Gettysburg’s
Residual Hauntings
An important part of the paranormal research process is the documentation of experiencer testimony. In the world of parapsychology, “experiencer” is a fancy word for “eyewitness,” or a person who has a firsthand encounter with the paranormal. During a group weekend investigation of Gettysburg, we interviewed several people who came along to learn how to conduct field investigations. As is almost always the case, many of them were there because they had experienced paranormal phenomena in the past and were hoping to learn more about what may have happened to them. One such gentleman, Brad, was fascinated with the paranormal, but particularly as it applied to battlefields. We soon learned he had experienced a life-changing encounter at Gettysburg. He provided us with the following documentation of his experience:
In the summer of 1990 when I was seventeen years old, my parents took me on a three-week summer vacation. We drove all over the eastern half of the country, and since Civil War history was one of my passions, we spent three days in Gettysburg. I also have a passion for ghosts and the supernatural, but I had no idea these two interests were going to come together during our visit.
Ironically, we arrived at Gettysburg on July 1 and left on July 3, the actual dates of the battle in 1863. Perhaps the timing was perfect to be able to experience the encounters I had, but whatever the reason, the following event occurred in front of my own eyes.
My encounter occurred on July 3 as we were leaving the battlefield. It was about 11 o’clock on a clear, very hot morning. As my parents and I drove through the battlefield park, I looked off to the area of a wheat field, where a particularly bloody skirmish took place during the battle. I noticed a regiment of about 30 Union soldiers marching in formation approximately 100 yards off the road, heading toward a ridge. I told my dad to stop the car; I grabbed my video camera and started sprinting across the field to catch up with them.
This Confederate sharpshooter met his violent end in Devil’s Den. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Many researchers believe that the manner in which these men died factors in to why the battlefield is so haunted. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Since we were there on the anniversary of the battle, I thought it was a reenactment group practicing some formation maneuvers. It seemed like I couldn’t catch up no matter how fast I ran. I stopped on occasion and got some pretty good shots of them, but I noticed how silent they seemed to be. All you could hear was the wind rustling through the wheat. They headed over a ridge and out of site. I got to the top of the ridge about a minute later, looked around, and saw nothing for miles over an empty valley. There wasn’t a single soldier in sight. There’s no way they could have gone anywhere else. Beyond the ridge is a vast, open countryside, and I was less than a minute behind them.
When I got to a VCR, I popped in the tape, and sure enough, there were the soldiers as clear as day. I just knew I had videotape with ghosts on it. Every time I show it to people, they don’t believe me because the soldiers are as solid as real people on video, but I know what I saw (or didn’t see) when I looked over the ridge. Several years later, I saw a TV show on the ghosts of Gettysburg, and one of the stories was about visiting Japanese dignitaries who pulled their limousine over to the side of the road and watched a regiment of Union soldiers march in formation several feet in front of them. They called the park rangers and thanked them for arranging the demonstration for them, but alas, there was no demonstration arranged or scheduled.
Several other people have seen a similar phantom regiment on the battlefield, and this particular phenomenon has come to be known as the Ghost Regiment of Gettysburg. I honestly believe this is what I saw; whether people believe me or not, I know what I videotaped is the real thing.
Brad’s encounter, and many other documented paranormal experiences at Gettysburg, may represent what was described in chapter 1 as residual hauntings, which theoretically occur when past events are somehow “imprinted” on environments and then experienced by eyewitnesses (via retrocognition, the ability to see past events) at a later time—sometimes decades or centuries later. The imprint theory, as you may recall, proposes that environments with traumatic emotional histories—and specifically the physical elements that make them up such as rocks, trees, water sources, man-made dwellings, etc.—act as recording devices, somehow absorbing and then replaying events that those with a sixth sense or keen intuition—or who just happen to be in the right place at the right time—can experience via visual, auditory, olfactory, and/or other sensory perceptions. Gettysburg would appear to be the perfect conduit for such activity because of its traumatic emotional history and the large scale of such trauma (51,000 + casualties in three days). Brad may have witnessed a recording of a Union regiment marching in formation 127 years prior to his visual encounter. It appears more plausible than him seeing the actual spirits of thirty separate individuals still marching in formation. This event likely constitutes an activity that occurred when these soldiers were still alive, but that was replayed more than a century later.
Loyd Auerbach, director of the Office of Paranormal Investigations and author of numerous books on the paranormal, emphasizes that residual hauntings involve the recorded activity of the living, not the dead. “Although the subject(s) of the recording may be long dead, the activity was impressed upon the environment when they were alive,” he explains. “This is analogous to videotaping a person doing something—you can’t really do that when the person is dead. They kind of just lie there.”
Residual hauntings are most commonly referred to as “place memory” by parapsychologists and academic researchers. In less formal circles it is called “cinema of time” and is often associated with Stone Tape Theory. Andrew Nichols, PhD, professor, author, and founder of the American Institute of Parapsychology (AIP), points out that paranormal phenomena often share similar characteristics, which makes it difficult to create clear lines of distinction. For example, he says, a probable relationship exists between retrocognitive experiences and psychometry, or object reading, which is the ability to perceive information about the history and owners of an object as practiced by psychics. “In fact,” he adds, “they are very likely to be very similar, if not identical, phenomenon.”
Auerbach agrees that place memory seems to be an extension of psychometry. One interpretation is that the object—and what is a house but a big object—becomes a focal point for retrocognition. However, an alternative interpretation is that something about the object, building, battlefield, etc., essentially “records” information as it exists. “Human beings are capable of picking up on these environmental recordings and essentially play back bits of the information in their own perceptions/consciousness,” he explains. “Most often, emotional events (or emotions themselves) are behind the more likely perceptions/recordings, although on occasion the recordings seem to be of very mundane activity.”
To muddy the waters further, similar phenomena are also referred to as time slips or time warps, depending on the specific characteristics associated with them. It remains a highly debated topic within the paranormal research community, yet one that offers an incredible opportunity to learn a great deal not only about paranormal mysteries, but history itself. For example, in Brad’s case, greater detail of the soldiers’ uniforms may have provided researchers with an opportunity to corroborate the encounter from a historical standpoint.
Brad’s Gettysburg account isn’t an isolated incident, as encounters with phantom ghost armies, discarnate soldiers, and other elements from the past have been documented at length thanks to the dedication of paranormal researchers such as the late Andrew McKenzie. McKenzie, who was vice president of the Society for Psychical Research and author of many books on the paranormal, was a serious student of spontaneous cases in which protagonists found themselves in surroundings that no longer existed. His task was not a easy one. Alan Gould, a colleague of McKenzie and former professor of psychology at the University of Nottingham, professed that such cases are “fascinating, exceedingly rare, and very hard to evaluate.”
One thing McKenzie learned from his research was that characteristics associated with these phenomena are similar but not always the same, which raises the question of whether a past event has been imprinted on the environment for those with psychic sensitivities to experience at a later date, or whether some type of time slip has occurred, where a person, or group of people, travel through time via supernatural means.
Two schoolteachers, Charlotte Anne Elizabeth Moberly and Eleanor Frances Jourdain, had perhaps the most famous time slip experience ever recorded. While visiting the Palace at Versailles in 1901, they decided to go in search of the Petit Trianon, a small chateau located on the grounds of the palace. While walking through the grounds, they both were impressed by a feeling of oppressive gloom. They claimed to have encountered—and interacted with—a number of people in old-fashioned attire whom they later assumed to have been members of the court of Marie Antoinette.
In a widely publicized case from 1979, two English couples driving through France claimed to have stayed overnight at an old-fashioned hotel and decided on their return journey to stay at the same hotel but were unable to find it. Photographs taken during their stay, which were in the middle of the roll of film, were missing, even from the negative strips, when the pictures were developed.
One telling characteristic of these phenomena has to do with whether those experiencing them can take an active part in the event—interacting with the people and places being “visited.” In the Versailles case, the two women were apparently seen, and spoken to, by people they saw. The English couples on holiday in France went further, staying in a hotel and eating dinner and breakfast in the course of their experience. Both of these incidents represent unusually prolonged events, taking place over at least several hours. These cases are more likely associated with some sort of time slip as opposed to a residual haunting, where the subject (e.g. Brad) is merely a passive observer of the past scene—one that plays out like a movie, imprinted on paranormal celluloid.
An interesting element associated with these cases is an “altered state of reality” that’s very difficult for the witnesses to describe. For example, many people report that at the start of their experiences, their immediate surroundings take on an “oddly flat, underlit, and lifeless appearance, and normal sounds seem muffled.” This surreal environment is sometimes accompanied by feelings of depression and unease.
Another account includes an equally odd description of the environment, in which “the street seemed unusually quiet; there were sounds but they appeared quite muted.” The witness also noticed that when she sat down, “the sun didn’t seem as bright as it had been moments before.” In fact, looking back years later, she described the light as similar to when the area had a partial solar eclipse.
Jenny Randles, a British author and former director of investigations with the British UFO Research Association (BUFORA), invented the phrase “Oz Factor” to describe this strange, seemingly altered state of being felt by witnesses of paranormal events. She defines the Oz Factor in her book UFO Reality as … “the sensation of being isolated, or transported back from the real world into a different environmental framework … where reality is but slightly different, as in the fairytale land of Oz.”
We also experienced this Oz Factor just before hearing rebel yells in the Triangular Field at Gettysburg a few years ago (see chapter 13: “Echoes from the Past”). During that encounter, the atmosphere becoming very still and quiet just before hearing the shrieking “whoops” and “yips” that terrified Union soldiers years earlier. Oddly enough, we remembered commenting that this is what it must feel like just before one goes missing in the Bermuda Triangle.
Brad may have experienced the same phenomenon while chasing his phantom regiment at Gettysburg. Remember him describing how “I couldn’t catch up no matter how fast I ran. I stopped on occasion and got some pretty good shots of them, but I noticed how silent they seemed to be. All you could hear was the wind rustling through the wheat.”
One thing is certain, and that is whatever Brad saw had a profound impact on his life. He, like so many others, experienced something truly bizarre at Gettysburg. He may have been privy to a glimpse back into the past or was actually transported back in time for a few brief moments. Gettysburg most certainly acted as the catalyst for Brad’s encounter due to its history and therefore most certainly requires our full attention as it applies to paranormal research and our quest to find the answers to these profound enigmas.