Ghosts of Gettysburg IV: Spirits, Apparitions and Haunted Places on the Battlefield by Mark Nesbitt

Author:Mark Nesbitt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: paranormal, civil war, supernatural, gettysburg, hauntings, haunted houses, haunted battlefields, hauntings and ghosts, ghosts stories

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Chapter 8: Notes From The Other World

Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn’d,

Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,

Be thy intents wicked or charitable,

Thou comest in such a questionable shape….

—William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, scene iv.

In the sullen, inexorable tramp of time and all of vast eternity, the Battle of Gettysburg could have been fought just yesterday. In fact, looking at Earth on July 1, 2, and 3 from a distant star, say 134 light-years away, the Great Conflict is just now occurring. If some intelligent creature on a planet circling that star had a telescope powerful enough to see the details of Earth, would he be able to see the desperate struggles on McPherson’s Ridge and through the Railroad Cut? Would the Confederate lines surging up Little Round Top and Culp’s Hill be discernible? And could that gross capitulation of souls we call Pickett’s Charge even be noticed at that distance? Probably not.

Yes, the great battles that break a hundred thousand mothers’ hearts and destroy families and alter genetic lines forever, from some places in this universe, cannot even be seen. The smoke and haze and fire are invisible. But the All is changed, from God’s point of view.

Perhaps that is why we try to memorialize the venues of Death. But making a battlefield into a manicured national park with monuments and administrators may be the worst thing anyone could do—it trivializes the horror and sanitizes the disgusting butchery that war really is. Preserving these killing grounds should be mandatory. But, as William Manchester noted, turning battlefields into recreational areas “may be an attempt to exorcise the desperate past,” meant to benefit the morbid curiosity or abject guilt of the living rather than memorialize the dead.

He chose his words wisely. Perturbed spirits, restless souls, and the essences of men exist and seem to need a helping hand to flee their tortured lives on that spot where they died. As Shakespeare wrote, “I am afeared there are few die well that die in battle….” Many deny that there are ghosts at Gettysburg—or anywhere on earth—and that may ring true to those who have never experienced an unexplainable event. But the argument is hollow to those who have.

I have been asked if I have ever “seen a ghost.” I can say with assurance that it is one thing to collect reports on hundreds of supernatural occurrences involving the mysteriously unexplainable. It is a completely different thing to experience one….

In the afternoon of July 1, 1863, the Union line, which had formed a rough, upside-down “L” west and north of Gettysburg during the fighting, begins to collapse. The lines north of town begin their retreat as pressure from Jones’s Confederate artillery battalion to the east of Barlow’s Knoll increases. A withdrawal is a perilous thing at any time; under fire it is particularly delicate.

Retreating from their position on Barlow’s Knoll, hundreds of men pass an ominous portent—Potter’s Field, the graveyard for the Adams County Poorhouse, the buildings of which are several hundred yards closer to town.

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