… I must watch you from the Spirit-land and hover near you…till we meet to part no more. But, O Sarah! if the dead can come back to this earth and flit unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you; in the gladest days and in the darkest nights…always, always, and if there be a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath, as the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by. Sarah do not mourn me dead; think I am gone and wait for thee, for we shall meet again….
—Major Sullivan Ballou, 2nd Rhode Island Volunteers,
killed at the Battle of 1st Bull Run one week later.
Dante, the fourteenth century expert on Heaven and Hades, in his wildest dreams, could not have imagined a hell more excruciating than a Civil War hospital. He came close to describing one a couple of times when he wrote: “There is no greater sorrow than to recall a happy time in the midst of wretchedness,”—which, no doubt, most young soldiers try to recall when dangerously wounded. There are accounts of them dictating letters to nurses, many of which talk about a better time in their past, when they were home with their beloved families, safe and sound and free of pain. There are other, more pitiful accounts of grown men, when wounded, crying for their mothers….
As well, Dante summed up rather succinctly a description that would fit both a field hospital and the Lower Regions:
Their sighs, lamentations and loud wailings resounded through the starless air, so that at first it made me weep; strange tongues, horrible language, words of pain, tones of anger, voices loud and hoarse, and with these the sound of hands, made a tumult which is whirling through that air forever dark….
But perhaps he described both hospital and Hades best in his most famous quote, posted above the entrance to Hell: Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.
There are a number of areas in and around Gettysburg known as “Hospital Woods.” Perhaps the best known is the area where Camp Letterman—site of the largest temporary field hospital of the war—was once located, about a mile east of Gettysburg on the road to York, Pennsylvania.
Other areas, especially along Hospital Road south of Gettysburg between the Baltimore Pike and the Taneytown Road, were established as field hospital sites. And the back roads and byways inside a radius of a dozen or so miles from the center square of Gettysburg are dotted with small blue signs indicating the former presence of doctors, orderlies and kindly volunteer nurses. Farmhouses marked by signs were, of course, sites occupied as well by the horribly maimed and mutilated bodies of once brave soldier-boys, reduced to crying, pleading, bloodless shells of their former selves.
The woods that once sheltered some of the wounded from the state of Mississippi after the first day’s fighting are still in existence. Or should we say that descendants of the trees that once provided shade for the Rebels from the deep south, are the only things that remain of the area filled with the detritus of brotherly conflict.
But detritus is such a cold noun to use for men who once had bodies and souls, who had fathers and mothers, wives, children and sweethearts left at home to wonder of their fate. So let us give at least two of the faceless sufferers names. From the official records of the brigade we know of Lt. Col. Moseley and of one Maj. Feeney of the 42nd Mississippi, wounded severely and probably taken to those hideous woods. Coldly the record continues: “A large number of the company officers were killed or wounded….”1
Near the site were buried many of the men upon whom the surgeons’ ministrations were in vain. Gregory Coco in his book, Wasted Valor: The Confederate Dead at Gettysburg, indicates that there were about 63 men buried in the area.2
But then again, perhaps the descendants of trees that once sheltered the helpless are not the only things remaining of the hospital site once rife with the tortured souls of youth gone cold and lifeless in the service of a misbegotten dream….
As Gettysburg grew, the area to the south and west of where the field hospital for the Mississippians was located became populated with many fine homes. Fortunately, the historic woods were not touched by the development. But it seems that some of the fine, modern homes were touched…by a more mysterious development.
A number of years ago, an elderly woman who wishes to remain anonymous, began to pursue a lifelong dream of traveling after her husband died. Her travels had kept her on the road, away from her lovely, well-kept home sometimes for weeks at a time.
The woman is as solid and stable as anyone. She had never had any paranormal experiences in her entire life. The closest she had ever come to a paranormal experience was when her husband passed away. She told me of the beautiful white cat that she and her husband had owned. When she returned home from the hospital after his death, the cat seemed to know that its master would not be coming home again.
That was her only “paranormal” experience until she began to spend time away from what she and her husband had considered their dream home. As if to protest her absence, strange occurrences began, and continue up to this writing….
She is a meticulous housekeeper, the kind who has a proper place for every pillow, and a closet-hook for every broom and dust mop. And, of course, while she was gone from the house, she left it immaculate and had a maid visit every two weeks to dust.
She stayed at a friend’s house while on the road. One night she was awakened by uneasiness and sat up in bed to see the full form of her friend’s father—whom she had only seen in photographs—standing beside her. He remained as an indistinct floating spectre for a few seconds. Before she could react, he vanished. The strange vision frightened her. While she was perfectly ready to forget it and relegate the apparition to the past, he visited her again, this time in a dream, the father’s face alone hovering over her while she lay in bed.
Sometime around February of that year, she had to return to her house twice in one week. She had been home only a few minutes when she noticed that the throw pillow which she personally had placed “just-so” on the sofa had been moved, as if someone had sat there. She straightened the pillow, wondering how it could have been disturbed when no one had been in the house since she last straightened up. As she was leaving, her eyes were drawn to a side table in the foyer. She had used this table to display a favorite autographed book of hers, angling it carefully, centered on the table to her liking. The book had been moved to the side of the table. She checked with the maid and a friend who kept a key—neither had been there.
A rational woman, she ran through all the possibilities in her mind: The maid had not visited during the time the items were re-arranged; the house had not been opened since she left; there had been no reports from the police that her security system, common to many of the homes in the area, had gone off. As she told me the story over the phone, I could almost hear the confusion in her voice.
One other thing she mentioned, reluctantly. A woman who lived nearby had committed suicide several years ago. It was rumored that she had been seen since, in the neighborhood, and even in some of the houses along her street, returning to the places where she had once attended cocktail parties with Gettysburg’s local residents. It was almost as if my friend did not want to ask: could it be the troubled spirit of this woman who had returned to somehow help with the housekeeping?
My friend again returned home to Gettysburg after another week of travel. One of the things she had been concentrating on during that week was a personal collection of her late husband’s artifacts. She herself was not interested in keeping the large collection. In spare moments that first week in March, she had given much thought as to what she would do with the private arms collection. On the site where a couple hundred thousand military weapons played such a large part in the lives—and deaths—of thousands of men, her thoughts of a few artifacts, it would seem, should be insignificant. Or were they trying to tell her something, these poor boys so horribly marred and mutilated who once lay so close to where the house now stands, whose reluctant spirits were set free by the types of weapons she now spent so much time and energy on….
One night she was awakened by a strange light coming from outside her bedroom door. She arose and walked to the hall and down the stairs. She noticed that the foyer light, which she had turned off before retiring, was now aglow. Confusion turned to mild panic as she realized that perhaps someone had entered the house. But that was impossible with the security system. She turned off the light and returned to bed.
About a week and a half later she took her husband’s collection to a local dealer to be sold. In a week she was back in Gettysburg. I received a phone call from her about 9:45 p.m. Her voice betrayed her. She was agitated and frightened.
She had gone into the basement to find something and returned upstairs. A little while later she needed to go into the basement again. While in the basement she noticed that the shutters on the window, which she always kept closed and which she was sure were closed less than an hour before, were open. I tried to calm her over the phone, but she was rattled and continued to talk about how she never, never opens the shutters, and she was 99% certain that they were closed the first time she went down to the basement. Then she asked me a question that made me shudder: “Do you think it’s in here with me now?” I assured her that of all the stories of supernatural beings I have collected, I knew of only one that was malevolent. That may have not been the right thing to say. I am sure she was thinking that hers could be the second.
She said one last thing before we hung up: She had noticed, in her lovely, pristine home, the door to her guest room was scuffed and damaged, as if someone had kicked at it.
Bright and early the next morning my phone rang. She sounded distraught and exhausted. She had slept very little. The strange things had continued through the night.
While upstairs in her bedroom on the telephone, from downstairs came the distinct sound of the door to the basement closing with a solid and unmistakable “thunk.” (I have examined the door to the basement—that is exactly the sound it makes. The door is weighted so that, once opened, unless it is pushed completely back to the wall, it closes by itself.) A little nervously, she told her caller that she had to go. She hung up and went downstairs. The door to the basement—the one she had just heard close—was wide open.
Around 10:15 that night, she had gone downstairs to get a drink. As she passed the dining room, she noticed that one half of the louvered doors between the living room and the dining room—a door she has always kept closed—was open.
Things seemed to quiet down, until springtime. Hospital Woods changed from a dull mud color to pale green and the scrub redbud, whose ancestors were once watered with the blood of brave men, blossomed with their own pink flowers. The abundant dogwood, said to display each Easter the iron-red Stigmata in the four corners of its bloom, reminded some people of other great sacrifices made on this very ground to set men free in a more secular way.
It was a lovely evening during the first week in May. My friend had an audiotape on the player in her bedroom. The tape played until the end. She turned it over, listened to that side, then turned off the tape player and went to sleep. At 2:30 a.m. she was startled awake by the tape playing. Somehow it had been rewound and started at the beginning of the side she had heard last. She got up and turned off the machine. As a last gesture, she unplugged it.
I received a FAX at 11:15 on the night of June 1. My friend could not get through since I was on the telephone line. The FAX read: “I just discovered some unusual things—3 nail holes driven in my desk in the foyer; the book moved again; and the grandfather’s clock just chimed 12:00. I reset it back one hour—now it is working well! I love this house!!”
I talked to her the next morning. She was in a much better mood than the last time we had spoken. She almost seemed resigned to the fact that she was going to have to live with whatever it was that co-occupied the house with her. She told me that when she went downstairs that morning the drapes in the kitchen were open, yet she had closed them the night before. As well, the door from the dining room into the living room—the same one she had seen open before which she always kept closed—had been opened again. She also had gone out into the garage and found her car cover, which she had always carefully stretched out and folded, rolled up in a ball on the garage floor.
Things quieted down again through the summer and fall. We continued to have phone conversations whenever she was in town. For a while I thought that the soldiers from thirteen decades ago who had wandered through the physical space now occupied by this modern home had settled down. And the neighbor who had answered in her own way Hamlet’s question, “To be, or not to be?” had finally found peace.
But I got another phone call from the woman the next time she was in Gettysburg. In her travels, she had consulted a clairvoyant. The clairvoyant, knowing little about my friend’s past, in their session saw inside of her Gettysburg home. Indeed, she said, she had seen three distinct forms meandering aimlessly through the house. Surprisingly, she saw my friend’s husband; she saw the figure of the woman from down the street who had long ago committed suicide; and she saw out of the corner of her mind’s eye, moving swiftly and quietly along the floor near the baseboard, the image of my friend’s cat, dead too for several years.
These mental images of the clairvoyant could be relegated to simple good guesswork or perhaps mere coincidence—for those of you who believe there is such a thing as coincidence. But she identified each so well, so distinctly to my friend, that there could be no mistake as to who they were….
My friend then told me how, when she had first gone upstairs she saw something strangely out of place. Her husband’s heavy bureau had been pulled out, away from the wall. Normally it would have taken a couple of strong men to move it; surely the maid could not have done it by herself. Questioning the maid confirmed that fact.
Next, she went into what used to be her husband’s bathroom. There, in the sink, were remnants of toothpaste, as if someone had forgot to wash out the sink.
A little frightened, but even more perplexed, she returned downstairs to calm herself. Instead of relief, she found one more piece of evidence left from the Other World: on the chair where her husband used to sit, and where her cat liked to lounge, as if it were some strange gift across the rift between life and death, were scattered tufts of white cat hair.
With that the story should end. But it does not.
While following up on my original notes on this story, I called my friend—as I do with all my sources for stories of the paranormal—to clarify some details in order to flesh out the story. She had not told me that anything unusual had happened in the house since the end of my original research. As I was asking details about the toothpaste left in her late husband’s sink, she commented, “Yes, and in the guest room too.”
“What?” I said. “Something happened in the guest room?”
“Yes,” she replied. “The same thing. This last time when I came home. It was as if someone had used that sink and forgot to clean up.”
“And the bureau, too,” she added, almost nonchalantly.
“What about the bureau?”
“It was moved. You know how it was always centered between the windows? When I came back this last time, it had been moved about six or seven inches to the right.”
It would have taken a very strong man—or a couple of soldiers, Civil War variety—to move that heavy bureau. But with the same ease with which they traverse time and space, they apparently can, as well, alter our own surroundings at their whim, even in the sanctity of our secure homes.
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