I wasted time, and now doth time waste me;
For now hath time made me his numbering clock:
My thoughts are minutes….
–William Shakespeare, King Richard II, Act V, Scene v.
Historians love to play the game, “What if they invented a Time Machine?”
Some of us who are old enough to remember the Rocky & Bullwinkle Show might recall Mr. Peabody, the talking, bespectacled dog with an I.Q. of Einstein. He had a “pet” boy named Sherman, and, to explore some mystery of the past for the benefit of the children watching, they would climb into a device Mr. Peabody had invented called the “Wayback Machine,” which would transport them to any historical time period they desired.
That was kid’s stuff, right? Yet science and some pretty influential physicists have pondered hard on the possibilities—and ramifications—of returning to the past. Some shrug it off as impossible, since time is a continuum and there is no going back…or forward, for that matter. Some say that all time is contained in the past and there is literally no future. Others bode ominously that even our merest presence in the past would disrupt the continuum and set up an entirely new future—where we live now—and change things so that the present is not what it is, perhaps even leading to the possibility that the time traveler into the past might never have even been born!
Still others claim time travel has already been accomplished and proven by sound physical laws.
The Nazis, according to at least one writer, had a super-secret facility located in a mine in Poland in which they conducted experiments using rare metals spinning at tremendous speeds in opposite directions. The result was the creation of a “field”—a “torsion field”—within whose influence strange things occurred. One thing was the rapid disintegration of life forms within the field’s influence. The Nazis had experimented with plants, mice, and, considering the Nazis, probably humans. The other result, if the torsion field is strong enough, is the disruption or bending of space. And, because of the space-time continuum—a well-known and accepted inviolable connection between space and time—if space is bent or distorted, so is time. A slowing or stoppage of time is the result.1
Not exactly a “Wayback Machine,” but the description of a torsion field leads to an unusual connection with paranormal studies.
A torsion field is described as a whirlpool or vortex, something ghost hunters claim to have captured in photos as evidence of paranormal energy. The vortex is apparently a tap or connection into time. If this is true, then paranormal energy, in the form of vortices, which give us a view or a vision into the past, can make some sort of sense.
I have seen this vortex in action in an historic farmhouse we were investigating for one of my Ghosts of Gettysburg series. Renowned psychic Karyol Kirkpatrick identified it as a “column” of spiritual energy, and when a reporter for the Gettysburg Times stood directly in it, her legs began vibrating rapidly. Although she had felt what she called, “static electricity,” in an area about eighteen inches around her body, she never felt her legs shaking.2
There are other stories in the Ghosts of Gettysburg series, which seem to indicate energy emanating from some unknown source in a column or a vortex.
But there is a house on Baltimore Street, within which Time, the Great Arbiter of men’s lives, seems to play games via an energy vortex.
The house itself does not date back to the time of the battle. But there was a house there, on that very spot on Baltimore Street. The ancient, hand-dug cellar below the current structure was part of the house that once rested over it. Both the cellar and the house that once stood above it were witnesses to much history and anguish.
First, in the last week of June 1863, raiding Confederates under Jubal Early marched past the original house on the site, through Gettysburg; then, a few days later, Union troops passed, route-stepping bravely into the battle raging in the fields north and west of town. The young women on Baltimore Street sang to them and ran out like maidens in books about knights they’d read, to give their brave defenders flowers, to carry into the coming fight. Within a few hours, some of those same Union troops would come racing back, stumbling through the street, ducking, hiding, trying not to be killed by victorious Rebels chasing after them like hounds after foxes. Past the house then, the Confederates would build a rubble barricade to hide and fight behind. They would occupy Gettysburg for the next three days and roam through the houses at will, “requisitioning” meat, coffee, sugar and canned goods from the owners and paying for it with Confederate script.
They also left a more valuable commodity within the walls of the houses on Baltimore Street: dear comrades, wounded in the fighting, placed in the houses because it was the only shade from the July sun, in the tender care of the women of Gettysburg, who, according to both sides, acted as merciful angels to the wounded and dying in their homes. The dying also apparently left something precious behind as well.
Their souls.
The woman who lived in this particular post-Civil War era house and who related the story is one of Gettysburg’s finest business persons. With several stores on Steinwehr Avenue—Habitat, Stoneham’s and Camelot Gifts and Souvenirs—she manages them with admirable fastidiousness: all are well-kept, welcoming businesses, catering to the many tourists that visit.
She first moved to Gettysburg about 14 years ago. She’d never had any experiences with ghosts or the paranormal, except for reading the Ghosts of Gettysburg books series.
One night in the springtime in her house on Baltimore Street, she was awakened by the familiar chime of a clock. It surprised her because, although she kept a clock on the mantle downstairs, she had never heard it chime before.
A week or so went by. Then, once again, in the middle of the night, the clock chimed. Confused as to why the clock didn’t chime during the day on the hour, the woman resolved to investigate the next morning. But with several businesses to run, and a family to care for, by the time she awoke, the matter had slipped her mind.
One evening, she and her family were having dinner. Suddenly, unexpectedly, through the hall and into the dining room echoed the rhythmic, melodious tones: dingdongdingdong…dingdongdingdong.
In an interview she related that just below the mantelpiece upon which the clock rested is the old, original, hand-dug cellar from the battle-era house. And while hand-dug cellars, common in many of the older houses in Gettysburg, are no doubt harmless relics of bygone architectural expedience; some feel that with the uneven, packed earth floors they could also be excellent concealers of buried secrets.3
The woman herself—remember, a rock-solid business person—admits that it is “very scary” down there in the cellar, and that it is a part of the house she never enters. A week or so before her interview, a man doing a termite inspection went down into the cellar. “I hadn’t said anything to him,” she said in the interview, “and he came up and said, ‘Wow. It’s really cold in that basement. It’s a strange feeling. Very cold, and it’s a hot day.’ I proceeded to say ‘well, I think that’s the old section of the basement and something may have been down there during the war.’ He came up and was quite alarmed at what was going on down there. I never go in there.”
Another strange addition to the cellar is a series of large, ancient, wooden shelves or, as she called them, “bunks.” “It looks as if there were bunks,” she said, “as if soldiers lay there. The bunks are curved as if to hold human bodies.”
She has no idea how old the shelves are in the basement, whether they are of the period of the original Civil War era house or not. Her sister-in-law was visiting over one July 4th holiday and she said that she thought that if anyone had been down there and in pain, they might have scratched or marked the wood. She went down into the old cellar. When she came up she had a strange observation: the wood looks as if it had been dug into or clawed at.
The clock that rested on the mantle was made in the state of New York, and the last time she visited the state, she stopped by the manufacturer of the clock. She spoke to the owner of the company and, as she put it in the interview about the chiming clock, “cleared it up completely. He said they don’t make chiming clocks. They have no mechanisms to make chiming clocks. And there isn’t [a chiming mechanism] if you look at the clock. There’s nothing there! If it was just me I would say right, I’m just hearing things. And I don’t believe in ghosts!”
She began to keep track of when the chimes were heard. The clock chimed on April 4, 1999. The next time it chimed was again on April 4, 2000. At least four other people besides the woman heard it. “When I’ve been away, they still recorded on the calendar for me when it chimed. But [it was] not all at the same time. In fact, the young girl who stayed with the house, she’s heard it. Actually, she won’t stay there anymore.”
I asked her how loud was the clock? Is it loud enough to hear in the whole house? “Oh yes. You can hear it upstairs.” Could there have been a mistake as to where the chiming was coming from? Perhaps through the wall from a clock next door? Her answer was unequivocal. “You can stand right up to it and it's chiming, right up there.”
She seemed to have solved the problem—at least temporarily. “The battery was flat [dead] in the clock. In other words, the clock is not turning around. I took the battery out after the April episode and it hasn’t chimed.”
But it’s not just the clock that gives the sense that there is a conduit—a vortex, if you will—from the old cellar with its mysterious, human-sized shelves, up through the fireplace and the mantle.
“One night,” she recalled in the interview, “I’d been cleaning the house and the fireplace has an old cover that you can put on. I think someone was coming to visit the next day. So I felt I better put this cover back on since it usually lies by the fireplace. It was about a quarter to twelve [at night] and I was tired so I made myself a cup of coffee and I sat down and I had a book and thought I’d read for fifteen minutes before going upstairs. And the cover on the fireplace started to rattle. And that really kind of scared me. And I thought that if the cover rattles and the clock goes off, I’m out of here! I’ll book a room at the Holiday Inn or something. So I got up and took the cover off straightaway. And I thought, well whatever it is, [it] does not like the cover over that spot. It was right directly under where the clock was. Where the clock was on top, the fireplace was right underneath. It’s one of those old, lovely fireplaces with woodwork trim. Since then I’ve never put the cover back on, I won’t have it on. I don’t want [it] to rattle in the night.”
“Then we’ve had the doorbell ring. Its an electronic doorbell, it doesn’t have batteries, you have to plug it in. One night, the doorbell went and the clock went at the same time. And the doorbell periodically would go, and we’d go to the door and nobody would be there. But that could be some electronic fault?” she asked instead of stated. “The doorbell doesn’t work at all now.”
Trying to draw some sort of logic to explain the unexplainable, she continued: “But the plug is not far from where the fireplace is. Now I don’t have a doorbell anymore. I have a doorbell, but it doesn’t work. I’m not saying that’s related to the clock. The clock is very weird. It doesn’t even have a mechanism to chime with.”
The house used to be a bed & breakfast and one woman who had stayed frequently, came in and said, “That place is haunted. Definitely, that house is haunted.” She wouldn’t relate a specific story, but said only that it was, “just a feeling.”
As far as living in the house, with its dirt cellar and body-length, sunken shelves with scratch-marks, and its strange area of energy vortex she said, “I’m okay most of the time, but I know when it gets to midnight, I get up those stairs pretty quickly and close the doors. I know it’s an old house and will creak and things like that, but I always have that feeling….”
Finally, in the interview, she was asked what ever happened to the clock?
“Well, I took it out of my house. I had it in the car for weeks and weeks. I drove around with this thing. I don’t want the clock going off in the middle of the night. It was on the back seat of the car and never rattled or rang. It only chimes on top of the mantle. I haven’t had it on there for a while. I took it off and put it on the chair.”
It must be simply a quirk that this one column of physical space that extends from a dank, earthen cellar, up through a fireplace and on up into eternity should remind us, in a most bizarre way, of Time, and his incessant, rhythmic, cadence, drumming each and every one of us who visit Gettysburg, into nothing less than our own oblivion….
The Haunted Clock.
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