“Absolutely,” she stated. “Different people have told me that a little boy at the Orphanage is always hanging around me. I’ve felt this before, but because I can’t see him, I can only guess that this is the case. But I look at it this way … these spirit energies were once living energies, and as living beings we are constantly connecting with each other. We are attracted to some people more than others for many reasons, so why would this be any different if that same energy still exists after death? Yes. I think that for all of us who live and work in Gettysburg, we have become connected to many of the energies that exist here as a result of the battle and its aftermath, but I’m definitely okay with that.”
My interview with Kendra was enlightening for many reasons. First and foremost, I appreciated her objective and open-minded approach to the paranormal activity that surrounds her. I was also impressed with her knowledge of paranormal theory, which is a testament to her desire to acquire knowledge regarding what she and others around her are experiencing. Perhaps most intriguing was her comfortable acceptance that she has probably “gotten in tune” with certain energies as a result of her familiarity with them, even though she can’t quantify it. Although we can’t know for certain that resonance is playing an important role in the activity that Gettysburg residents and employees are experiencing, it does provide some peace of mind. After all, if the spirits of soldiers, women, and children are roaming the battlefield, streets, and hallways of Gettysburg, it’s comforting to know that they can connect with the living and perhaps feel a sense of love, caring, and belonging from those open-minded enough to acknowledge their presence.
Well, maybe not Rosa Carmichael.
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Afterword
Control.
It’s a word scientists love, and an environment they demand when conducting research. Laboratories offer the most controlled environments, as parapsychologist and paranormal research pioneer J. B. Rhine and his team proved when they conducted successful extrasensory perception (ESP) experiments at Duke University in the 1920s and 1930s. Rhine’s experimentation led to reliable analysis due to the replication of his observations. To this day, ESP is the only paranormal occurrence to which some scientists will acquiesce, in large part due to Rhine’s efforts.
Unfortunately, most paranormal phenomena dictate that researchers and investigators leave the comfortable confines of the laboratory and venture out into the field. This, after all, is where the action is. A wise man once said that if you want to catch fish, go where the fish are. The same principle applies to ghosts, as only so much can be gleaned from ghostly phenomena in a laboratory.
The problem: Too many unknown variables taint evidence, rendering it useless to those who subscribe to the scientific method. The scientific method demands observation, hypothesis, experimentation, analysis, conclusion, and theory. In the field, it’s often difficult to cover the stages of scientific rigor in the few seconds an anomaly might occur, and you can’t go back and make it happen again on demand (lack of repeatability). Spirits don’t keep schedules, and emotional imprints can’t be bottled up for laboratory analysis—at least not yet.
Having said this, some of the most active and challenging places to conduct paranormal research are battlefields. These historic landmarks have presented difficult challenges to field researchers. Some of these hindrances include natural elements associated with the outdoors such as rain, wind, and extreme temperatures, which all can affect electronic equipment, film stock, and an investigator’s fortitude. Indigenous animals can make it difficult to conduct electronic voice phenomena (EVP) experiments, as the sounds they make can be easily misinterpreted as paranormal.
And then there are people. Millions of tourists visit battlefields every year. During the course of any given day, dozens of school buses drop off children of all ages to explore these hallowed grounds. At Gettysburg, some of these kids tend to run around Devil’s Den like it’s a Chuck E. Cheese’s. It’s important that children experience these places, but it’s a nightmare for field researchers!
Large battlefields such as Gettysburg cover more than ten square miles, and strange anomalies have been experienced on just about every portion of it. Remember, the larger the area in which you conduct an experiment, the less control you have over outside elements. Lugging around hundreds of pounds of equipment over long distances is no walk in the park. Storing equipment, keeping it safe, and having appropriate power sources in the middle of a battlefield can be a tricky proposition when the nearest shelter or power source is hundreds of yards, or even miles, away.
Topography also adds to the chaos. Battlefields are covered with trees, bushes, logs, leaves, and rocks—a perfect environment in which to see a thousand faces on Mars! Remember, the mind creates familiarity out of chaos (simulacra), so in a place like Gettysburg, every photograph can conceivably have a blurry tree or moss-covered rock in the background that will look like a soldier once the mind connects the dots.
Adding to these headaches are time and money. Some battlefield parks have banker’s hours, so your time may be limited once it gets dark. Unless you want to spend time in county lockup, you need to take the time to secure the appropriate permits, or permission, depending on where you go. Also, traveling costs money, whether you travel by car (gas), airplane (ticket expenses), or horse and buggy (time away from work!). Field investigators traverse long distances in order to “go where the fish are.” Such research can be likened to expeditions that require planning and smart logistical execution.
Although these obstacles can be daunting, there are things you can do to make your battlefield investigation a success. For example, always pick smaller areas in which to conduct experiments. Remember, you have more control the smaller your “outdoor laboratory.” In Gettysburg, we narrow our experiments to specific parts of the battlefield. On the twenty-six-acre Wheatfield, for example, we conduct a grid-like walkthrough with several participants. These investigators walk across the field at twenty yards apart holding handheld equipment such as cameras, tape recorders, and trifield meters. Simultaneously, we set up video cameras on higher elevations that offer wide-angle views of the entire field. The result—several people with possible psi abilities being documented exploring every inch of the field while holding environmental monitoring equipment.
As mentioned above, battlefields are covered with trees, bushes, tall grass, dead logs, and rocks. At various angles, these objects can look like soldiers, horses, and other battlefield objects. In order to document locations properly, always shoot a series of photos to create a panoramic view of the entire area from where you stand. By doing so, you cover every angle and can better determine if that bearded Union soldier is actually a jagged rock with fungus and moss growing on it. Another effective way to decrease the chances of misinterpretation is by setting up a triangulated coverage with video equipment. Triangulation is an approach to data analysis that synthesizes data from multiple sources. By having multiple video sources in which to view various angles of Devil’s Den, for example, we can rule out a false positive by viewing the ghostly image from another angle and determining it’s only a rock that happens to looks like a man’s face from one particular angle. Triangulation can also help corroborate something as being paranormal in nature if more than one camera picks up the same anomaly.
In the end, field investigations are imperative to paranormal research. Rhine proved certain phenomena could be observed and replicated in a laboratory. Some of the more unpredictable phenomena, however, cannot. Therefore, interaction with the environments where these events occur is necessary. Environmental factors that are geographically specific such as electromagnetic field anomalies, family dynamics, and traumatic historical events seem to play a role in various types of hauntings, so being in the trenches can yield the best evidence as it applies to the effects of these variables. Importantly, interviewing eyewitnesses where the phenomena occur—not in a parapsychologist’s off
ice or laboratory—seems to be the best way to extract accurate testimony due to familiar triggers in the environment. As field researchers, we can put forth due diligence in order to gather acceptable evidence, especially if, over long periods of time, we can establish trends that give scientists something to attempt to replicate either in the field or in a laboratory.
We intend for this book to be the first in a collaborative series that documents compelling evidence collected on battlefields across the world. Our goal is to accumulate a body of evidence that compels other researchers and scientists to recognize the importance of battlefields as they apply to paranormal research.
Life happens “out there,” and that’s where we need to be in order to find the elusive answers to life’s most puzzling enigmas. Our experiences at Gettysburg have taught us that exploring the unknown represents an unparalleled adventure and that investigating battlefields results in a clearer understanding of both historical events and the specific sacrifices associated with war that make them the most horrific, yet enduring, of all human experiences.
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Appendix A:
History of Paranormal Research
Since the dawn of primitive cultures, human beings have questioned what happens when they die. The idea of “spirit” goes back to early man, who became consciously aware of his mortality and wanted to know if getting mauled by a sabertoothed tiger represented his finite end. Consciousness gone. Kaput. Nothingness.
In 1871, England’s first professor of anthropology, Edward Burnett Tylor, published Primitive Cultures. In it, Tylor explains the theory of “animism,” which he defines as the belief in spiritual beings. According to Tylor, the belief in spirit began with early man’s attempt to explain basic bodily and mental conditions such as sleeping, waking, trance, or other unconscious states, dreams, illness, and death. He believed that primitive man pondered these things and developed the idea of a soul or spirit separate from the body, which was then extended to animals, plants, inanimate objects, heavenly bodies, and deceased ancestors.
This led to primitive faiths, which in turn led to spiritual rituals. Some early cultures began to believe that the spirit wanders away from the body during periods of unconsciousness such as sleep, or that after death the spirit lingers near the body of the dead person. It was a common practice of groups holding such beliefs to pacify the ghosts of the dead by offering food, clothing, and other objects these spirits might find useful in the afterlife. These types of rituals still exist in many cultures today. In fact, the practices of ancestor worship and the mourning rites of many modern civilizations most likely originated in this newfound belief in the spirit world.
As civilizations and technology developed, however, it was no longer acceptable for people to simply believe in ghosts. Scientists and skeptics began to question how exactly it was that spirits existed, and of course, whether this could be proven scientifically. These inquiring minds focused on psychic phenomena, or psi, which refers to events that appear to contradict physical laws and suggest the ability to send or receive messages without the use of the five senses. These processes include extrasensory perception (ESP), the acquisition of information without using the known senses. ESP is comprised of telepathy, the transfer of information from one person to another without using any of the known channels of sensory communication; clairvoyance, the acquisition of information about places, objects, or events without the mediation of any of the known senses; and precognition, the acquisition of information about a future incident that couldn’t be anticipated through any known related process. Along the same lines as precognition is retrocognition, the purported abstract transfer of information about a past occurrence. Another fascinating manifestation of psi is psychokinesis, which is the direct influence of mind on physical objects or events without the intervention of any known physical force.
The organized, scientific investigation of paranormal phenomena officially began with the founding of the Society for Psychical Research in London in 1882. It was the first organization established to examine these abnormal occurrences using scientific principles. In its early days, the SPR focused on the explosion of “extravagant paranormal claims … related to the spread of the new religion of Spiritualism.” The American Society for Psychical Research was founded a short time later in 1885. Its mission has been “to explore extraordinary or as yet unexplained phenomena that have been called psychic or paranormal, and their implications for our understanding of consciousness, the universe, and the nature of existence.”
In 1927, the pioneer of contemporary parapsychology, Joseph Banks Rhine, founded the parapsychology lab at Duke University and began his seminal extrasensory perception (ESP) experiments. He coined the word “parapsychology,” the actual discipline that seeks to investigate the existence and causes of both psychic abilities and life after death using the scientific method. Due to Rhine’s somewhat successful mental-telepathy experiments, the great majority of psychical studies in the last fifty years have occurred in laboratories and focused on ESP. You see, in order for something to be deemed “scientific” and worthy of study in the scientific community, it must be observable, empirical, measurable, and repeatable. Most metaphysical incidents don’t comply with scientific protocols, but Rhine’s experimental methods held the promise of supplying repeatable demonstrations. This has been a mixed blessing, because although psi research creates a pathway to understanding the human mind, the repetitive forced-choice procedures studied in laboratories fail to capture the kinds of ghostly experiences people report in everyday life. They also preclude consciousness-after-death possibilities.
This conundrum brings up the obvious question: How does ESP tie into ghostly encounters, if at all? Are ghosts manifestations of our psychic abilities, or can spirits of the dead (souls) actually manifest themselves in our earthly realm in tangible ways? Either way, the sobering truth remains that after more than a hundred years of research conducted by some of the most brilliant minds on the planet, we’re no closer to understanding the nature of spirit than our sabertooth-dodging brethren. However, in recent years, the growing number of paranormal researchers willing to leave the confines of the laboratory and venture out into the field where the real action occurs has yielded a strong body of evidence in favor of the existence of various types of ghostly peculiarities.
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Appendix B:
Gettysburg’s Quantum Quirks
For some, experiencing Gettysburg can be likened to peering down the proverbial rabbit hole. Energy vortices captured on film and video, strange wave-like ripples in the atmosphere seen with the naked eye, high electro- and geomagnetic readings garnered from high-tech equipment, and other strange anomalies experienced on almost every portion of the battlefield. But what do these highly unfamiliar events represent?
Extensive volumes have been written regarding the relationship between paranormal phenomena and the nontraditional scientific possibilities that might validate them as part of the natural and known universe. Quantum physics explores the realities of life at the subatomic levels, and this has had consequences in terms of our own consciousness and experience, as well as our relationship to the universe around us. Quantum theory suggests there are interconnections and influences between subject and object, which, according to traditional scientific theory, cannot exist. This opens the door to alternative explanations of consciousness and challenges us to explore them with an open-mindedness that goes against a societal belief system still entrenched in superstition, fear, and skepticism.
As it relates to Gettysburg, how might quantum physics explain the paranormal phenomena encountered there on a regular basis? How can a man see the “imprint” of a Union regiment marching near the Wheatfield more than a century earlier? How can a video camera capture a ghost soldier jumping over a fence at the Triangular Field? How can we hear the sounds of battles already fought? Can we experience history firsthand, as a result of some univer
sal law of physics scientists haven’t discovered yet?
For more than a century, the greatest minds on this planet have studied paranormal phenomena and their implications on our understanding of the universe and human consciousness. Theories associated with time slips or time warps can be traced to Albert Einstein, who proposed the theory that time and space form a continuum that bends, folds, or warps from the observer’s point of view, relative to such factors as movement or gravitation. A time slip, therefore, might be a perceived discontinuity in time, either one that allows something to travel backward or forward in time, or an area of space that appears to travel through time at a different rate from the rest of the universe. If we assume these discontinuities are possible, it might explain how a couple who visited the Gettysburg battlefield in 1989 reportedly had a conversation with a barefoot, emaciated, sweat-soaked man dressed in a filthy, ripped, gray uniform who politely asked for a drink of water, then slowly disappeared before their eyes!
Mathematical developments associated with the superstring theory, considered by some scientists to be the most outrageous theory ever proposed, may help theoretical physicists explain encounters with the past as well. Research suggests that disruptions and warps can occur naturally in space, resulting infrequently in theoretically possible random time events. These warps or disruptions might allow for any action or event to transcend time and space—and be seen, heard, or felt at any point in time. Superstring theory attempts to explain all of the particles and fundamental forces of nature in one theory, or a Theory of Everything. The implications of superstring physics are radically changing our ideas about the nature of space, opening up the possibility that extra dimensions, rips in the fabric of space, and parallel universes actually exist.
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