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.
“We were all walking around looking for the light Todd saw,” she said. “I went off to the right toward the very edge of the woods and climbed up those rocks and stepped over that fallen tree to the right. I was just standing very still at that point trying to get an electromagnetic reading. I looked up, and about eye level with me or maybe a little above I saw a face. It was very solid and very clear. It was a man’s face. He had dark hair, very heavy thick hair, full facial hair that was very dark, black almost, and then he locked eyes with me.”
“Where was he exactly?” I asked.
“He was by that tree, but just his face,” Rebecca pointed to a tree on the edge of the Wheatfield. “I couldn’t see a body. He had the kind of facial hair that was very common during the Civil War. And his face looked dirty.”
“Did he have a hat?” I asked.
“No,” she said, still shaken by her experience, “not that I could see.”
I asked her what she did when she first saw the face.
“This is the first time I ever saw anything like this,” she said. “The last thing I thought of was grabbing my camera. I just stared back at him trying to decide if I was really seeing what I thought I was seeing, and when I could finally breathe again, I tried to motion for someone without speaking, you know, like ‘Come here!’ because I didn’t want to look away from him yet. But nobody saw my gestures. I locked eyes with this guy for what seemed like an eternity, and I finally looked over and everybody was gone.
“When I looked back, he was gone. I actually stayed there looking for some more to see if it could’ve been a shadow or a configuration of shadows, or something that I could’ve mistaken, but I never found it again.”
“It’s great that you stayed and didn’t run away,” I said. “Was he threatening?”
“It was very definitely a man, and he was very mean,” she explained. “It was not a pleasant experience, and it scared the heck out of me because he was very, very hostile. I just couldn’t breathe when it happened. I just couldn’t even breathe and you know when you feel tingly all over? Well that’s how I felt. It was a very negative experience. He was just mean-spirited.”
I assured Rebecca that he was gone now and she was safe with us.
Debbie, another participant in the experiment, told us that she took a photograph of the tree line around the same time Rebecca had her experience because she sensed something by that tree. We checked Debbie’s photo and were amazed to see a white, glowing orb about the size of a large grapefruit or a small soccer ball to the left of the tree. It was located in the same area of the woods where Todd saw the glowing object enter the tree line and about twenty yards south of where Rebecca saw the man’s face.
Debbie’s photo was taken during the day in good lighting conditions, which rules out the often-misidentified dust particles that tend to illuminate when digital shots are taken in low-light conditions (which they usually are) and the flash goes off. The unique natures of the photo stems from the fact that such clear and pronounced glowing orb manifestations captured in daylight hours are quite rare. Let’s not forget that Debbie also sensed something by the tree, which prompted her to take the photo in the first place. Therefore, her psychic intuition becomes a corroborative factor in this instance.
We also examined the area where Rebecca saw the face and saw nothing in the environment that could have resembled what she described. We did this in order to rule out pareidolia or matrixing, which is the phenomenon of seeing a familiar shape or form in random combinations of shadows and light. The shape or form itself is called simulacrum. One
of the primary functions of the human mind is to make order out of chaos. Therefore, we have a tendency to see what looks like a face or familiar form in jagged rocks, dirt, water, clouds, and even flames. The outdoor environment in Gettysburg is lush with trees, bushes, rocks, water sources, and foliage in various stages of decomposition—combinations of shapes and forms that often can be mistaken for soldiers, horses, guns, and other elements associated with the battle.
What is extremely compelling about this series of incidents in the Wheatfield is the fact that three witnesses experienced profound phenomena, within minutes of each other, all of which can be linked in a logical manner. Let’s recap: The first person (Todd) sees a visual sighting of an orb-like object streaking across the Wheatfield; the second person (Rebecca) experiences a harrowing apparitional sighting of a man’s face in the same area where the orb-like object is last seen; and the third person (Debbie) senses something and takes a photograph of a similar orb-like object in the exact location where the first streak of light apparently enters the woods.
This daylight orb was captured by the tree line minutes after being seen in the Wheatfield. Photo by Debbie Estep.
In the world of paranormal field research, this is known as a “big deal.” When it comes to mostly nontangible and nonreplicable phenomena such as ghosts, science refuses to even consider their validity. Corroborative evidence represents the best validation of the phenomena we currently have at our disposal.
Could these anomalies be associated with the energies of one or more of the thousands of souls who lost their lives in the Wheatfield during the most epic battle of the war? We may never know for certain, but when solid eyewitness accounts of ghostly phenomena are encountered in an area where extreme emotional trauma took place in such a short period of time, it makes further study in and around the Wheatfield worthy of our time and effort.