What has gone takes something with it,
and when this is of the dear, nothing can fill the place.
All the changes touched the borders of sorrows.
—Major General Joshua Chamberlain
Most experts agree that a “haunting” is the recurrence in the same venue of the same or similar paranormal happenings; when similar paranormal happenings occur to many different people over a number of years, a house or an area can truly be considered haunted.
Devil’s Den must surely fall into this category. Old Dorm, Schmucker Hall at the Seminary, Stevens Hall, the houses on Baltimore Street and Carlisle Street, and a number of historic houses on and around the battlefield have had numerous inhabitants who have reported similar unexplainable sights and happenings. Iverson’s Pits apparently at one time had a great deal of paranormal activity, which, at least in one case, has continued.
Prior to the massive expansion in recent years of Gettysburg College, two quaint houses stood across from the College Union Building and south of the Health Center, about where the new dining hall addition stands today.
They were two and a half stories high and were called, respectively, East Cottage and West Cottage, and housed female students for the most part. One was white stucco and stood until just a few years ago when it was razed. One must wonder where the displaced spirit went that was heard to wander in it by the numerous students who co-habitated with it.
No one would ever go into the attic of the cottage even though a good bit of storage space was there. It seems that virtually every time someone opened the small door in one of the second floor rooms that led up to the attic and attempted to climb the stairs, odd noises would begin—stifled moans, muffled voices, threatening sounds—until the intruder was driven to leave the area and close the door.
One woman, who lived there as a student, recalled the experiences that were had by her and the other residents of the house. At first they began blaming the personal items that were out-of-place on each other playing pranks. But strange things happened so often that even the most hard-core prankster would soon be expected to tire of them and admit to being the perpetrator—unless no living resident of the house was the cause of the happenings.
She thought the spirit must be classified as a “poltergeist” or “noisy ghost,” because of the odd physical manifestations of its presence and the tireless repetitiveness of the events. The poet Robert Graves, writing about “noisy ghosts” in 1958 said that “poltergeists everywhere show an appalling sameness of behavior; humorless, pointless, uncoordinated.” Poltergeists have run amok in nearly every country, and for quite a while too: one of the first cases was recorded in Germany in A. D. 355.1 Yet, how many unexplainable occurrences of physical objects—stone implements or animal skin clothing or pottery—being moved happened before that date and were never recorded or even spoken of, the percipient fearful of an angry god or evil spirit?
The women in East Cottage would, one by one, clean up, make their beds and leave for morning classes. They would study after class in the library, or be busy until noon, when they would all manage to return to the cottage to have lunch. Sure enough, one of the beds would be torn up and disheveled, pillows here, covers there. One of the housemates would get the blame and profess her innocence, until it had happened enough times to everyone in the house that some other presence was eventually blamed.
East Cottage (Special Collections, Gettysburg College Library).
The woman who related this story later worked for the National Park Service and had some further experiences out on the battlefield, some of which are recorded in this book. But none was quite as disconcerting as those she experienced in East Cottage.
Her room was on the second floor. She had a bookshelf in that room that had a raised edge—a “lip”—at the front of the shelf to keep the books from tumbling. A half-dozen books were lying upon the shelf on their sides—not upright as they normally are—and she watched one night in utter amazement as one by one each book lifted over the lip and fell to the floor.
She and the other women were the victims several times of the messy poltergeist when it threw papers around individual rooms while they were gone.
They would sometimes be awakened late at night by the old piano downstairs playing by itself. No specific tune, just a random tinkling of keys. At first they thought it was a mouse or squirrel, but never could confirm the unlikely event that some timid creature like that would wander up and down the keys of a noisy piano without scaring itself. There were never any other normal signs of rodent infestation—chewed windows, food nibbled at, droppings—to confirm the fact that it was a living creature and not a spiritual one who was attracted time and again to the half-century-old instrument to play some mournful, ethereal music on the keys.
Perhaps the time that the poltergeist evoked the most anger was when my friend’s small, porcelain, Hummel-type music box with a figurine was flipped off the bookshelf onto the floor to smash into several pieces. It was the same bookshelf with the lipped edge on it, from which books would unexplainably tumble. Disappointment gave way to confusion as to how the heavy figurine could have lifted itself from the shelf, over the lip, and hurled itself to the floor without the least bit of movement within the house or movement of the shelf itself or anything else on it. In fact, it would have taken an earthquake to lift the weighted music box over the edge of the shelf and toss it carelessly to the floor. And of course, no earthquakes have been recorded in Gettysburg in the last century-and-a-half, unless you want to count the unleashing of hundreds of cannon in three horrid days in July 1863. Her anger came later, as she was trying to carefully glue the pieces back together since the figurine held much sentimental value. “All right,” she scolded angrily into thin air when a piece would not stick. “I’ve had it with you! That’s enough!” For a long time there was no more activity in the house.
Then, one day, she was standing in the kitchen of the cottage. The door to the unfinished cellar was closed and locked with its skeleton key. The old door was apparently out of joint and the women noticed that if they didn’t lock the ancient lock with the key, they would find the door open in the mornings. They never used the basement for anything, but stored canned goods in the stairway.
Suddenly, her attention was attracted by some movements at the door. As she watched, the key in the old door slowly turned by itself, the door came unlocked and swung open as if letting someone out of the kitchen and down into the darkened cellar.
As if something was trying to say that it was sorry for breaking the figurine and was banishing itself from the house, it was the last thing, to her knowledge, that ever happened in the cottage.
* * *
Eventually the cottages were torn down and the new dining hall addition was constructed. Just fifty yards or so from where East and West Cottages once stood is the Health Center for the college. From the Health Center you can look out across West Broadway, across the broad, grassy athletic fields where now rich boys play and once brave boys died, to the ridgeline of Oak Ridge, from which streamed the destroyed remnants of a portion of the Union Army’s First Corps. You must also remember that the 47 barren acres between Oak Ridge, Broadway, Howard Avenue, and the Carlisle Road were irreverently and irreversibly altered by Gettysburg College in the last few years, filling in with thousands of truckloads of fill the valleys and small defilades which saved soldier’s lives, for their fields of play. “Hallowed ground” means different things to different people.
Somewhere in those fields between the ridgeline and the college retreated what was left of the 11th Pennsylvania, losing sight of their little mascot in the confusion. Their small war dog “Sallie” got lost in the melee then stayed behind to guard her fallen masters. Guard them she did with the unconditional, selfless, mysterious love given only by dogs, going without food or water for three stifling days, ferociously keeping Confederates—or anyone—away from the bodies of the dead Pennsylvanians until the survivors of the 11th returned to bury their brother soldiers. Then and only then, when she recognized her comrades would the brave little terrier yield the high ground of Oak Ridge and allow the bodies of her slain masters to be touched. Yes, “hallowed ground” is understood differently by different creatures.
Across the fields tumbled the men from Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, New York and Maine. They retreated into the town along the railroad bed to the west and the Mummasburg Road, with ragged edges of their retreating lines making their way through the crop-filled fields. If they could have looked into the future (or we into the past) they would have been seen passing through the brick walls of the modern building of the Health Center.
Time is such a mysterious thing. The different ways we measure it, loosely based upon the turning of the earth relative to the sun, or even with atomic clocks, seem inadequate toward understanding time’s true nature. There is the time which flows forward and is measured by pieces on our wrists or on the walls or in towers and keeps us coordinated with the rest of the world. More important is the time ticked off by our own bodies that represents the gradual decay of our physical forms, because when that clock stops, so do we. The only real reason time matters is death, and so we must be very careful with the way we kill time before it eventually kills us.
But what happens to time when we die?
Some parapsychologists believe that the sightings of apparitions indicate life after death, that the dead person is the one sending the telepathic message to the living.2 And if we do indeed move on, into another form or world, certainly some form of time must occur, because in order to exist in any form, something must be in existence for at least some time. Some philosophers have called it universal time, or even God’s Time, wherein time travels not forward—in fact, doesn’t even flow—but merely exists as “now.” The existence somewhere of an ageless, timeless, non-decaying, “now” certainly explains the immutability and eternal nature of those gone before us.
One of the nurses who worked the night shift at the Health Center in the mid-1980s recalled some experiences she had—as well as others—in the center established for the healing of students.
Alone in the semi-darkened Health Center at night, she would often hear footfalls coming down the hall toward the nurse’s office. She would leave her desk to try and help whatever student had gotten up to wander the halls, but no one was there. The only times that the sounds of the footsteps up and down the halls were frightening were when she knew that no one was checked into the center that night. Those times she called College Security, who came promptly and found no one to arrest.
There were odd noises as well. For some of noises she could locate the source: photos falling off the wall; radiator covers being flung from the radiators. Yet, even though she could locate where the noise came from, she was still anxious about just how frequently the photos would fall. How many times in a week or two do several different radiator covers have to end up crashing to the floor before one suspects something odd: eight, ten times? How often should a picture fall, the nail inspected, the picture re-hung only to fall again, before one is convinced that someone unseen is trying to do a little re-decorating: six times, eight times?
Finally, when the odd noises continued one night as she was catching up on backlogged paperwork to the soft background buzz of the television, they became so loud and irritating, she simply accepted the cacophony and turned up the volume of the TV to cover the noises so she wouldn’t be distracted from her work.
She said that her evenings there alone were usually filled with the constant feeling that someone else was around. Her sense, which may be colored by her devotion to her profession, was that whoever was walking the halls was not malevolent, but merely checking in on the sick students, whether there were any in the building or not. And yet, even with knowing the kindly nature of the invisible, caring spirit who paces and re-arranges things, she admits to being much happier about not working nights anymore.
***************
These were my men, and those who followed were familiar and dear.
They belonged to me and I to them,
by bonds birth cannot create nor death sever.
More were passing here than the personages on the stand could see.
But to me so seeing, what a review,
how great, how far, how near!
It was as the morning of the resurrection!
—Major General Joshua Chamberlain
There is always a momentary pause upon confronting a great anachronism that looms before our senses occasionally in life. The tangle of thoughts when we discover that someone we love and just saw alive is suddenly dead; the image that rises, in some strange way, upon being hurt or wounded, that the person I have known all my life—“me”—might be in danger of dying at this moment; the mistrust of the senses before any of us is willing to surrender what we believe is true to what is reality. Yet, when you have lived in one of the historic houses on the battlefield of Gettysburg, the occasional suspension of reality is acceptable. So it was with two of my friends who lived in houses that rest upon the hallowed ground of Gettysburg.
I received a letter from a good friend now living in Washington who, for a time, worked for the National Park Service at Gettysburg and lived in at least one of the historic houses on the battlefield. She told me of two events in the letter of which I was unaware.
First, she mentioned a mutual friend who was living in the George Weikert House; the same Weikert House that contained the upstairs door that refused to remain closed no matter what anyone did to it, including nailing it shut.1 Her roommate travelled frequently in her job for the National Park Service and she was alone in the house watching television one night. The drone of the TV had gone on for a while, when she was suddenly aware of another noise in the house besides the TV—what some acoustics experts might call “white noise”—a sort of underlying, background noise which is so monotonous in pitch that it is hardly even noticeable without paying strict attention to it. She got up and walked to the TV and turned down the volume. The sounds became more distinct now, and she heard the unmistakable murmur of what she called a “party” going on somewhere within the confines of the house. People were chattering, glasses clinking, movement of bodies. She distinctly heard it on the second floor of the house.
The Weikert House.
The sounds of the party went on as she became more and more aware. Laughter, faint music, doors opening and closing, glasses with ice tinkling quietly above her head.
She turned up the TV volume again, wandered back to the sofa with a slight smile growing on her face, knowing exactly what was happening but still unwilling to surrender all of reason to the unreasonable. Again she rose and turned down the volume, and again listened to the polite hum of her uninvited guests upstairs.
Finally, gaining enough courage from the fact that this, indeed, was her house, she began to ascend the stairs as the festivities continued and she listened, a reluctant party-crasher. As she approached the second floor, the sounds slowly began to fade, as if a heavy, dark curtain were pulled across the entranceway to another era. By the time she reached the second floor, all the sounds had ceased.
A few weeks later she was sitting with her roommate who had returned from her trip and casually, and somewhat reluctantly, mentioned the strange party noises that stirred her to try to join the festivities on the second floor of their home: the laughing, the glasses clinking, the sounds of low voices, the music. Related to her roommate, it was almost as if she were trying to elicit the comforting response of “how strange…may be you were dreaming...couldn’t have happened.”
Instead, her roommate listened, smiled and said, “Oh. You heard it too,” and told of the number of times she had heard the ghostly revelry on the second floor of Mr. Weikert’s old stone house.
Further on in the letter, my friend from Washington described a quiet evening at home she and her new husband were having, relaxing in the brick structure they rented we all called “The Schoolhouse,” which sits on the northeast slope of Little Round Top. It probably wasn’t there at the time of the battle, but is very old, and actually had been, at one time, a one room schoolhouse. It retains much of the ambience of a little red schoolhouse and, if the interior had not been remodeled, upon approaching the house you would swear that when you opened the door you would be greeted by the murmur of children learning their lessons out loud in the old style “blab-school” fashion, and be met by the icy gaze of a stern, tight-laced “school-marm.”
As she and her husband sat there that particular night, slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, her antique rocker began to rock back and forth. Gradually, the rocking motion grew as she and her husband watched. She looked at him, then at the windows to see if perhaps a breeze had moved it. But all the windows were closed, and the rocking continued. Slowly, just as it had started, the rocker gradually swung to a halt.
The Little Red Schoolhouse.
It was almost as if the spirit of one of the teachers long gone had returned to the beloved old one-room schoolhouse, one more time, to teach one last lesson about life and what appears to be death….
* * *
We return to the area of Iverson’s Pits, that one spot on the battlefield where over 500 North Carolina soldier-boys were sent on the last long march toward eternity at virtually the same moment by thousands of Yankee minie balls, and were buried where they dropped in a common grave a furlong wide.2
The story comes again from one of Dr. Charles Emmons’s students who had done a paper on supernatural occurrences on the battlefield.3 A student from Gettysburg College had taken his girlfriend from another college out on the battlefield around midnight. The Peace Light Memorial and its parking area are a short drive from the Gettysburg College Campus, and the light from the monument provides a romantic setting. An observation tower on Oak Ridge is located nearby and is another popular spot from which to view the town at night.
The young woman was described as being “quite psychic,” one of those individuals tuned in, so to speak, to the quiet, unseen stirrings in the other world. She had seen, one night, an old woman appear in her apartment and walk into her closet only to vanish amongst the clothing stored there. Later she learned that indeed, an elderly woman had entered that closet decades before, but left it only as a corpse separated from its departed spirit. She died by hanging herself in that very closet the young woman once watched her enter, but never leave.
It was a foggy night. They had left the car and were sitting near the small tower, by one of the stone fences that once sheltered Union infantry from Confederate gunfire, near where the battlefield road from the Peace Light crosses the Mummasburg Road. It was from that site where the Union line was “refused”—doubled back upon itself in the direction of the town—and from where their musketry delivered virtually a solid wall of lead to the west: Hundreds of minie balls launched within a tenth of a second of one another, against the men of Iverson’s Brigade. Confederates just eighty or so yards from the wall by the hundreds felt the electric shock to the nervous system, the total disruption of senses an intrusion upon the body like that produces. The lucky ones died instantly, struck in the head or the heart. The unlucky ones fell writhing, only to be wounded again and again. All, no doubt in their last moments, after being caught in the open, desperately thought of rising and trying to make it to cover. None did, except in his final, dying dreams.
The young man was looking out towards the northern end of Gettysburg and she towards the Peace Light. Suddenly, her eye was caught by a rapid motion in the misty dark fields not more than a few dozen feet from where she sat. Her breath caught in her throat as she realized it was a “grayish figure,” carrying a rifle and running quickly through the field just beyond the low stone wall. Whoever it was appeared to take cover behind two trees. Though close enough to see both her and her boyfriend, the misty figure was more intent upon finding shelter than making contact with anyone. She quickly grabbed the arm of her boyfriend and hurried back to the parked car.
She refused to tell him why she was in such a hurry to leave the place until they were safely within the car. As they drove out of the parking lot, the car headlights illuminated the two trees, and both passengers peered into the mist to see if the strange figure was to be seen behind the foliage. He was apparently well hidden, for they saw no sign of him behind the twin trees.
Later she was to describe the figure as “real”—meaning humanlike—appearing “unfocused,” lit only by the flickering, uncertain light from the Peace Light. Its sudden appearance and lack of interest in the two other people just yards away sent a queasy feeling through her stomach.
The morning after she had seen the image dart behind the two trees in the fog, they drove out to the tower again to examine the site in broad daylight. As they parked the car and re-created the night-scene which occurred just hours before, they were shocked by one unexplainable fact: There were no longer two trees which they so clearly saw the night before, but only one. As they approached the single tree they realized that right next to it was the stump of another. But instead of being freshly cut, it was gnarled and rotted and weathered, obviously the work of some woodsman of decades before, now himself probably long dead.
Tree and stump near Iverson’s Pits.
Like Iverson’s Burial Pits, where the poor souls whose last wish for a few horrifying minutes on July 1,1863, was to find shelter from the burning lead being fired at them, the protection they coveted with the last of their life’s blood also had disappeared….
They say there are no atheists in foxholes. There can be no doubt that the experience of combat, the unreal-ness of the scene surrounding a soldier when watching close friends pass from animation to something else either causes him to abandon completely any faith he may have had, or believe more deeply in an afterlife. Shakespeare’s admonition that “there are few die well that die in a battle,” is no doubt true: Soldiers, before they have reached a certain fatalistic stage while facing combat think back on all the things they will miss; on their wives and sweethearts and parents and children; on the worldly possessions they may be leaving behind; on home. But soon the fatalism takes over, the realization—or the coping device—that makes them believe that if their time is up, it is up; that there is a bullet out there with their name on it, so don’t worry about all the other bullets flying by.
Perhaps it is then that the concept of an afterlife crosses the soldier’s mind, as it has for untold centuries. Paradise. Heaven. The Happy Hunting Ground. Valhalla. The place where warriors go when they die if they’ve done their duty.
The belief that he and his loved ones will meet again permeates many soldiers’ letters and diaries, and though they may have never had any organized religion in their lives, they seem to understand and accept the concept and hope for some sort of afterlife, perhaps because they realize they will leave something behind, something quite unfinished….
In the past several years a number of America’s finest artists have turned to recreating the past in their paintings. Following “in the brush strokes” of military artists like Frederick Remington, Eduoard DeTaille, and some contemporary masters like Tom Lea and Tom Lovett, they have chosen to represent men at war. Since no photos were ever taken of a Civil War battle, we must rely upon an artist to show us the look on the men’s faces as they moved into combat, the posture of their bodies, the fear in their eyes. From this we learn even more of the awful details of the American Civil War.
Most of the artists painting today are fine researchers as well. Since a soldier’s kepi sometimes fell top-down on the battlefield, they must know what the inside looked like. Since Shiloh doesn’t look like Gettysburg, and Antietam doesn’t look like Stone’s River, the artists visit the sites where the battles took place.
One of the finest of these artists now painting was researching here in Gettysburg and staying with his wife in a modern motel just on the edge of the battlefield. In fact, his room was located only a couple of hundred yards from where Pickett’s Charge passed to find itself wasted on the gentle, fire-ringed slopes of Cemetery Ridge. Some of the Northern soldiers who died defending the Union line were buried even closer to where he and his wife slept that night, in the National Cemetery just a hundred or so yards away, enjoying sleep’s viler sister, death.
It was about two in the morning when the artist started to hear it. A soft movement of what initially sounded like some of the jewelry he and his wife left on the dresser as they prepared for bed. At first he was a little disgusted to think that a fine modern motel like the one they had rented had mice. His wife was awakened by the rattling as well and quietly mentioned it to him. Slowly, silently he raised himself from the bed and flipped on the light to catch the little critters in the act and call the night desk clerk to report them.
No rodent was on the desk. The jewelry appeared to be in the same place where his wife had left it. Nothing appeared to have been moved. He went over to the window to see if anyone was out in the parking lot trying to break into their car. But it was the off-season in Gettysburg and there was only one other car in the lot, and no one was near it. Perplexed, but not hearing the noises anymore, he turned the light back out and reclined. Apparently, whatever it was, it was gone.
Modern Steinwehr Avenue and motels.
Then it started again. This time it came from a corner of the room. In a recent conversation, asked what it sounded like, he said that, more than anything it was like the chain of an old-fashioned pocket watch being rattled. Again the lights were flipped on and their attention concentrated on the corner from where the odd rattling emanated. Again, there was no mouse, or watch chain, or anything else to visually confirm the strange sounds they both heard.
Out went the lights again. It was quiet in the darkened room. Both were about to fall off to sleep, when again the rattling began, this time across the room from where they’d heard it before. Again, the lights were turned on, but nothing was seen.
For another hour the unexplainable jingling that sounded like a pocket watch being handled went on, first on this side of the room, then on that side of the room in the motel that was built on the one corner of earth where a great nation’s destiny was decided and its beloved boys were hideously harvested for death’s abundant feast.
Though it wasn’t the most restful night they ever spent, they finally got some sleep. Yet one must wonder what could have happened on that very spot during the fire and fury of battle that was so important that it demanded continual attention to the hands of the watch; and who could it have been that was so concerned with temporal time as to keep removing a pocket watch and replacing it over and over; and why would the sound so much associated with timekeeping in the 19th Century continue in this particular space through almost thirteen decades?
***************
There are things belonging to the eternities of which you’ve but lately heard:
Things of the past; things of the present; things yet to be.
Oh, break these worldly wings so I may finally fly…
—Anonymous
Probably the best-known psychic in this area is Karyol Kirkpatrick of Lancaster. I first met her when we both visited two Gettysburg “haunted houses” on Halloween morning in 1991 for a live broadcast for a local radio station.
While she has helped several police departments solve murders that had them stumped by finding incriminating hidden evidence psychically, she doesn’t like to mention who the murderers are or where they are incarcerated. As it was explained to me by a mutual friend, many murderers are themselves psychic, but use their remarkable powers to tap into the evil energies which co-exist along side of the good.
Her amazing observations in the Gettysburg “haunted houses” are chronicled in this book. My experience with her was so interesting that I asked her if she would like to visit some areas on the Gettysburg Battlefield to see what she could pick up from them. Her one and only trip to Gettysburg had been when she visited the two houses on Halloween. She had never been out on the battlefield before in her life—or at least, in this life. Needless to say we were both looking forward to the visit.
On July 27, 1992, she had a radio broadcast to do in Hanover, so we met afterwards for breakfast and then drove to Gettysburg with her “designated driver,” Dorothea Fasig and Dorothea’s son Mike. (Karyol never drives. When engaged in psychic activity, she sometimes lapses into a trance and is fearful that it could happen sometime when she is driving.) Jeane Thomas was our chauffeur around the battlefield.
Because of temperament and training, I’ve always felt as if I’ve been on the fringe of many things in life; it is the proper place for a writer to exist. I’m close enough to experience life, but far enough removed to write about it, if not objectively, then certainly with a universality. So when I say I approached my battlefield experience with Karyol as a skeptic, I don’t mean it in a pejorative sense. I have approached all the ghost stories in this book and the last with the same healthy skepticism, which is actually more of a “show me and I’ll believe you” attitude than denial.
The Triangular Field.
So our first stop was the Triangular Field where so many cameramen (and camerawomen) have had such bad luck with their equipment.1
What is now known as the Triangular Field was once owned by Mr. George W. Weikert, and was a field separate from the fields surrounding Weikert’s farmhouse located about 1000 feet to the west and rented by the Timbers family. The Triangular Field held a bloody past born within a few dreadful hours on a hot July day for Georgians and Texans, New Yorkers and Pennsylvanians.
On the afternoon of July 2,1863, the men of General James Longstreet’s Confederate Corps—specifically Major General John Bell Hood’s Division—were launched in an assault from their positions on the southern end of Seminary Ridge toward the left flank of the Union line near a large, wooded hill called Round Top. As the four lines of infantry descended the slope of southern Seminary Ridge and entered the valley of the small creek called Rose Run, they were perfect targets for artillery fire from the four cannon of Smith’s 4th New York Battery. After two years of drill and battle, Smith’s New Yorkers were excellent artillerists. They were cutting fuses for five and six seconds in an attempt to explode the projectiles over the heads of the Southerners, showering them with hot, jagged pieces of iron. The men of the 1st Texas Regiment along with the 3rd Arkansas continued to advance courageously down the slope as Smith’s men ran out of case shot and shell and changed to canister.
Man’s creativity is never so twisted nor as inventive as when it is engaged in finding new ways to kill in battle. Canister consisted of what was virtually a tin can filled with scores of lead or iron balls. Though the range was short, when the gun was fired the tin can disintegrated and the balls spewed out in a horrifying hail of pain and death. One eyewitness recalled that the change in ammunition tore “gap after gap through the ranks of the advancing foe.”2 That’s a nice way of saying that human beings were literally blown apart by the force of the impact of several canister balls in a relatively small area on the body.
The 3rd Arkansas had their left flank turned and thus were forced to retire and leave the Texans to their own fate. The Texans alone charged Smith’s battery but were driven back by canister from the battery and an impetuous charge by the 124th New York led by Major Cromwell. Just as they victoriously drove the Texans down the slope of the Triangular Field, down went Cromwell tumbling backward out of the saddle, a southern minie ball through his heart. Along with the major, the volley from the recently arrived 15th Georgia knocked down nearly a quarter of the Orange Blossoms. Orange County, New York’s beloved sons were being torn to pieces in that three-sided cinerary. Yet another casualty in the seething hell was Colonel Ellis of the 124th. Lifting his sword to give a command that would only be heard echoing in another world, he took rebel lead through his forehead and fell a tangled heap of quivering flesh amongst the stained rocks and sickening crimson harvest of this day’s work in Mr. Weikert’s field.
Nor was it over in the odd, three-cornered field. Georgians of General Benning’s Brigade would try three more times to assault the slope of the weird field and be met by the hot, horrid breath of musketry from the 99th Pennsylvania as well as artillery fire from Little Round Top. A participant described it:
The conflict at this point defied description. Roaring cannon, crashing rifles, screeching shots, bursting shells, hissing bullets, cheers, shouts, shrieks and groans were the notes of the song of death which greeted the grim reaper, as with mighty sweeps he leveled down the richest field of grain ever garnered on this continent.3
And so it is that in human combat on the glorious field of battle, man’s (and now soon woman’s) mortal experience is reduced to the basest of all primary elements, and those reduced even further: earth, fire, water, air, rock, blood, dust, smoke, life, death.
Karyol Kirkpatrick took my tape recorder to the top edge of the Triangular Field and began recording her feelings. She entered a mental state where all her energy is focused upon what she feels from her surroundings, from the trees, the earth, the grass, the rocks. Our group was nowhere near her for about ten minutes while she spoke into the recorder. Those familiar with earlier stories of the Triangular Field will have no problem understanding that when Karyol returned with the modern machine, though she was familiar with that type of recorder, it had failed to work while she was anywhere near the field.
I fiddled with the machine, got it running again, and, from a safe distance away on the road, Karyol began recording her impressions again.
Some excerpts, verbatim, from the tape: “A lot of conflict and confusion as to what was going on. I felt as though…there was something of a sheltered area that I could hear like lots of hollering and crying out. I felt as though there were some people bound and I felt as though there were some people injured…It showed as though that there was…I could feel a man having his leg blown off right about the knee coming up the hill….” And more of the same.
She said she felt two feelings coming together here, as she pointed to the northwest corner of the field: A crying of victory and a crying of loss. To her, the momentum was the same for the two feelings, meaning that nobody had won and nobody had lost; the loss of life had been the greatest sacrifice.
The feeling I got from the overall was as though the trees could not absorb the spiritual energies and the fires and the weepings of the spirits, and it’s like there wasn’t enough angelic force to guide the spirits and souls and the weepings and the cryings as they were trying to leave their bodies. I felt as though much death and much blood to this area to this comer, [pointing again to the uppermost comer where the Texans charged and were driven back by the New Yorkers and later the Georgians charged] but I felt that it started over there and came this way [indicating the far bottom comer and lower wall of the field] as you come more this way it seemed as though that there were greater horrors that went on into and through the night.
Listening to the tape again, I realized that she was describing in non-historian terms, in general what went on in that once horrid field. The 1st Texas, combined with the 15th Georgia and the 20th Georgia, made their assault from the wall (now a remnant) at the bottom of the Triangular Field up the hill to the wall at the top of the field where Smith’s Battery and the 99th Pennsylvania waited for them. The Georgia and Texas regiments straddled the wall and so were funneled right to the upper comer. The 20th hit the upper wall a little obliquely, and they, too, sidled a little to their left, toward the corner where Karyol was certain there was “much death and much blood.”
For a non-historian who had never read anything about the battle other than who won, and who was visiting a rather out-of-the-way battlesite, she picked up something from the field itself which helped her describe the movements of troops across the battlesite very accurately. But that was nothing compared to what she said next.
She paused on the tape, seemingly exhausting what she could get from the area. She asked if I had picked up any key phrase in what she said and I replied that I would need to review the tape. I asked her if she wanted to know what happened here and she replied, “No, it doesn’t matter.” Precisely. Thanks to her gift she had just “seen” what had happened there; why would she need an historian to tell her!
She talked about a traitor and someone named Johnny being hanged, which didn’t make any historical sense to me, at least as far as my knowledge of the battle-related history of the area was concerned. She also mentioned that she felt there were animals, water and the smell of food as she gestured toward the area of Rose Run and the Confederate main battle lines.
She continued: “There were animals deeper in here and there was some type of a shelter, a hospital and there were also people tied that they didn’t want to get away and didn’t want them to get hurt either.” Again listening to the tape afterwards, I remember that the Timbers Farm once stood over in the direction Karyol pointed, and was, no doubt, used as a temporary hospital where men were taken. The tying up of people could possibly be a description of the men with head wounds who could still walk but had lost their very essences to the sloppy work of an ounce of flattened lead. What awful things a hot .58 caliber minie ball does once it is let loose inside a human skull to do its hideous dance.
She spoke again about that once horrifying corner, and that she felt that the trees were actually weeping because there was more than they could absorb.
She pointed to one of the larger rocks and said she felt a conversation between two people over the games that men play and the power over one another as well as the power to succeed. All it brought was death.
A few more comments and she wondered why the monuments were in one place and not another where she felt they should be. She was dead right about that. Historians at the park think that Smith’s Battery now rests several yards behind where it may have been during the battle—at the wall. As well, the monument to the Orange Blossoms is at the top of the crest and not down in the oddly-shaped field where they paid so dearly for their moment of glory.
Another pause in the tape, and I asked a wild question of the woman who had never studied the battle and had never been on the site before: “Do you get any names of states, or anything?”
A long pause, then: “I wanted to say clay; Georgia clay.” Another pause. “And they’re not used to the brown earth….” Some more about traveling on water and communications, and another pause.
Then: “I question even if there could have been some people out of or from close around Texas come through this area or region or was a part of this in some way or some manner.”
A very long pause: “I wanted to feel that there were also people out of Philadelphia and maybe southern New York area and region here because they had a different accent.” A short pause: “I can hear their voices….”
By now in awe, I asked her to record it on the tape to affirm that this was her first visit to this area. She confirmed that except for her visit to the two haunted houses within the town in October, this was, indeed, her only visit to the battlefield. She also added that she has only been interested in ancient history and not American History.
It was at that point I told her that the name of this area was the Triangular Field and that Benning’s Georgians and the 1st Texas attacked and were driven back. I said at that point I didn’t know about Philadelphia, but the troops that fought them initially were members of the 124th New York and pointed to the monument. I asked her if she had seen the monument before. (I was certain that she hadn’t even looked in that direction, but I had to be sure.) She said no, she didn’t even have her glasses on, which she would need to see anything that far away.
Looking at a map later, I discovered that Orange County is indeed in southern New York, along the New Jersey border.
Walking back to the van I looked up and saw the monument to the 99th Pennsylvania. Jeane asked Mike, the youngest of us, to run up to the monument and see where they were recruited.
“Philadelphia,” he called down.
Our visit to the Wheatfield revealed that psychic time doesn’t necessarily follow the same pattern of flow that real time does. Our visit to the battlefield reminded me of a visit to a hall with many windows and doors. Some of the doors were open and some of them shut; some of the windows were clear or open and some were closed or fogged over. You could not always pick which part of the great past you would be able to see.
In the Wheatfield, despite the incredible tumult which occurred there on July 2, 1863, Karyol had tapped into an earlier period. Mostly, she felt Native American spirits on that spot, standing, in fact, on one spot, she thought one important warrior had died. (Historians know only by oral accounts of a great Indian battle which occurred on the site where late-coming combatants would later shed their blood. Accounts place it somewhere in the vicinity of Big Round Top, perhaps to the south or west of it, close to where we were standing.) She also felt a lot of female energy in the area, nurses perhaps, helping with casualties, seeking to help the wounded from either era.
She did hear the clashing of metal, wood, and sticks and a great deal of hollering, but much of what she picked up was from several eras and somewhat disjointed. There are more stories to our ancient earth than we can ever know.
We began to move on to our next site. We drove along West Confederate Avenue toward the first day’s battle site and, in particular, Reynolds Woods.
Major General John F. Reynolds was a native of Lancaster, Pennsylvania and had arrived upon the battlefield of Gettysburg just as it was becoming a battlefield, in the morning of July 1,1863. He was here barely long enough to make sure his Union Army First Corps was headed in the right direction as he sat his horse upon McPherson Ridge, when a rebel marksman sent a minie ball smashing into the back of his neck.
His aides thought first that he had just been stunned since they rolled him over and could find no wound except a bruise over his left eye. Then they realized he wasn’t coming to and began to carry him back to the town. Halfway between the place where he was hit and the Seminary, Reynolds gasped a little. His aides paused with their burden and tried to give him some water, but he was insensible. When they got back to town and placed him in Mr. George’s stone house on the pike to Emmitsburg, they saw where he had been hit, saw that there was very little blood, and assumed that the wound had bled internally.4 From being offered the command of the largest army on the planet—The Union Army of the Potomac—just a week before, he instead became the highest-ranking officer from either side to die in the battle.
We had just passed the lovely McMillan House on the north end of West Confederate Avenue when Karyol said that she felt something was happening at the beginning. I had a moment of confusion until I realized that we were heading out to where the battle indeed had begun. Then she said something even more confusing when she said she felt a pain in her back.
The tape recorder wasn’t going at that moment because we weren’t near the site yet. As the van travelled out the Fairfield Road toward Doubleday Avenue, I turned and wondered if she was really in discomfort. She said something to the effect that, “I feel like someone was shot in the back. I feel the pain in my back.”
We turned onto Doubleday Avenue and she said, “It’s really getting stronger. I can feel the pain in my back.” I noticed that she was actually sitting up, moving her back away from the seat and reaching behind her. Then I realized that she was relating to Reynolds somehow.
Reynolds Woods.
We pulled over at the site of the monument to Reynolds on the spot where he was struck. The monument is so far off the road that one would need to know exactly what one was looking for to find it, as well as very good eyesight to read it. I told her that we didn’t even have to get out of the van for this one. I told her the story about Reynolds, ending with the details of his wounding in the back of the neck.
The suddenness of Karyol’s pain and the growing intensity as we approached the site where Reynolds was struck in an anatomical area which probably produced an immediate, if only momentary shock of pain down his back truly impressed me and the others in the van. As far as an explanation for this remarkable woman’s physical manifestations of empathy for an officer of an army long dead and gone, I have none.
***************
When that this body did contain a spirit,
A kingdom for it was too small a bound…
—William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Act V, scene iv.
At Gettysburg, in the fields and valleys, on the ridges and from the rocks—wherever you go when it’s quiet—you can almost hear the great breathing of history, barely audible, like a dull, continuous, rumble coming from the very earth below your feet.
No one is immune to the vortex that pulls us to the place; the high-born and lowly, the common visitor and the diplomat, the mere private soldier and the great general. The whole world comes to Gettysburg, eventually.
And so it was with Dwight David Eisenhower. The common Texas farm boy, who left the turning of the earth to lead great armies and defeat great evil that threatened to girdle the entire globe in chains, eventually came back to the farm. He had heard the rumblings of history at Gettysburg before he himself had made it, and returned, as great a man as he was, to be near an even greater place.
If the American Civil War was the great moral crusade of the 19th century, then World War II was the great moral crusade of the 20th. The main issue was virtually the same: Slavery. And while slavery as it was known in the antebellum American South had endured long enough to be a geographically restricted, regionally accepted institution, it was still enslavement. What the Nazis and Japanese warlords did, and what they intended to do with the rest of the world had no restrictions. As well as enslavement, it was what could have become annihilation.
Some men saw in the rantings of Hitler and the gobbling up of the Pacific Basin by the Japanese, a terror unknown to humankind on a stage of epic scale.
One of those men was Dwight Eisenhower, and when his time for ultimate effort and hard decisions came, he responded.
He had been to Gettysburg before—in his mind at least—as he studied the maps and texts as part of his military science courses at the U. S. Military Academy. After his graduation in 1915, instead of being sent to Europe during World War I, he was stationed at Gettysburg’s Camp Colt, the training center for the U. S. Army’s newly conceived tank corps.
The camp was situated in the middle of the fields once drenched by the rain of human blood during Pickett’s Charge. Even though the youthful officer and his lovely young wife Mamie lived in two homes at separate times in the small town of Gettysburg, the man they called “Ike” had time to spend on the battlefield and learned its lessons well.
The bucolic fields, the small-town ambience, the friendliness of the people, and the great pull of history kept hold on their hearts for the rest of their lives. Over the next three decades they would travel extensively. After his service in World War II as Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the invasion of Europe and a stint as president of Columbia University, Eisenhower and Mamie began looking for a place in which to retire. Not surprisingly, the soldier turned to a battlefield to find peace. Recalling their happy younger days in Gettysburg they purchased a small dairy farm in 1950. It was located in the rear of the Confederate lines, not far from where Major General Longstreet had his headquarters and within eyeshot of where Pickett’s men mustered for their fateful summer’s charge some 87 years before.
But easy retirement was not forthcoming. Eisenhower, very much like famous military commander General Robert E. Lee before him, for the first fifty years of his existence had lived his professional life at an exceedingly slow pace, all according to the whims of the army. Then, it seems as if fate wanted him to live two lives in the short time he had remaining.
Just after they bought the Gettysburg Farm, he was sent by President Truman to take over the NATO forces in Europe. In 1952 he accepted the Republican Party’s nomination for President and served two terms. And while the Eisenhowers continued to maintain their beloved home in Gettysburg, their efforts at using it for anything more than a weekend home away from the White House were continually frustrated.
Eisenhower as President would bring dignitaries, after their serious meetings at Camp David, to the relaxed atmosphere of the Gettysburg Farm. It seemed in keeping with the man. In the serious business of war, his fine touch for the human element and that incredible grin, as broad as the Kansas plains from whence he came, had melted and forged an alloy as divergent—and as strong—as all mankind for the common purpose of casting off a German tyrant’s chains. In the postwar world, he achieved much the same thing once the “official” serious business was over and he could get the great leaders of the world in amongst his prize-winning black angus cattle and watching where they stepped, or out on the battlefield of Gettysburg where he could explain the horrid, heart-breaking results of the failure of diplomacy.
But, it always seemed, during the decade of the fifties, the Eisenhowers could never spend quite enough time on the farm.
Finally, in 1961, after his Presidency was over, he and Mamie retired to the farm where Confederate soldiers had once wandered. Ike worked during the day in an office in what is now the Admissions Office of Gettysburg College, writing his memoirs and meeting with politicos and business associates. Sadly, after fifty years serving his country, Dwight Eisenhower only got to spend eight years living in what he and Mamie considered to be their only home. On March 28,1969, at the age of 78, the general died.
The Eisenhower Home ca. 1955/56 (National Park Service).
Mamie Doud Eisenhower lived another ten years at the farm, and although she enjoyed her privacy, she still donated much of her time and her good name to charitable organizations in the community of Gettysburg and nationwide. For the rest of her life, as some of her friends still living in Gettysburg relate, she worried when things were not quite right at the house, because that was not the way “The General” would have had it.
But the history of the house itself goes back much further than when the Eisenhowers owned it. The General and Mrs. Eisenhower gave the property to the U. S. Government in 1967 with the stipulation that they would be able to maintain a lifetime tenancy in the house. After Mrs. Eisenhower died in 1979, the National Park Service made plans to open the house to the public as the Eisenhower National Historic Site.
When the Eisenhowers first bought the house in 1950 they remodeled. Underneath the 100-year-old bricks that were part of the original Redding family farmhouse, they were astonished to find a 200-year-old log cabin. Unfortunately, it was so deteriorated that it could not be saved, but Mamie, with an eye toward the history of the place, requested that the architects save as much of the older structure as they could and incorporate it into the remodeled structure. The kitchen fireplace and bake oven and some of the brickwork were retained, as well as some of the ancient shutters, floorboards and beams.
The old log farmhouse predated even the establishment of the town of Gettysburg in 1780, and so was, no doubt, the nucleus of a hard-working, probably large family of tillers of the soil. Without even a town nearby, they must have been pretty much self-sufficient and independent.
No one knows whether the Eisenhowers ever experienced any paranormal activity in their farmhouse that might relate back to the original tenants. But since their passing and the opening of the house to visitors, several strange and unexplainable occurrences have happened repeatedly to the government employees who work there.
The events seem to happen near the end of the day, or in the wintertime when visitors are fairly scarce. The house is normally quiet at those times and there are only one or two people there to witness anything out of the ordinary. One interesting thing about these occurrences is that they have been happening to people who are of fairly high intelligence—historians, college graduates, people with their masters degrees—which may make the events even more believable.
There is the case of the slamming doors. In Mrs. Eisenhower’s dressing room there is a set of heavy, sliding, mirrored doors. At least two rangers have heard the doors shut with an audible “bang,” as if they were forcibly closed. Being sliding doors, they are not affected by the wind.
One ranger was standing with another when she suddenly heard the distinctive sound of the doors slamming shut. The odd part is that the ranger with her heard nothing. Other than their supervisor who was in her office in another part of the house, they knew they were the only ones there. The ranger who hadn’t heard the slamming realized something was wrong because of the deathly pale color the other government employee’s face had assumed.
They went to their supervisor and told her the story. Being a rational individual, she told them to go upstairs and close the sliding doors with some force to experiment and see if that was indeed the sound at least one of them heard.
Up they trudged. The doors were opened and the experiment took place. The one ranger didn’t even have to ask the other if that was the sound she had heard—her pale, sheet-white face again told the whole story.
Two other rangers were out at the house, once again on a cold, wintry February day in 1984 when there were no visitors at the farm. A fine day to catch up on research, thought one ranger, and proceeded to go into the kitchen, part of the original section of the house. He had been engaged in research for a half-hour or so when he heard distinct footsteps descending leisurely down the inside back stairs. He knew what the sound was like because he had heard literally thousands of visitors take that same stairway on their tours.
He called to his associate, assuming she had been checking the house and had come down to find him. No answer. He called again. Still no answer. He got up, walked up the stairs and all through the house, finally finding his fellow ranger. (In a later conversation he stated that he had felt uneasy and sort of “sensed” that someone else was there.) His partner had been nowhere near the stairs for the last half-hour. Assuming that perhaps another ranger had entered or perhaps the unlikely possibility that a visitor had walked down to the farm, they searched the house, she going one way around it and he the other. They met and confirmed that they were the only two in the house.
Fortunately, by then it was close to the time for them to leave. According to the woman ranger, as they stood there after their thorough search of the house, they both heard distinctly, on the soft carpeted stairs that once felt the footfalls of an American President and his First Lady, again the footsteps of someone slowly descending.
They locked the house up quickly and left.
And there is that frequent whiff of perfume that wafts ethereally down the stairs, around the house and lingers especially near the maid’s room. It has been associated with Mrs. Eisenhower’s favorite scents. Yet all her perfume bottles sitting by the side of her bed upstairs for display to visitors, remain tightly capped.
It was the anniversary of the great general’s death. The female ranger mentioned above was at the back door of the house when she heard someone coughing. It wasn’t a normal cough, but the hacking, hard cough one hears from someone of a previous generation, who had smoked from an early age before the deadly consequences of the habit were well known. She turned and walked to where she had heard the hacking—the butler’s quarters—to see if she could help whatever poor visitor it was that was suffering so. As she approached the butler’s quarters, the fierce coughing ceased. Rounding the corner she saw that there was no one any where near the back of the house.
One maintenance person who was stationed in the house alone after hours continued to hear the soft, crackling rustle of the type of crinolines worn on special formal occasions—such as inaugural balls—in the 1950s. She heard the distinct sound so often and so clearly in the evenings that she began to wear a portable tape player with earphones so she wouldn’t be disturbed from her work.
And finally, one day after she had been working alone at the house and had locked up the building as she was leaving, she happened to glance back at the house. The shade covering Mrs. Eisenhower’s bedroom window slowly raised, then lowered again, as if to make sure that whomever it was at the farm was indeed leaving the grounds.
The rangers privately propose numerous theories as to whom it might be that still dwells within the confines of the beautiful home. Though painstakingly remodeled and cared for as a retirement sanctuary for one of the greatest men of the century and his wife, the home and their long retirement together was still denied to them by a country that found it needed him far too much to ever let him go.
***************
A Wrinkle In Time
1 Tucker, Glenn. High Tide At Gettysburg, 261.
2 Haynes, Martin A. History of the 2nd New Hampshire Volunteer Infantry in the War of the Rebellion, 159.
3 While signing books in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, a gentleman approached and offered the information that he had been in Gettysburg that year as a reenactor and had seen the rounds of ammunition just after my friend had received them and had returned to camp. He swore to their absolute authenticity saying they looked as if they were fine museum pieces.
Slaying Days In Eden
1 Elwood Christ, research on the Sheads' House located in files at the Gettysburg Borough Office.
2 I remember being interviewed by some of his students in the past as a source for their student papers, and finding many of the stories I collected in their papers. Hopefully, in return for my cooperation with their papers, they won't mind my relating some of their research.
3 When paranormal occurrences continue to happen at one venue and are observed by many different people at different times, the venue is said to be “haunted.”
4 Data collected for the unpublished papers of Raymond Carpenter, Jan. 25,1980 paper; Kurt W. Hettler, Jan. 24,1980 paper; Jose V. Pimienta, Jan. 27,1983 paper.
Twice Hallowed Ground
1 Veil, Charles H. “An Old Boy’s Personal Recollections and Reminiscences of the Civil War.”
A Cavalryman’s Revenge
1 Thomason, John W. Jeb Stuart.
2 From an unpublished letter from Mrs. Hitner to Mrs. Hastings, July 6,1863, located in the Military History Archives, Carlisle Barracks.
3 Mrs. Ralph Mitchell, noted Stuart scholar was friends with Mary Marrow Stuart (Mrs. Drewry Smith) the granddaughter of Jeb Stuart, stated that according to the family, Stuart did visit Carlisle in 1859 on his six months leave of absence from the army in the west.
Lower Than Angels
1 See Ghosts of Gettysburg, “The Tireless Surgeons of Old Dorm.”
Castaway Souls
1 The biographical information of Jennie Wade was carefully collected from numerous sources and compiled into an excellent historical work entitled The Jennie Wade Story, by Cindy L. Small and published by Thomas Publications.
Off-Off Broadway
1 Elwood Christ, Gettysburg Historian, has done a remarkable job researching the houses in town for the Gettysburg Borough. His work resides in the Borough Office.
2 Dr. Charles Glatfelter, an unpublished script for a slide program on early Adams County, located at the Adams County Historical Society.
Townsmen of a Stiller Town
1 Quote is a paraphrase from A.E. Housman's “To an Athlete Dying Young.”
2 See Ghosts of Gettysburg, “Black Sunset,” p. 59.
3 See Ghosts of Gettysburg, “The Inn at Cashtown,” p. 72.
4 This author rode for the National Park Service for four years during that time period. Never, to my knowledge, during the entire time we had the horses, were they ever taken out after dark.
Fall of the Sparrow
1 Hill, Douglas and Pat Williams. The Supernatural, p. 85.
2 Hill, Douglas and Pat Williams. The Supernatural, p. 84.
Death’s Feast
1 Ghosts of Gettysburg, p. 26.
2 See Ghosts of Gettysburg, p. 22 for the details of the battle action in the area, and of the subsequent burial, exhumation of the bodies, and stories of other hauntings in the vicinity.
3 Jose V. Pimienta. “An Investigation into the Folklore and Apparitions of the Gettysburg College Area,” unpublished paper done in January 1983 for Dr. Charles Emmons’s course in Sociology. Dr. Emmons kindly opened his files to me. It is interesting to read the papers for which I was used as one of the sources for ghost stories I heard of the battlefield in the late 70s and early 80s.
Pirouettes in Quicksand
1 See Ghosts of Gettysburg, “The Devil's Den,” p. 19.
2 The quote comes from an article by A.W. Tucker, “Orange Blossoms,” National Tribune, January 21, 1886, and is cited in an excellent and comprehensive article “Our Principal Loss Was In This Place,” by Kathleen Georg Harrison, in Gettysburg: Historical Articles of Lasting Interest. (Morningside House, Inc. Dayton: July, 1989.) The Orange Blossoms was the rather unusual nickname for the 124th New York Regiment.
3 The quote is from New York at Gettysburg, vol. 2, pp. 869-870, once again collected for her article “Our Principal Loss...” by Kathleen Georg Harrison.
4 From an unpublished letter entitled “The Last 24 Hours of General John F. Reynolds,” by Charles H. Veil, April 7,1864.
***************
O Death, old captain, it is time! Set Sail!
This land palls on us, Death! Let's put to sea!
If sky and ocean are black as coal,
You know our hearts are full of brilliancy!
* * *
Pour forth your poison, our deliverance!
This fire consumes our minds, let's bid adieu,
Plumb Hell or Heaven, what's the difference?
Plumb the Unknown, to find out something new/
—Charles Baudelaire
####