Just death, kind umpire of men’s miseries.
—William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Act I, Scene ii
On McPherson’s Ridge to the west of Gettysburg, the Southern brigades of Archer and Davis lined up shoulder-to-shoulder and advanced toward Gettysburg straddling the Cashtown Road. They ran into the dismounted cavalry of Brigadier General John Buford which held them long enough for Major General John F. Reynolds and his Federal First Corps to arrive on the field. Reynolds, of course, was riding to meet a Confederate bullet, still in some Rebel’s cartridge box for another fifteen minutes or so.
As more and more units marched to the sound of the guns on the morning of July 1, 1863, the lines stretched farther north, along Oak Ridge to Oak Hill. The fighting was fierce along Oak Ridge, from the railroad cut on the south to the Mummasburg Road to the north. Iverson’s Confederate Brigade, because of a tactical foul-up, was annihilated in one long, neat row as if they were still marching into battle. On certain nights, witnesses say, you can still hear the noises they made as they marched into the palm of Death’s grizzled hand and he closed his fist: the men moan and cry out, shout orders and curses, and hundreds of Yankee bullets thud into bodies, finding their mark.
Farther down the line stood the men of the 11th Pennsylvania. With them was their little mascot, Sallie “the War Dog,” who, when the rest of the regiment was forced to retreat, stayed faithfully behind without food or water for three days, snapping at strangers in gray or blue, ferociously guarding the dead of her regiment until their comrades returned to bury them. She is still there today, nobly resting on the west side of the monument, crafted in bronze as directed by the survivors, guarding now only the spirits of the men whose earthly forms she once so fiercely protected.
War mascots have always been a part of man’s belligerent endeavors. There was “Old Abe” the war eagle of the 8th Wisconsin during the Civil War, and “Willie,” George S. Patton’s dog whose lack of courage got his name changed from “William the Conqueror.” There is no doubt that the dog mascots loved their masters—a whole regiment of them—with a love that humans can only hope to understand one day.
Union Brigadier General Thomas L. Kane was given a lesson on the fealty of the canine to its often unworthy masters at Gettysburg:
A pet dog belonging to a company of the 1st Maryland (Confederate) charged with the Reg’t, ran ahead of them when their progress was arrested, & came in among the Boys in Blue as if he supposed they were what in better days they might have been—merely the men of another noisy hose or engine company, competing for precedence with his masters, in the smoke of a burning building. At first, some of my men said, he barked in valorous glee; but I myself first saw him on three legs going between our own men & the Men in Gray on the ground as though looking for a dead master, or seeking on which side he might find an explanation of the tragedy he witnessed, intelligible to his canine apprehension. He licked someone’s hand, they said, after he was perfectly riddled. Regarding him as the only Christian-minded being on either side, I ordered him to be honorably buried.1
Then there was the “last stand” of the boys of the 16th Maine, who were told, like some other Maine boys at the opposite end of the line, to “hold their position at all costs.” But this order was a little different from that given their comrades from the 20th Maine at Little Round Top the next day: the rest of the army was leaving them behind, not coming toward them. They were to be the rear guard for the retreat.
They were sent to where the Mummasburg Road crests, then descends Oak Ridge, and were given the fateful order to hold it at all costs. Little did they know that it was that point where two Confederate wings, like two huge blades of the same set of sharpened shears, would come together. By one account, of the 275 men standing on Oak Ridge in the afternoon of July 1, only 43 would make it back to Cemetery Ridge by night.2
Their monument stands on the Mummasburg Road. Veterans of the units always liked to place their monuments at the most advanced point of action, where they were closest to the enemy. In this case, the location of the monument is a little misleading. The Mainers were pushed from that spot by overwhelming numbers of Rebels; indeed it was the farthest advance toward the enemy they made that day, but it was not the closest they would get to them.
Slowly they were pushed back along Oak Ridge, resisting fiercely as best they could, until they reached the cut in the earth made for the future railroad line. It seemed for a moment as if they were sinking into the earth, for they were indeed descending below ground level. For all, it was a premonition of the future that eventually comes to all men; to some in the 16th, the future would come a little sooner than for others. Moments after they found refuge in the earth, the Rebels found them.3
As they were overrun in the easternmost railroad cut by the Rebels demanding they surrender their flag, they ripped it from its staff, and tore it to bits. They hid the fragments of bars and stars in their clothes, to go to prison with them or, in many cases, to prison graveyards at Andersonville, or Libby, or Belle Isle, where the pieces lie yet today, moldering along with the heroes who bore them there.
Years after the war, in response to a toast to “Gettysburg,” General Joshua L. Chamberlain addressed the survivors of the 16th Maine. The ghosts—living and dead—from those prison graveyards arose and gathered. Near the end of the speech, referring to how he had heard that they had “lost” their colors, he brought them cheering to their feet, magnificent orator that he was. But cheers turned to solemn tears when one of the old veterans reached into his vest pocket and pulled out a tattered and stained star, a relic from that glorious day when honor meant more than life, which he had carried all those years. Chamberlain continued: “Lost? There is a way of losing that is finding. When soul overmasters sense; when the noble and divine self overcomes the lower self; when duty and honor and love,—immortal things,—bid the mortal perish! It is only when a man supremely gives that he supremely finds. That was your sacrifice; that is your reward.”
And so it is to this ridge named after the tree that grows upon it, once watered by the blood of patriots and heroes, that people still come. As if the men who fought there still send out solemn reminders of their sacrifice, strange, unexplainable events still occur to visitors to Oak Ridge.
Take, for example, the man exploring Oak Ridge in 1991. The sun was just setting behind the South Mountains to the west. Anyone who has been there at dusk can empathize with the employees of farmer Forney, who owned the parcel of land just to the west, where there was planted, for a number of years after the battle, several hundred of Iverson’s North Carolinians. Instead of the corn or wheat sown in the field that spring, the farmhands ended up reaping the spirits of Iverson’s men, who rose like some unwanted and hideous crop, to terrorize them.
The man walked past the monument to the men of the 11th Pennsylvania and its brave little mascot Sallie. He had gotten about 100 yards out, probably passing the site of Iverson’s men’s burial, when he became the recipient of a rare gift from the battlefield. Looking down, he spotted what looked like a cannonball. He stooped to touch it. Sure enough, it was not smooth rock, but cool symmetrical iron that met his fingers. Since he was “exploring” he decided to continue his walk. But after just a couple of steps, he stopped and realized what a rare find he had stumbled across, and turned to retrieve it.
Although he had walked only a step or two from it, when he returned to the spot, it was gone. Certainly it was the right spot, for there, beneath his fingers, was the depression where the rare projectile had been. Certainly he was alone in that once terrible field where cannonballs like the one he had seen and touched were scythes of death and destruction. He searched the area for another 45 minutes, but for no use: the agent of death, like the men it had sent on their one-way journey, had been removed from the earth in an instant.
Two years later, he returned to Gettysburg and related the story to a battlefield guide. You can imagine how both were astounded when the guide related that exactly seven days before his encounter with the phantom artillery shell, two men had told the guide that they had seen a cannonball in that very field, and when they returned for it, it too had disappeared, leaving only an indentation and a mystery where once solid iron had lain.
11th Pennsylvania monument on Doubleday Avenue.
Perhaps it is lying there right now, waiting for another unsuspecting soul to find it, then lose it again to the unknown.
The Doubleday Inn is one of the more delightful and well-placed bed and breakfasts in Gettysburg. It sits on Oak Ridge and overlooks the Gettysburg College campus and the town beyond. Doubleday Avenue, where the Inn is located, winds around in a fairly large loop as it changes its name to Wadsworth Avenue, past the Union Cavalry line markers on Buford Avenue, and the site of the old Forney Farm, then past the Peace Light Memorial on North Confederate Avenue, until it returns to the Inn. It is a nice walk…most of the time.
For one couple, the first week in May seems to hold a special place in the spirit world of Gettysburg.
Being from Massachusetts, they naturally wanted to visit the site where some of the men from their state had battled on Oak Ridge. The 12th Massachusetts fought near the Mummasburg Road. In fact, when O’Neal’s entire Confederate Brigade attacked that end of the line, the 12th, along with the 90th Pennsylvania and two other regiments, swung to the right and delivered a volley of fire that sent O’Neal’s men tumbling back, thus setting up the solitary destruction of Iverson’s Brigade a few minutes later. The couple ventured to the 12th Massachusetts monument. As they approached the monument they were overtaken by a distinct drop in temperature.
It was not the first time this had happened. They had visited the monument a number of times before, and, sure enough, the temperature had dropped each time they approached the spot. Ominously, their letter to me states, “Even during the day things seem colder there, but at night even more happens.”
Their first experience was in 1994. It was a quiet May night as they walked to the 12th Massachusetts monument. Still and calm, the battlefield—and especially the area of Iverson’s Pits—holds surprises that we of this world are unaware of.
As she put it, they decided to “tempt fate,” and walked behind the monument, over the low stone wall, and out into the darkened fields where over 500 North Carolina boys poured out their life’s blood into the Yankee loam. They stopped. Suddenly, she felt something strike the arch on the right side of her right foot. She looked down to see what it was. She could not have walked into anything since she had been standing still and there was nothing near her foot but packed earth. It could not have been her husband; he was on her left. Still she asked, “Did you just touch my foot?” He replied in the negative, but told her that he had just felt an icy coldness in the shape of a Christian cross, pressed against his spine.
Events which have no obvious genesis visible in this world are frightening. And so they left the darkened fields, which were sanctified by the sacrifice of the North Carolinians.
Sometimes we just cannot stay away from what we cannot explain. Paranormal experiences, frightening though they may be, fascinate humans probably because we want to go to the edge of life, to the very brink, of heaven…or hell. So, two years later, once again in May, they returned to Gettysburg. This time they stayed at the Doubleday Inn, purposely to be able to visit the spot near the Massachusetts monument again.
Visit it they did—four times during that trip, each when the veil of night covered the once grisly field of fighting. Two of the nights were blustery; two were as still as a tomb. They ventured over the wall on one of the quiet nights. As they began to walk tentatively out toward the temporary sepulcher of the North Carolinians, in the distance to their right, from the same direction Iverson’s doomed men advanced, quietly at first, then gradually getting louder, they heard a rustling in the brush like someone was moving toward them. They left for that night, but courageously returned three more times during their stay.
On the two blustery nights, they heard nothing. They ran through the possibilities: animals, or possibly more wind than they originally thought. But the last night they visited, they took note that wind conditions were very still, the same as they remembered from the first night they had heard the noises.
As they carefully trod the earth where heroes once bled, the noises started again, as if some unseen soul (or a whole regiment of souls) was advancing toward them from their right flank. This second time they noticed that there were more noises than the first time, a whole brigade of noises mustering in the dark. The other thing they noticed was that the closer they got to the site of Iverson’s Pits, the more noises they heard moving toward them.
Do they see us? Do the dead watch us from Beyond? There are times when they seem to care about us, even protect us, at least those of us they loved in this life. Or are they merely curious about who is intruding upon their quiet, peaceful, eternal rest?
In their letter, they said they never believed in ghosts before. But there is something about Gettysburg that makes believers out of some of the most avid skeptics.
I received a letter in 1995 from a former Seminarian to whom I had spoken concerning an experience several of his party had on Oak Ridge. In October 1994, he, his wife, and four other friends were touring the battlefield using the tour tape, traveling south on Doubleday Avenue. It was a beautiful, sunny day. They were somewhere past the observation tower when one of their group said, “Look who’s coming.”
A Union officer on horseback passed them, galloping close enough so they might see his epaulets, and they could identify him as a captain. They said they saw him riding southward to the “white house”—which I assume was the Doubleday Inn or perhaps another house on that side of the avenue—dismount, and enter quickly as if he were on some mission. Thinking there might be an encampment nearby and wishing to garner some information from the reenactor, they drove quickly to the house, consuming far less than a minute from the time they saw him enter and the time they pulled up in front of the house.
I personally have seen a mounted man ride to the Doubleday Inn. For what reason, I do not know. He may have been a reenactor-friend of the former owners, stopping by for a cold glass of water. I do know, however, that whoever he was, he rode in the hoof prints of scores of young aides and adjutants and couriers, riding rapidly from regimental commanders to brigade commanders to division commanders, who had temporary “field headquarters”—no tents, but simply their aides gathered around and their personal flag—along that side of the ridge. The couriers carried vital, battle-altering orders. Some made it to deliver their messages, some did not.
But for the observers of the captain, by the time they got to the white house, there was no sign of the rider, or his horse. All in the car saw him ride to and arrive at his destination. Not a single one of the six people in the car saw him leave. Of course, there is always the chance that the horseman they saw was indeed a reenactor who somehow departed without being seen. Common sense would certainly dictate that. Except for a letter I received in 1997.
The subject of the letter was Sallie, the mascot of the 11th Pennsylvania. The couple that wrote found themselves tremendously moved by the little terrier who returned the offering of food scraps, clean water, and some straw to sleep on with a loyalty that bade her to starve to death rather than yield the bodies of her dead but still beloved masters to strangers.
The woman, being an animal lover, proposed to place a dog biscuit as a symbol on little Sallie’s memorial. It was not a planned thing; she had always wanted to do it; they were right there, and even though it was night, being from Tennessee, who knew when they would make it back. They stopped their vehicle, actually had to back up since it was such a spur-of-the-moment thing, and parked at the monument. The lady got out of the truck and sorted through the stuff behind the seat until she pulled a biscuit from the box of them she keeps for her neighbor’s dog. Just as she found the biscuit, she looked at her husband and said, “Did you hear anything?”
“No,” he said. “What did it sound like?” He looked through the rear window onto the moonlit road and battlefields beyond, but saw nothing.
“I heard a boot or shoe scuff on the pavement.” He had heard nothing but the noise from her search for the biscuit. She turned slowly to walk behind the truck, but suddenly jumped, and gasped, “Oh, my God!”
“What’s the matter?”
“I felt someone standing right here, close enough to put my hand on their chest!” Her husband looked, but there was no one there. He paused and thought for a moment, as anyone might—was it time to get out of there?
“Is there any feeling of negativity—coldness or anything like that?” he asked.
“No,” she replied, “but I feel they’re just curious about what we’re doing here.”
“Well, go ahead and put the biscuit on the monument so they’ll know we mean no harm or disrespect.”
She walked quickly around the truck and the monument, placed the biscuit before the beloved bronze replica of the little dog, and returned to the vehicle. She said she felt the eerie presence had departed, apparently happy with their intentions. They summed it up best in their letter: “As we drove slowly on down Oak Ridge, we decided that as Sallie had watched over the men of the 11th who fell in battle, perhaps they were guarding her memorial in return. We had apparently encountered one of Sallie’s soldiers on spectral sentry duty, patrolling the hallowed ground where they fought and fell….”
And while the main story of their letter counts as one of the ghostly experiences so common on the Gettysburg Battlefield, something they wrote in the beginning of the letter is important to the former Seminarian and his friends who saw the young captain riding the lines.
Explaining why they were driving past the monument to the 11th Pennsylvania, the husband mentioned that, after taking one of our ghost tours, they wanted to check out the Peace Light Memorial. The reason was because, many years ago, his wife had seen something completely divorced from logic or reason out there on Oak Hill and the ridge that extends from it.
From behind the Peace Light, she had seen the ghostly figure of a horse and rider appear, ride from left to right as if he were about to head south down Oak Ridge, then vanish before her eyes. Could he have been the same young officer seen by the others? Skepticism is such a darn hard thing to keep…at Gettysburg!
But perhaps the most bizarre occurrence to date in the area of Oak Ridge was documented in a letter dated February 2, 1996. There was a cover letter by a mother who had once stayed at the Doubleday Inn with her two grown daughters. It was about 10:30 that cold winter night when they ventured from the warm, comfortable confines of the Inn into what may have been a temporary lifting of the veil of time.
The two sisters decided they would take a nice walk in the freshly fallen snow. Leaving the Inn they turned left, then began to curve around to the right as Doubleday Avenue becomes Wadsworth. It was indeed a lovely, snow-covered night, far in time and mood from those sultry, hot days of July 1863, when the ridge along which they walked held sweaty, fear-filled young men and boys bent upon breaking the Fifth Commandment with a vengeance, then to suffer for the rest of their lives—whether that be three score years or three score seconds—for their misdeed. A little past the marker for the 95th New York Infantry, they began to hear it.
At first they thought it sounded like a group of people sitting around in the woods having a party. They stopped to listen, and the chatter stopped. They started to walk again and it began again. Every time they stopped, the noise stopped.4
They are so maddeningly elusive, these spirits, these entities. They must know so much. Why don’t they just show themselves, or speak up? Oh, the questions we could ask, of the battle they suffered through, of their migrations since, and of their pilgrimage back to the place where they left this plane of existence. Do they not answer because they are teasing us, because they do not want to answer our silly questions…or is it because they cannot….
Then, from the cold, darkened woods, a strange echo from the past. A song. They stopped to listen, and the song stopped. They began to walk again, and the chatter began anew.
One of the women suddenly decided she needed to get closer to the sound, and, uninvited, began to walk into the woods. Her sister felt as if she were already close enough to this private party, whether taking place in this world or the next, but she certainly did not want to stand in the dark on that once embattled ridge by herself. So she entered the woods too.
As the woods slowly closed around them, once again the conversation began, but it seemed that the closer they got to the sound, the farther away it moved, always staying the same distance from them. Still they could not see anyone associated with the noises.
Nowhere in any published works that I know of is that piece of woods identified as a field hospital. It is the area across which the 76th New York and 56th Pennsylvania retreated after being attacked by Mississippians and North Carolinians. And, of course, it is where the 95th New York fought. Yet men were wounded all over that area, and during the heat of battle were often taken temporarily to the shelter of nearby woods, for its shade. I checked the old maps. Yes, there were woods and shade for the wounded in that same area where they are today. Sometimes a surgeon would check in to these temporary sites, and quickly treat the more seriously wounded. Amputations in that situation were probably rare, but the gathering together of the hideously wounded for transport to a field hospital—like the house of John Forney just to the rear of these woods—would no doubt occur. But lifting and carrying the grievously wounded was so painful for them….
The letter-writer tells it best: “Then we started hearing things I particularly could have done without hearing. There was an agonizing scream. Then a lot of sobbing. Out of the muffled conversation there was one voice that stood out above the rest. This voice then yelled, ‘Get up, get up, Go! Go!’”
They continued to walk, albeit a little more cautiously, until they were about fifteen or twenty feet into the woods, but still could not see any living soul.
“The sobbing and horrible screams continued,” she wrote. “Then we heard ‘Charge!’ Both of us looked at each other to confirm what we had heard.”
Apparently the one sister felt that there were people back in the trees and thickets on this February night, in the snowy woods, having a weird party, for she picked up the pace, heading deeper and deeper into the woods.
They heard metal rattling. She likened it to the sound a belt buckle would make if you shook it—or perhaps the metal pieces of a horse harness.
They came upon a thinned-out section of the woods with a large rock in the center of it. They stood motionless. Suddenly they heard a sound she described as a loud “crack!” They looked to their right from where the report had come, but again saw nothing. And now, it seems, they had entered into a different realm of the supernatural, where noises were changing to a visual confirmation of the Other World. The area in which they were standing, and that immediate area only, she emphasized, began to glow and become illuminated with that odd blue light which so many times before has presaged some imminent supernatural event.
Her sister wanted to continue on her quest into the unknown, which seemed to be unfolding before their eyes and in their presence, but suddenly the author of the letter began to get an intense feeling of sadness, and began to weep and shake uncontrollably. She was afraid the events they were hearing were about to become events that could be seen.
“All I kept telling her was that I didn’t want to see what accompanied these horrible sounds. I didn’t want to see them dying.”
Her sister gave in and they ran through the woods and into a field, then made their way back to Wadsworth Avenue. At that moment a red pickup truck zoomed by, fishtailing in the snow.
So, you think. Now we know the source for the weird noises, and the party sounds, and the mock sobbing and horrible screams and the counterfeit orders to “get up!” and “Charge!” It was simply a truckload of local kids having fun on a snowy winter’s night. And now they have left. That explains it all….
They started walking back to the Inn, feeling perhaps a little more at ease having seen the red truck fly by, and realizing that there just might be a rational explanation for what they heard.
They reached the woods again…and there it was…again! Softly emanating from the bare trees, sounds like low conversation came to their ears. They quickened their pace, and held hands from fear, like they were kids again. They reached the Inn, found their mother and related the story that put the lie to reason and logic. The letter writer could not talk to her mother about the horrible cries and screams, the sobbing, the orders to move to battle, without weeping.
They begged their mother to go back with them, to be certain that they had not been hallucinating. They put the video camera in the car, believing they would have the presence of mind to tape the horrid sounds or the otherworldly blue light. The writer promised to stay in the car with her mother while the other sister would go out and tape…whatever it was.
They parked the car on the side of the snow-covered road. She got out of the car and entered the woods. No sooner had she stepped foot into the woods than the mother heard the shrill, agonized scream. Horrified at the sound, she covered her ears, uncontrollably curled up into a ball, welled up with tears and pleaded to leave. Her daughter screamed for her sister to get back into the car and they tore off.
For some reason, the sisters did not hear the terrible scream of pain that frightened their mother so badly. But when they asked their mother to vocalize what she had heard, it was the exact sound they had heard just minutes before, when they had entered those weird woods.
The ancient Egyptians, who have always seemed a little more open, a little more wise, or at least a little more accepting of death and the realization of an afterlife, played a favorite a board game called “Senet.” It was a game based upon the players’ adventures in the afterlife, and although Egyptian in origin, it seems it would be universal in theme and action and popular in any culture that will face its own inevitable conclusion. I shall always wonder who inspired the genesis of this game: was it some one living, or one of the dead come back….
And at Gettysburg, we seem to be always playing that game against opponents who know the rules better than we.
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