…To where the damned have howled away their hearts,
And where the blessed dance….
–William Butler Yeats, “All Souls’ Night”
There are worlds, access to which we are no longer allowed. Worlds just inches from us, as we stand in our own world. Invisible, they contain not only the present, but the past, and, some say, the future as well. Other generations of other ages apparently have been able to see into them: ancient shamans; some mystics in our age have; suffering saints, because of their strict aestheticism, have God’s permission to go there; sometimes poets, who often suffer as much as saints, can peer into them as well. But we, convinced by those in our world that other worlds do not exist, have then convinced ourselves otherwise. And prison-pent we suffer the most exquisite torture of wondering….
For years—probably since before the great battle here—there have been nagging rumors of a strange subterranean complex—tunnels, if you will—below the streets of Gettysburg. I have spoken with visitors, long time residents, and local historians, and some too have heard the bizarre rumors. In the most famous small town in America, of which thousands of books have been written, no documentation for the underground grottoes can be found.
Yet one woman who grew up in Gettysburg from her birth, remembered a house mentioned in one of my previous Ghosts of Gettysburg books and recalled how, as children, she and a couple of her friends had somehow gotten into the basement of the house—perhaps shortly after the death of the elderly woman who had resided there—and found an entrance into what appeared to be a head-high (to a 10-year-old) secret shaft. Whether it had been boarded up and they removed the board on purpose, I do not know. I remember her saying that they began to enter and walk cautiously into the clammy darkness.
She said it headed off toward another house, not directly next door, but southward, under the back yard. It was either a dirt wall some several yards into the tunnel, or simply abject fear they ran into head-first that sent the children back to the cellar of the abandoned structure and up into the sunlight of a soft summer Gettysburg morning.
A local policeman—a high school classmate of the woman mentioned above—confirmed he too had heard of the tunnels and reminded me that the rumors have them starting below the Catholic Church on West High Street, coincidentally, during the battle, a field hospital. Interestingly, if one would draw a north-south line through the church it would bisect, generally, where my friend as a child explored to the limits of her fright, the mysterious tunnel in the basement.
Some have speculated that the tunnels were once part of the famous and clandestine Underground Railroad—therefore quite literally underground in Gettysburg—where runaway slaves would travel, scattering rodents before their feet, escaping from the dreaded “paterollers” and their dogs. Even in Gettysburg, seven miles north of the Mason-Dixon line, escaped slaves were not safe, thanks to the Fugitive Slave Act which made harboring an escapee illegal, even in “Free States.”
If the catacombs were used for escaping slaves—or even if they merely exist—they might very well be a treasure-trove for archaeologists and historians.
Some also have said that the subterranean tunnels sheltered soldiers: Union soldiers escaping from Confederates after being driven from their positions on the first day of fighting; Confederates who had been wounded or were merely curious as to what lay hidden underneath their feet; surgeons and orderlies, dressed in their white dusters preparing to operate upon the wounded in the clandestine hospital.
One such orderly who served in Gettysburg would go on to a more notorious infamy.
Lewis Thornton Powell (aka Lewis Paine) fought at Gettysburg in a Florida Regiment. At 6’ 1” and 175 pounds he made a big target and was wounded in the battle and captured. Only slightly hurt, he was put to work in “Old Dorm,” now known as Pennsylvania Hall, on the Gettysburg College Campus. His stint as a white-coated orderly was short-lived. As soon as he could, he escaped from his Yankee captors. Having access to the cellar of the old building, did he also find access to the underground warrens to explore and plant the seed of escape from his captors? (For that matter, could some subterranean conduit be the means by which the wraiths of long-dead surgeons, orderlies and wounded appear and vanish seemingly at will in the cellar of Old Dorm?)1
He was sent to Baltimore and did escape and his escape helped mold a strange twist in American History. Somehow at the end of the war he got tangled up with a young and famous actor, soon to be infamous. With his association with one John Wilkes Booth, Powell/Paine would become a co-conspirator in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by viciously stabbing Secretary of State William Seward numerous times the same night of the assassination. One source has him shouting as he ran from the bloody scene he had created, “Mad! I am mad!” Powell would hang for his role, but numerous photos would be taken of him while he was in prison dressed up in what appears to be a long, light-colored coat and hat for identification by witnesses. Was he ever a denizen of the alleged underground passages beneath Gettysburg? An even more tantalizing question emerges: If he did use the subterranean burrows at one time, could he have returned…even after his hanging in 1865?
Wild, unsubstantiated, recent rumors have the tunnels as a conduit for illegal activities of unknown nature in small-town Gettysburg: let the reader’s imagination fill in the details….
Still others maintain that the grottoes would provide excellent passages for perturbed, restless, unsettled spirits, remaining from Gettysburg’s earliest times, through which they could move from haunted site to haunted site. This would be especially true if they were built—inadvertently or on purpose—along “ley lines,” those energy paths that occur naturally in the earth.
One can only imagine the spirits of Gettysburg’s ancient dead descending from their graves above to the underground tunnels, then floating silently, wispily, along passageways through the underworld, to emerge as from some supernatural subway, passing through rock and concrete and wood as they are wont to do, and materializing at times of their own choosing, at those most famous haunted places such as the Codori or Culp Houses, Devil’s Den, or the Triangular Field, or Spangler’s Spring, where they may bubble up from the earth like the water that seems to help draw them. Then, as they appeared, so they disappear, sinking back into their labyrinthine warrens, to move, undetected, just inches below the living. And this they do at their own whim, or perhaps when some living human in need beckons them in just the right way….
There is a house on a melancholy street in Gettysburg, close enough to the college (and also Old Dorm) so as to have been used for nearly thirty years as student housing. It has been the scene of serious studies by aspiring intellectuals, of raucous parties filled to the brim with youthful enthusiasm. It has been the living quarters of scores of lively students, of scholars and athletes vital with the ebullience and perceived invulnerability of youth. It has also been the dwelling place of Death.
At first it was the site. The roads coming in from the east and west actually struck the main road within a few blocks, and when the Union line imploded on the afternoon of July 1, 1863, sons of the North ran helter-skelter for their very lives through the space now occupied by the house. A battery of Union artillery established a temporary line straddling the road and hot shell and sighing canister blew through the space the house would some day occupy. Southern men were sliced open by the blunt canister balls traveling faster than the speed of sound. Yankees were shot through the lungs and spine and kidneys from behind as their rebel counterparts chased them down the dirt road past where the house now stands. Death has been no stranger to the site upon which the house sits or even it’s subsurface (if those reports of underground tunnels in that area of Gettysburg are true).
Nor has Death, who washes away this worrisome world, been estranged to the brick walls and wooden trim that circumscribe the space where men once reluctantly traded their mortal existence for existence on another plane.
And while students for the last several years have pursued their goals—intellectual and social—within the walls of the house, there was a persistent rumor of a malevolent visitor to the house who was not a student at all, who had an agenda of pursuit and manipulation for evil all his own.
According to the few descriptions left of him, he was young—in his late twenties—and dressed in white—perhaps a lab coat from a college science classroom, or something out of a century-old photo of doctors or orderlies or embalmers—and he was, or appeared to be, quite mad.
Angry at something, yes. But mad also in the Victorian sense of the word: mentally deranged. He would appear in the house, wander aimlessly, move to the door to the basement, and when curious students would go to find him, be gone.
He was apparently darkly handsome as well, with deep-set, mysterious eyes, a squared off jaw and thick dark hair. A matinee idol…but of a different age.
There is a theory in parapsychology that explains strange behavior in certain people: madness, suicidal tendencies, bizarre irritability, unexplainable outbursts or uncharacteristic behavior. It is similar to a possession, except that, instead of the devil taking over someone’s body, it is the spirit of a dead individual that enters and takes over. It is called a “walk-in.” The most frightening aspect of it is that sometimes you can tell when a person is the victim of a walk-in because of their radical change—but sometimes you cannot.
It cannot be assumed that the individual actually lived in the house. Or, better put, it cannot be assumed that the individual “lived” while he was in the house. It also cannot be assumed that he is completely gone from the house either. Some stories have him killing himself in that basement. Others say he was already dead—an apparition in a long, white coat—when he hanged himself, using the act as an enticement for others to follow and as a demonstration for how easy it is to self-immolate. Or perhaps he was seen reenacting his own fate on a government gallows a dozen decades past….
They say a note was left explaining unexplainable actions. Yet officials have not—nor, I surmise, ever will—reveal its contents. I have heard rumors though. Perhaps in the note there is reference to the former tenant who wailed his own life away within the ever-narrowing confines of the walls; or a reference to joining the infamous “man-in-white” who apparently still lives—if that is the right word for it—in the cellar. The history of the house revealed that, indeed, a second person succumbed to the same manner of endless sleep, accomplishing “the thing that ends all other deeds.”
One who spoke under strict oath of anonymity questioned whether anyone should even be allowed to live in the house “if there’s that kind of spirit still involved in the house. If there is such a thing as being ‘called’—if you are in a vulnerable space—by a negative spirit, well….”
Two self-appointed encounters with the Great Imposter within the same confines of the same walls on that lonely corner in Gettysburg can only be a convergence beyond coincidence, beyond understanding, and perhaps, beyond this world.
***************