High Strangeness on Seminary Ridge
— By Jack Roth —
On May 8, 2004, we decided to set up a private midnight tour of Seminary Ridge for the investigative team and our guests. We had heard of many ghostly encounters in this area and, we knew it would be very quiet and free of tourists at such a late hour.
Seminary Ridge was the site of fierce fighting on the first day of the battle. This was where Union Gen. John Buford’s Cavalry Corps First Division held off Gen. Henry Heth’s superior Confederate infantry forces long enough for corps of Union infantry to arrive at Gettysburg. The beautiful Lutheran Theological Seminary dominates the geography of Seminary Ridge, as it sits majestically on its crest. It was to its highest cupola where Buford, while trying to lead his troops from the field, climbed up periodically to assess a broader view of a very grave situation—pivoting constantly with binoculars to watch both his badly outnumbered cavalry division holding off the Confederates to the north and for any sign of Union General Reynolds’s I Corps arriving from either the south or west.
Union General John Buford, whose Cavalry Corps First Division held off superior Confederate Infantry until Union infantry could arrive at Gettysburg on July 1, 1863. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Union dead next to McPherson’s Woods after the first day of fighting. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Our tour began peacefully enough, as our knowledgeable guide gave us a detailed description of both the Lutheran Seminary and the riveting events of the battle’s first day. But then, as is often the case in Gettysburg, what had been an uneventful midnight stroll slowly transformed into an emotional whirlwind of high strangeness. After the tour ended and the excitement subsided, we decided to get everyone back to our hotel in order to lead a roundtable discussion while the night’s “festivities” were still fresh in everyone’s memories.
One of our guests, Shannon, was the first to describe what she saw. Apparently, as she was listening to the tour guide, she saw a pinpoint of light streak over the top of her head. The light wasn’t visible for very long and quickly disappeared. She described it as moving from left to right over the tour guide’s head.
“Can you describe the light?” I asked.
“It was more of a small pinpoint streaking across the sky,” replied Shannon. “Not even an inch, which is why I thought it was a bug at first.”
Sean, another tour participant, also witnessed something similar. “I think I saw the same thing at a different time,” he said. “I didn’t really think much about it. It was when she was talking about the widow’s house, and I saw it seven to ten feet above her head, starting off at golf-ball size and trailing about six feet. It was yellow and reddish. It got no bigger than a softball.”
I asked if anyone else saw something.
“Debbie, when you were looking through the window at the Seminary, I walked over and I took a picture of the steps, and then I saw that you were looking in the window,” said Sean. “So I decided to take a picture of you, and just as I lifted my camera I saw a light about ten or twelve feet away on my right-hand side on the ground. And it wasn’t the blue orbs that I’ve seen in your photos. This was something I’ve never seen in digital camera displays, but it was a light on the ground and then it was just gone. Something was definitely there and then it wasn’t there; and it wasn’t somebody else taking a picture because everybody else was standing at another location.”
“Could it have been a flashlight?” I asked.
“No,” Sean said. “Nobody else was there. It was totally dark on that side of the steps and I didn’t know she was there. I don’t know why I walked over there. This is the first time I’ve done anything like this.”
I added that when the tour guide was talking about John Reynolds, I was looking around the street corner where some houses were, in the same direction she said they took General Reynolds’s body. I looked over and saw this white figure moving toward the street corner. There was a big bush on the corner, so I saw this glowing form for about two or three seconds, and it was higher up … it was probably about five or six feet off the ground. It happened really quickly, so I thought it might be a person walking with a bright white shirt. At least that’s what I assumed at first, and then I waited for it to turn the corner and come out from the other side of the bush that was blocking my view, but it never did. I kept staring at the same location and wanted to make sure nothing came out the other side, and nothing ever did. If a person was walking down the street, they would have eventually come out from the other side of the bush because that’s where the street went.”
Jon added to the list of phenomena we experienced that night. “When we first arrived for the ghost tour, I was standing to the side looking at something on Seminary Ridge, and it looked like a cat,” he described. “It was oblong and black, maybe the size of a football. And it kind of bounded down the hill a little bit. There was this bushy shrub tree, and it went behind that and disappeared. I poked Jack and we walked down there to make sure it wasn’t a cat or something in the tree. We actually walked down past the tree, and there was nothing in the tree. There was nowhere for it to jump out, and I watched the tree the entire time.”
(top) A ghostly mist forms in McPherson’s Woods, where heavy fighting took place on the first day of the battle. (bottom) Second still from video shows mist forming and moving like someone running with what looks like a gun. Photos by Michael Hartness.
Robin, who had been with us on a few Gettysburg investigations in the past and was a very reliable witness, said that she was standing by the church steeple toward the end of the tour, and she had this feeling in her peripheral vision as if something was going to happen to her right. “So I turned around, took a few steps away from the tour guide, and thought I saw what appeared to be soldiers,” she said. “It was just a couple of them at first moving between the trees. This is when Debbie (a sensitive) came over, probably out of concern. There was such a strong odor of gunpowder that my eyes started tearing. And it was so bitterly cold that my camera froze. The batteries did not fail; the camera froze. The zoom lens wouldn’t move, and nothing would work. Debbie came over, which was comforting because when you’re in the midst of something like that away from the group, you want somebody around.”
Debbie jumped in with her perspective. “I walked over to her because she was standing perfectly still, so I thought something was going on,” she said. “As soon as I started walking toward her, the closer I got to her, the colder it got. By the time I got in front of her, I could smell the gunpowder, and we’re both sniffing the air and asking, ‘Well, what do you smell?’ She’s telling me she’s smelling gunpowder, and I’m smelling the same thing, so I knew we weren’t both hallucinating this strange odor, and it was freezing cold.”
“It was freezing!” added Robin.
“I mean it was cold to begin with, but this was a bone-chilling cold,” continued Debbie. “This went right through your skin like a deep, frigid cold. And then we lost you guys for a bit and had to find you again, and as the tour guide was telling the story about the soldier who was accidentally buried alive, we were looking again at that same area because the other thing we had seen was two columns of white, kind of misty, floating material. And we both saw it.”
“Just coming up from the earth,” said Robin. “A mist.”
“But it didn’t belong there; it wasn’t supposed to be there and it wasn’t right … there was no mist anyplace else,” said Debbie. “So then we were walking toward it, and the closer we got to that little grove of trees, the colder it was getting. We stopped and just watched. And you could see deeper shadows, but they were definitely people-shaped shadows moving between the trees, and they were definitely moving.
“Robin, how many were there?” I asked.
“There was a group of three, and there was another pair of two, and there was another group of at least four,” she said. “We were really careful to point out where and in what direction they were moving. Whether it was at the streetlight, to the right of the streetlight, or ahead of the tree. We were really careful to identify movement to each other to make sure we weren’t seeing car taillights or something like that.”
“A lot of mysterious shadows and lights,” I said. “Anything else?”
“When we left, we got turned around on Seminary Ridge and wound up on Confederate Avenue, so we got to ride along where Pickett’s division formed before Pickett’s Charge and all the way down to the end of the Confederate line,” said Jon. “I mean, it’s miles and miles of tree line and monuments and cannons and everything else, and as we drove down, I saw a large rectangular light, a bright light out in the middle of the battlefield. It was distinctly purple and as large as one of the monuments. It was as if somebody put a purple film in front of a light to make the light change color. It was bright and purple, and it was basically lit up in the middle of the battlefield.”
I pointed out to everyone that I was in the car with Jon and Scott, and both of their reactions were interesting because they reacted at exactly the same time to whatever they saw.
“Yeah, I saw it too,” said Scott. “It was the weirdest thing. We tried to come up with a rational explanation of what it could have been, but we couldn’t. It was one of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen. And why purple? It’s been a very strange night.”
After the roundtable discussion, Scott and Jon stayed up a while longer to tell me about their interpretation of the streaking light they also saw on Seminary Ridge. I didn’t know they had also seen a similar phenomenon, so I was interested to hear what they had to say.
“We were standing out there just enjoying the tour,” Scott began. “The tour guide had set down her lantern, and we were all gathered around in a semicircle. Suddenly, almost thirty feet above us, I saw a very intense, extremely bright white streak of light. It wasn’t a ball of light casting a contrail; it wasn’t any fixed thing. It was just like a stretch of light that was about three to four feet long. It started out about three or four inches wide and as it went along, it stretched and elongated a little bit, and then it just dissipated. It kind of looked like a glowing surfboard, to be honest with you. So basically, it started about twenty-five feet above us, and it went and kind of streaked away.”
“I think I saw the other end of what Scott saw,” Jon continued. “When I first got to that spot, instead of listening to the tour I was watching the top of the Seminary to try and see if I could see anything up in the tower. I saw shadows up there move like somebody hit it with a flashlight, and I looked around to tell somebody but I didn’t see anybody else looking that way, so I was going to wait until the end of the tour, but that’s when I heard the others talking about seeing a light coming from one way and then dissipate going the other way. But that’s what I saw. The tour guide also told us she saw the same thing happen about two or three times before we got there. Her husband saw it once and she saw it twice—a light from that general area streaking across the sky, but it never followed the same pattern twice. And there were no lighthouses or searchlights around there, so it couldn’t have been that.”
“And what you saw was moving in the same trajectory as what I saw,” added Scott. “But what I saw faded out, so it’s almost like Jon was looking in a different direction, and whatever it was kind of re-intensified later on down the line but at the same trajectory.”
These eyewitness accounts illustrate just how hard it is to accurately describe and define paranormal incidents. Each person who saw the streaking light on Seminary Ridge most likely saw the same thing but had a different interpretation of what it looked like. In this case, one person’s bug was another person’s ghostly surfboard.
Different interpretations aside, notice how in a group setting as one person starts to open up about experiencing something, other people start to feel more comfortable about it and chime in with their own experiences. It started with a flash of light in the sky that Shannon thought might be a bug, but thankfully she wasn’t afraid to mention it. From that we obtained compelling and corroborative testimony involving other strange lights, moving shadows, glowing figures, the overwhelming smell of gunpowder, shadowy soldier figures, and a huge flash of purple light seen right where Pickett’s men would have congregated to prepare for their famous charge. This is why having roundtable discussions (in a relaxed atmosphere) after a paranormal event is an effective way to draw out and document eyewitness testimony.
That night on Seminary Ridge was one of the most interesting nights I’ve ever spent in Gettysburg, but what exactly did we see? Surprisingly, seeing flashes and streaks of light on the battlefield is more common than one might think. Some theorize these may represent the imprinted energies of both gun and cannon fire, which is certainly a plausible explanation considering the concentrated amount that was expelled in a three-day period. As for smelling the gunpowder, this too could easily represent a residual haunting, as the entire battlefield and surrounding countryside must have been permeated with the smell of gunpowder (and other, much more ghastly things) for days. Regarding the shadows and the glowing figures, we’ll probably never know; we obtained no photographic evidence to corroborate the visual sightings.
In the end, these experiences left us with more questions than answers, but by documenting them, we may someday be able to develop a viable blueprint as to the nature of paranormal activity. And perhaps more importantly, engaging in the pursuit of these answers allows us to witness profound events and learn a great deal about—if nothing else—the human experience.