felt uneasy and sort of “sensed” that someone else was there.) His partner had been nowhere near the stairs for the last half-hour. Assuming that perhaps another ranger had entered or perhaps the unlikely possibility that a visitor had walked down to the farm, they searched the house, she going one way around it and he the other. They met and confirmed that they were the only two in the house.

  Fortunately, by then it was close to the time for them to leave. According to the woman ranger, as they stood there after their thorough search of the house, they both heard distinctly, on the soft carpeted stairs that once felt the footfalls of an American President and his First Lady, again the footsteps of someone slowly descending.

  They locked the house up quickly and left.

  And there is that frequent whiff of perfume that wafts ethereally down the stairs, around the house and lingers especially near the maid’s room. It has been associated with Mrs. Eisenhower’s favorite scents. Yet all her perfume bottles sitting by the side of her bed upstairs for display to visitors, remain tightly capped.

  It was the anniversary of the great general’s death. The female ranger mentioned above was at the back door of the house when she heard someone coughing. It wasn’t a normal cough, but the hacking, hard cough one hears from someone of a previous generation, who had smoked from an early age before the deadly consequences of the habit were well known. She turned and walked to where she had heard the hacking—the butler’s quarters—to see if she could help whatever poor visitor it was that was suffering so. As she approached the butler’s quarters, the fierce coughing ceased. Rounding the corner she saw that there was no one any where near the back of the house.

  One maintenance person who was stationed in the house alone after hours continued to hear the soft, crackling rustle of the type of crinolines worn on special formal occasions—such as inaugural balls—in the 1950s. She heard the distinct sound so often and so clearly in the evenings that she began to wear a portable tape player with earphones so she wouldn’t be disturbed from her work.

  And finally, one day after she had been working alone at the house and had locked up the building as she was leaving, she happened to glance back at the house. The shade covering Mrs. Eisenhower’s bedroom window slowly raised, then lowered again, as if to make sure that whomever it was at the farm was indeed leaving the grounds.

  The rangers privately propose numerous theories as to whom it might be that still dwells within the confines of the beautiful home. Though painstakingly remodeled and cared for as a retirement sanctuary for one of the greatest men of the century and his wife, the home and their long retirement together was still denied to them by a country that found it needed him far too much to ever let him go.

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  Chapter 16: End Notes

  A Wrinkle In Time

  1 Tucker, Glenn. High Tide At Gettysburg, 261.

  2 Haynes, Martin A. History of the 2nd New Hampshire Volunteer Infantry in the War of the Rebellion, 159.

  3 While signing books in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, a gentleman approached and offered the information that he had been in Gettysburg that year as a reenactor and had seen the rounds of ammunition just after my friend had received them and had returned to camp. He swore to their absolute authenticity saying they looked as if they were fine museum pieces.

  Slaying Days In Eden

  1 Elwood Christ, research on the Sheads' House located in files at the Gettysburg Borough Office.

  2 I remember being interviewed by some of his students in the past as a source for their student papers, and finding many of the stories I collected in their papers. Hopefully, in return for my cooperation with their papers, they won't mind my relating some of their research.

  3 When paranormal occurrences continue to happen at one venue and are observed by many different people at different times, the venue is said to be “haunted.”

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p; 4 Data collected for the unpublished papers of Raymond Carpenter, Jan. 25,1980 paper; Kurt W. Hettler, Jan. 24,1980 paper; Jose V. Pimienta, Jan. 27,1983 paper.

  Twice Hallowed Ground

  1 Veil, Charles H. “An Old Boy’s Personal Recollections and Reminiscences of the Civil War.”

  A Cavalryman’s Revenge

  1 Thomason, John W. Jeb Stuart.

  2 From an unpublished letter from Mrs. Hitner to Mrs. Hastings, July 6,1863, located in the Military History Archives, Carlisle Barracks.

  3 Mrs. Ralph Mitchell, noted Stuart scholar was friends with Mary Marrow Stuart (Mrs. Drewry Smith) the granddaughter of Jeb Stuart, stated that according to the family, Stuart did visit Carlisle in 1859 on his six months leave of absence from the army in the west.

  Lower Than Angels

  1 See Ghosts of Gettysburg, “The Tireless Surgeons of Old Dorm.”

  Castaway Souls

  1 The biographical information of Jennie Wade was carefully collected from numerous sources and compiled into an excellent historical work entitled The Jennie Wade Story, by Cindy L. Small and published by Thomas Publications.

  Off-Off Broadway

  1 Elwood Christ, Gettysburg Historian, has done a remarkable job researching the houses in town for the Gettysburg Borough. His work resides in the Borough Office.