Ghost Soldiers of Gettysburg

by Patrick Burke

  Tammy, thinking it might be time-of-day related, wanted to come back at the same time the next night to see if they could see the same thing.

  A great idea, I told them that we would definitely make it a point of doing that.

  I also expressed my excitement over the fact that their first paranormal experience was such a positive one.

  “Did you feel strange while you watched these lights, or did you feel like the atmosphere around you changed at all?” I asked.

  “We were in the car at first, but the windows were open, and then of course we got out to take pictures as the lights got closer. But it’s funny you ask that, because as time went by, it seemed as if everything else around us didn’t exist,” said Eric. “I can’t recall any sounds, natural or man-made, so maybe I was just very focused on the lights. I can’t speak for Tammy.”

  “I ask this because sometimes people experience what is known as the Oz Factor, which is when the environment actually changes as you’re experiencing a paranormal event,” I explained. “The atmosphere becomes different to people, and it’s very hard to explain.”

  “I felt strange, but Eric and I were talking to each other, so that interaction was real,” said Tammy. “The lights themselves were strange, though. They seemed not of this world, so to speak. I think you can just tell when something isn’t right.”

  We hung out for a while longer to see if anything else manifested, but all was quiet. Eric wanted to know what happened in this area of the battlefield that might explain the lights. I told him that soldiers were fighting all throughout this area and many of them died in this creek. There was a lot of gun and cannon fire, which could explain the lights as a residual phenomenon. “Many people see flashes of light all over the battlefield, and they aren’t all fireflies,” I assured them. “It makes sense,” I said, “but only if you believe residual hauntings are possible.”

  “I can see that for sure,” said Tammy.

  “They did look like flashes of gunfire in the dark,” said Eric. “That would be the most accurate description yet. Wow. I can really see that, but why high above the trees at first?”

  “I can’t say for sure, but certain kinds of artillery fire did explode above the trees, raining down shrapnel over the enemy,” I explained. “We can never know for sure, but I think your experience tonight was a really good one.”

  I still think about Tammy and Eric’s experience for several reasons. First and foremost, they were really cool people and made for outstanding eyewitnesses. They weren’t flaky and really performed an objective analysis regarding what they saw as they saw it, which should be commended. Also, my intuition tells me they saw something truly paranormal. Usually, lights and orbs represent tenuous evidence at best, but when they are seen by more than one witness for a prolonged period of time with the naked eye and appear in a way that defies all logical explanations, then such an event should be taken seriously and documented thoroughly.

  The location factor also comes into play in this instance. Bloody Run, the Slaughter Pen, Devil’s Den—these places are bathed in a history of bloodshed, emotional trauma, and loss of life, all of which must be taken into account when examining evidence or eyewitness testimony, especially when such evidence imitates the natural phenomena associated with the actual battle (gun flashes, cannon fire bursts, etc.).

  For me, the best part of this story remains the fact that Tammy and Eric had what they truly believed was a real paranormal experience, and it was a positive and exciting one. We will probably never know what they saw that night, but I remain very happy for them because they experienced something special. Experiences like theirs often urge people to become more involved in paranormal research. I sincerely hope they continue to show an interest in investigating paranormal phenomena and approaching it in such an objective, logical manner. I, for one, believe they would make great field researchers.

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  Little Round Top

  Chapter Eighteen

  Fight or Flight

  Just behind the Peach Orchard lies the Trostle Farm, one of the areas where Confederate Gen. James Longstreet’s forces clashed with Union Gen. Daniel Sickles’s Third Corps on the second day of the battle. The fighting in this area was vicious, and it was the result of a bold salient—a maneuver that projects into the position of the enemy—made by Sickles that almost jeopardized the entire Union army. Sickles—a controversial, flamboyant, and charismatic officer—didn’t like the unfavorable nature of his original position on Cemetery Ridge and decided to move his troops forward toward the Peach Orchard to meet the enemy head-on. Not only did Sickles disobey Maj. Gen. George Gordon Meade’s direct order to hold his ground, Sickles exposed both sides of the Third Corps to enfilading fire and overextended the Union line.

  As Sickles directed his forces in front of the Trostle Farm on a slight rise in the landscape, he could see the battle developing, but before he could meet the incoming Rebels, he was struck in the right leg by shrapnel. Being an old warhorse, Sickles told his aides to place a tourniquet on his leg and continued to direct his troops for several more minutes before being carried off the field. His leg was later amputated; a result that many officers believed saved him from being court-martialed for his rash and perilous action.

  Confederate dead in the Peach Orchard, where heavy fighting occurred on the second day of the battle. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

  As the Confederate juggernaut pressed forward and Sickles’s troops began to crumble, Union forces continued to rush men in to fill the gaps in their lines. The fighting around Trostle Farm was intense, and many visitors to the battlefield have reported paranormal activity in that area. On a July night in 2006, a group of us made plans to meet at Gettysburg for an investigation. Ed Dubil Jr. (Little Ed) and his dad (Big Ed) wanted to do some ghost hunting around Trostle Farm and the Peach Orchard, so we met there. We were all happy to have Brutus, Little Ed’s ghost hunting dog, with us. This was the first time I had the chance to work with Brutus, and it turned out to be an incredible experience.

  Union General Daniel Sickles, who disobeyed orders and exposed the Union Third Corps to a battering of enemy fire. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

  As a sensitive, I usually get a feel for the presence of ghost soldiers before most other people. My brother John and Big Ed were at the front and to the left of the barn as you face it from the Peach Orchard. Along the shoulder of the road, they set up two tripods with Sony “night-shot” camcorders as they talked about the various places they had investigated. Little Ed, Brutus, and two close friends of mine, Chris Carouthers (a talented sensitive) and Karen Mitchell-Carouthers (a rocket scientist … seriously!) joined me on the backside of the barn, standing near the area where wounded soldiers were cared for during and after the battle.

  Little Ed and I were talking about some of the experiences he had with Brutus and his father on the battlefield, and he recounted this story for me:

  We were at the Eleventh Pennsylvania Infantry monument on Oaks Hill. The Eleventh had a mascot, a dog named Sally. Dad and I had been there before and never got any evidence, but on this overcast morning we decided to make another visit. Brutus did what all dogs do, checked out the area and then lay down near the statue of Sally. Dad wandered off videotaping while I began taking random pictures with my camera and turned on my digital recorder, placing it on the monument near the statue of Sally. No one else was there, just Dad, Brutus, and me. As I normally do when on the battlefield, I thought about what it must have been like during the fighting, and also about the men who survived and went back to search, not only for their fallen comrades, but for Sally too. She had been missing since they retreated on July 1st. I imagined the relief they must have felt when they saw Sally, looking a bit sickly but alive, guarding their dead comrades. Suddenly Brutus sat up, his ears perked and his breathing very still, and then he trotted over to me. Later that night as Dad and I
were going through the photos and videos, I played the recorder, and all was quiet. All you could hear was my camera taking a few shots, that is, until we heard a whistle and a man’s voice calling out, “Here boy!”

  As we walked toward the paved road that cuts through the Peach Orchard and past the barn, we could see John and Big Ed about 175 feet away, near their stationary cameras. I felt a sense of urgency as I watched Brutus stop, raise his ears and seem to hold his breath. I asked Little Ed what Brutus was doing, and his response was, “It’s called fight or flight. He is deciding if what he hears is a threat and, if so, can he win.” Little Ed squatted down behind Brutus and took a photo between the dog’s ears. The photograph revealed an orb about a foot away from where Brutus was standing.

  As we walked around the barn to the spot where Sickles lost his leg, Chris (the sensitive) began to feel nauseated and confused. There was definitely a sense of dread around us, which I associated with the Union soldiers as they struggled to hold their position against overwhelming odds.

  And then, suddenly, I heard the rebel yell. All around me it seemed like men were running, “Dear God,” I thought. “This is how it felt to be on the receiving end of that howl!” Brutus’s ears were up and his body was tense. Chris, Karen, and Little Ed had moved about fifty feet away from me, and they showed no signs of hearing anything at all … and then the moment was gone.

  A few days later my brother John called me and said he believed he had captured a mass of men rushing past the barn toward the Peach Orchard. When we reviewed the footage together, we could see (although the quality of the video is lacking) a mass of shadows crossing between the fence rails and the barn, and we could even see the shadow of a flag waving. Brutus, who has since passed away, was able to experience this paranormal activity before any of us became aware of anything out of the ordinary. Like most animals, he had a keen sense of such things. Brutus was a great field investigator in his own right, and he will be missed.

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  Chapter Nineteen

  Chaos and Carnage

  — By Jack Roth —

  On the afternoon of July 2, 1863, a twenty-acre field of wheat on the John Rose farm became the stage for some of the most vicious and costly fighting associated with not only the Battle of Gettysburg, but of the entire Civil War. Although golden wheat grew tall on hundreds of other fields across southern Pennsylvania around the time of the battle, this patch of land would forever become known as the “Bloody Wheatfield,” somehow relegating all other wheat fields to secondary status.

  In the summer of 1863, the Wheatfield was surrounded by wood lots owned by the John Rose family. A small road and a large patch of land known as Trostle’s Woods snaked its northern border. A worm-rail fence bordered its western edge, separating it from Rose Woods and a rocky knoll known as the Stony Hill, which overlooked the Valley of Death before the Little Round Top. A stone wall separated the field from the section of Rose’s Woods that stretched along its southern edge. Immediately to the east of the field was Houck’s Ridge and Devil’s Den, and beyond that was Little Round Top, the ultimate prize for the Confederates because the entire Union artillery reserves and supplies trains were parked just on the other side. With that in mind, Confederate forces attacked the Union defenses like a series of tidal waves on the second day of fighting.

  Confederate dead at the edge of the Rose Woods, where Southern forces emerged and collided with Union brigades in the Wheatfield. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

  Positioned at a relatively secure location on Cemetery Ridge on the morning of July 2, General Sickles believed he saw higher ground ahead of him and advanced his entire Corp without orders, exposing the Union’s left flank. His lines now stretched through fields far in front of those chosen by the Union’s commanding general, George Gordon Meade. One such area along this new line was the now-infamous twenty-acre field of wheat.

  In the late afternoon, Confederate forces began their coordinated assault against Union lines beginning at its southernmost point at Devil’s Den and Little Round Top. As Southern brigades advanced in the direction of the Wheatfield, they were completely unaware that Union Gen. Daniel E. Sickles, the commander of the Army of the Potomac’s Third Corps, had advanced his men to this location. In fact, the fighting in both the Wheatfield and the Peach Orchard actually occurred by accident—the result of Sickles ill-advised and unauthorized tactical maneuver (see chapter 18: Fight or Flight).

  At four thirty p.m., when Confederate Gen. George T. Anderson’s Brigade of Georgians and the Third Arkansas emerged from the Rose Woods and collided with Union brigades from the Third Corps in the Wheatfield, a melee of epic proportions began. Chaos ensued with a series of confusing attacks and counterattacks by eleven brigades from both sides, resulting in heavy casualties. In what must have seemed like utter pandemonium for the soldiers involved, the field changed hands six times in two hours.

  A dead Union soldier in the Wheatfield, where Union forces suffered more than 3,000 casualties and the Confederates incurred almost 1,500 casualties during the three-hour melee. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

  By seven thirty p.m., the battle of the Wheatfield was over. The wheat lay trampled and the ground left soaked in blood with the dead and wounded stacked three and four deep. The casualty rates appalled even the most hardened of commanders. The Sixty-First New York lost 60 percent of its number, all killed and wounded. The Fifty-Third Pennsylvania lost 59 percent. The Seventeenth U.S. lost 58 percent. The Union regiments averaged losses of approximately one-third, with the Confederate regiments averaging about the same. In total, the Union suffered casualties of 3,215 and the Confederates 1,394. More than 4,000 men were killed or wounded in just over two hours of fighting. Some of the wounded managed to crawl to Plum Run but couldn’t cross it. The river ran red with their blood, earning it the nickname “Bloody Run.”

  A New York soldier described the aftermath of the day’s carnage: “Silence followed the roar and tumult of battle. Through the darkness the rifles of the distant pickets flashed like fireflies, while, nearer by, the night air was burdened with the plaintive moans of wounded men who were lying between the lines and begging for water.”

  As one might expect, the Wheatfield represents a great location in which to conduct paranormal research. On May 8, 2004, our investigative team conducted a daytime experiment designed to cover the entire twenty-acre field. We performed a grid-like walkthrough with several participants. The “sweepers” spread out approximately fifteen yards apart and began walking across the field in unison from southern to northern edge. They each possessed handheld equipment in the form of still and/or video cameras, voice recorders, ion detectors, and EMF meters. Simultaneously, we set up video cameras along the higher elevations in order to capture various bird’s-eye views of the entire field.

  I monitored the walkthrough with a walkie-talkie from the southern edge of the field while Jon, a fellow investigator, monitored the experiment with another walkie-talkie from the northern edge. We did this so each sweeper could make at least one of us aware of an anomalous event, and we could then coordinate the movements of the entire team to the point of interest. Once they all reached the northern edge of the field, Jon would send them back through for a reverse walkthrough.

  It was a beautiful day with temperatures in the mid-70s, low humidity, and partly cloudy skies. Within seconds of beginning the experiment, a participant named Todd yelled aloud in excitement that he saw something. We rushed over to where he was standing.

  “I guess there were six or seven of us crossing the field,” he said. “I was the first person from the western edge tree line and probably fifteen yards from the edge. I was about forty yards into it when from my right-hand side I saw a light traveling to the left toward the tree line.”

  “Can you describe it?” I asked.

  “I didn’t see or sense anything but I saw a light, just a pure white light that was
three or maybe four feet long and approximately eight to ten inches in diameter,” explained Todd. “I deal a lot with animals and I know it definitely wasn’t any kind of animal. It was about a foot and a half off the ground and a bit higher than the grass, and it was traveling from right to left toward the tree line. I was on the left hand side, and when I saw it I didn’t have time to take a picture because it was moving so fast.”

  “Did it move in a straight line?” I asked.

  “No,” he continued. “It went and circled around a large rock in a collection of rocks that were in the tree line and then it was just gone. It was really quick, instantaneous—and it definitely wasn’t an animal.”

  I continued the questioning. “Have you ever seen anything like it before, or was it completely unique to you?”

  “I can’t explain what it was,” he said. “This is the first time I’ve ever seen anything like this. It was definitely there, and it was a light about three or four feet long and eight to ten inches wide. It seemed to just come out of the grass at a point west of my line. I thought it was being disturbed in some way as we all walked closer to it, and it disappeared into the tree line, moving out of the field very quickly.”

  He added that it was very clear and extremely bright. It was also very fast as it shot into the woods.

  “Could it have been a reflection of something hitting the sunlight?” I wondered.

  “This was a solid, bright, white light,” Todd reassured me. “It wasn’t a bird or any animal I’ve ever seen before. It was luminescent, too big to be

  a bug and too fast to be a bird. I wouldn’t have yelled out if it didn’t register as something really out of the ordinary.”

  Considering what Todd just witnessed, we decided to focus our efforts on the wooded area on the western edge of the field where he witnessed the light vanish. We took readings and photographs along the edge of the tree line and slowly made our way into the woods. After only a few minutes, another participant, Rebecca, approached Jon and me with a look of horror on her face. She was pale and literally shaking, and we attempted to calm her down. Once she reached a decent state of calm, I asked her to describe what happened.