Some things have to be believed to be seen.
–Ralph Hodgson
After the savage fighting on the first day at Gettysburg—the Union Army’s initial stand west and north of town and the subsequent dissolution of their lines into the town of Gettysburg—the opposing armies formed up in two lines for the most part running north and south on top of two roughly parallel ridges. The Union’s Army of the Potomac stretched along the ridge that ran south from the hill the locals had used as their town cemetery to a pair of hills later to be known as Round Top and Little Round Top. The Confederacy’s Army of Northern Virginia assembled through the town itself then along a ridge that undulated southward from the Lutheran Seminary. Thus you have the names of the two major terrain features on the Gettysburg Battlefield: Cemetery Ridge and Seminary Ridge.
But they were more than cold “terrain features,” or prosaic “battle sites,” or tactical “high ground.” They were, for two horrid days in American History, Satan’s gristmills, grinding men’s bodies to bloody bits and flinging off their souls like so much chaff tossed into the wind.
We see, through the dusky glass of our studies, the battle as dispassionate, colored blocks animated in coordinated movements, bumping into one another and recoiling, like some board game in our heads.
And that is good, because if we knew what went on inside those little blocks when they bump together, our deepest, most awful nightmares would suddenly become reality. As the great, dark writer H. P. Lovecraft wrote, “There are horrors beyond horrors, and this was one of those nuclei of all dreamable hideousness which the cosmos saves to blast an accursed and unhappy few.” He could have written those words about the Battle of Gettysburg and its “accursed and unhappy” participants.
Along Seminary Ridge rest a few of what the National Park Service calls “inholdings”—private homes, some historic, some not—islands ensconced within the property the government owns. Needless to say, they are high on the acquisition list.
One is the David McMillan House. It was in existence at the time of the battle, and so, early on the morning of July 1, 1863, Union troops marched past the house on their way to the fighting west of Gettysburg. They were led by the well-respected but doomed Major General John F. Reynolds, who turned down the command of the entire Union Army of the Potomac just days before. He would pass the house again going the other way within just a few minutes, this time an insensible corpse.
Eventually, Seminary Ridge became the main Confederate battleline, and so David McMillan’s tidy house, his yards, outbuildings, fields, orchards, and wells, were used by Confederates on July 2, 3 and 4, for water, food, shelter from the sun and rain, for succor after being wounded, and for sepulture after death.
(As a young park ranger, I was riding one of the National Park horses on patrol past the McMillan House when the owner spotted me and rushed over to see the new addition to the park staff—the horse, not me. He was, I discovered, an esteemed professor at Gettysburg College. He called to his wife, a strikingly attractive woman, and offered to hold my horse while she took me on a tour of the historic house. She showed me a bullet hole in one of the doorways and numerous other bits of trivia. In later years, after my first ghost book came out, he graciously approached me. “You want to hear about ghosts?” obviously referring to his home on the battlefield. “Come see me some time. We’ll talk.”)
Another historic house on Seminary Ridge is “Red Patch,” former home of Union Colonel Charles H. T. Collis. Collis recruited a regiment from Pennsylvania early in the war and had them uniformed in the flamboyant French-styled “zouave” get-up. After their Colonel they would be named “Collis’s Zouaves,” but officially they would be mustered in as the 114th Pennsylvania Regiment.
Colonel Collis is only the second known Medal of Honor recipient buried in the National Cemetery at Gettysburg. The first, of course, is Captain William Miller, 3rd Pennsylvania Cavalry who won the Medal here at Gettysburg for disobeying an order.1 The difference is that Miller won the Medal for his role at Gettysburg; Collis for action at Fredericksburg, Virginia, December 13, 1862. Near Collis’s large tombstone, upon which rests a bronze bust of the Colonel in his youth, are several graves identified as “Unknown Zouave,” whose fate their Colonel, mercifully, would not share.
Although buried in the Gettysburg National Cemetery, Colonel Collis did not fight at Gettysburg, being ill during the battle and recovering at his home in Philadelphia. It was probably best, for he may have ended up in the National Cemetery several decades sooner than he did.
You see, his regiment, the 114th Pennsylvania ended up fighting in some of the most vicious combat in the battle, along the Emmitsburg Road, attempting to blunt the virtually unstoppable charge by Barksdale’s Mississippians. Their fate in the battle—to be chewed up by what one man called, “the most magnificent charge I witnessed during the war,”2—was mild compared to the destiny of some who were merely wounded.
Both Union and Confederate wounded sought shelter in the Sherfy barn, near which they fought. According to a postwar letter to Union General Daniel E. Sickles from Frank E. Moran who became a prisoner of the Confederates, as he was passing the barn, “I could hear the groaning of the wounded within. Shot, shell and bullets had riddled the boards from the ground to the roof.”3 But this was not the worst.
Their groans would soon be replaced by shrieks. While the wounded lay helpless in the barn, it caught fire and burned to the ground, leaving charred, unidentifiable corpses of those helpless, wounded, broken bodies. According to notes gathered by Colonel Jacob M. Sheads, in the Pennsylvania section of the National Cemetery can be found numerous graves marked “Unknown Zouave,” referring to Collis’s Zouaves, the 114th Pennsylvania Regiment. These graves embrace for eternity the blackened bodies of the wounded who, having survived the combat and holding the hope they might return to their beloved homes and families, died a horrible death in the conflagration of the barn.
So even though he did not participate in the battle, Collis was a soldier, appreciative of great battlefields, and after the war, when it came to settling down, he purchased a parcel right on the most famous battlefield of his war and built a house there. The house must have seemed like a mansion in its day—it seems so now—and he gave it a distinctive name: “Red Patch.” His 114th Pennsylvania was part of the Third Corps, 1st Division, whose symbol was a red diamond—a “Red Patch.” The name remains to this day.
I remember a story, perhaps apocryphal, from Colonel Sheads. With apologies to any of the Collis clan who may be sensitive to this type of thing, the story has to do with the unique architecture of the house and the nature of Gettysburgians. It seems that Colonel Collis had a back entrance built “below” ground off of West Confederate Avenue. He had an affinity for the ladies and an abhorrence of nosy neighbors. The carriages carrying the “ladies” from Washington, D. C., instead of bouncing through the streets of Gettysburg and up the long hill on Middle Street to “Red Patch,” would turn off the Emmitsburg Road at what some locals called “pinch-gut,” where Confederate Avenue crosses, and follow West Confederate Avenue to “Red Patch.” There the carriages would discreetly turn down behind the house and disgorge their comely passengers into the back entrance. One can almost hear the swishing of silk and rustling of crinolines as the women swept through the elegant home, perhaps to sip champagne and munch on crabmeat brought in from the port of Baltimore, and mingle with other select guest on the spacious front porch of “Red Patch.”
One other historic home is the Elizabeth Shultz House that sits upon Seminary Ridge at the corner of Middle Street and West Confederate Avenue. It has most recently been magnificently and faithfully restored by its current residents. And yet, like virtually all the houses in Gettysburg that were here during the battle, it too has its story of death and suffering surrounding it. On the very corner where the Shultz House stands is a stone memorial presented to Co. D, 149th Pennsylvania by George W. Baldwin in memory of his brother, Joseph H. Baldwin, “killed here July 1, 1863” and to Alexander M. Stewart, “mortally wounded and dying in Gettysburg, July 6, 1863.” Death, like the unbidden and unwanted relative, overstayed his welcome everywhere in Gettysburg for months after the inferno of combat.
There are two other contemporary houses on the north end of Seminary Ridge. And while the history of their existence does not include the battle fought upon the slopes where they now sit, one of them at least, is replete with unexplainable occurrences and strange visitations.
Suzanne, one of my best friends in Gettysburg approached me, several years after the first ghost book was published, and confessed that she had experienced something of the paranormal when she lived in one of the houses on Seminary Ridge. She prefaced it, however, with a story from a house on York Street and one that predates even that one. Her matter-of-fact accounts of the paranormal experiences in her life amount to an extraordinary chronicle of bizarre, unexplained happenings, both on the Gettysburg Battlefield and off.
She would be the first to admit that she is sensitive to the paranormal. Some of us will admit to a belief, not so much in the paranormal, but in this fact: What we see, hear, taste, touch, and smell is not all there is to this world. It is a concept that is as old as humankind and as widespread. Suzanne’s lineage certainly would attest to the fact that she would be more attuned to the spirit world. Somewhere in her distant past is a blood relative that was Native American, a people with a culture that responded directly to insights into the spirit-world. You can see it in her exotic eyes and dark skin, which would tan at the least exposure to the sun; you can see it in her daughters’ faces: two lovely young women with the same haunting eyes.
You can also hear the echoes from her Native American ancestors in the telling of her Other Worldly experiences.
The first time she ever saw a spirit was in Easton, Pennsylvania. She was visiting a friend. About ten years before he had dated a woman who had worked in the Playboy Club as one of their famed waitress “bunnies.” She was a beautiful, buxom blonde. One evening the man had become deathly ill. The woman found him on the bathroom floor and saved his life. Even though their romantic relationship ended, because of that act of kindness, he always felt close to her. Tragically, she was found murdered in Las Vegas. He got the phone call, asked Suzanne if she would “house sit” for him, and left immediately for the funeral in Nevada.
As Suzanne described it, “I awoke in his house that night and saw a woman standing there—only about two feet away—and I knew it was her. It was just a feeling, but she didn’t look at all like her pictures. She had long dark hair; she was really thin and had a sweater over her shoulders.”
Suzanne spoke to her but she didn’t respond. The “woman” stayed for quite a while, about five minutes, long enough for Suzanne to realize that it wasn’t a dream and that she was fully awake. She said she even had time to analyze the apparition and asked herself several questions: “Is it a shadow? Am I misunderstanding this?” But she just stayed very still, standing in one place. “I didn’t want to scare her,” Suzanne explained, “so I didn’t jump out of bed.”
The next day her friend came back from Las Vegas. He was sick with remorse. He explained to Suzanne that the former Playboy waitress had gotten into drugs; she was extremely thin; her beautiful blonde hair was long and dark. “I never would have recognized her,” he said.
And that was just the way she had appeared to Suzanne in the man’s house the night before her funeral. Suzanne’s guess is that she returned out of concern. “I think she had loved him and he loved her. I think there was something unfinished there. I don’t think she was angry with me; at least I didn’t get the feeling of anger. She was just standing in the corner, not far away….”
Suzanne eventually married—but not before dying and coming back from the dead.
But more on that later.
She and her husband lived in Gettysburg on York Street. The building was not standing at the time of the battle: it was a vacant lot owned by Judge Samuel A. Russell in July of 1863. So while the house was not there, the plot of land was, and became witness to and absorber of the bloodletting of some of the vicious street fighting that occurred when Confederates drove Federals through the town on the afternoon of July 1, 1863.
She said there had always been—from the moment they moved in—a certain feeling in the house. But we all have odd feelings at times in certain circumstances; certainly no reason to move from a house after we’ve paid the rent and signed a contract. We are reasonable and logical human beings after all, even when confronted with the unknown, unseen and unexplainable…aren’t we?
Everything went fine for a while. They began making friends in Gettysburg and finding their way around. After all, this was just a temporary rental in town while they looked for a “home.” But then, one night, she was awakened by that “feeling.” As her eyes adjusted and her mind surfaced from the sea of sleep, she saw someone across the room. At first she thought it was her husband, standing there in the middle of the night, oddly looking over the stereo. Her impression was solidified by the fact that he wasn’t in bed at that moment. She also saw that the man had a beard—which her husband wore at the time—and thought it was he. She sat up in bed, wondering what he was doing? Sleepwalking? Had the stereo turned on—by itself?—and was he turning it off?
It took her a minute but she slowly began to understand that it wasn’t a real human that confronted her, but rather an inhabitant of the World as yet unknown to us. Remember, she had seen a spirit before, and, for better or worse, was familiar with their shape, their demeanor, their “being.” She wasn’t frightened. In fact she asked, as any good hostess would, “Can I help you?” Apparently, the visitor thought she could because he turned and looked at her. It was then she realized that he wore 19th Century clothing. Unperturbed, she asked again, “Can I help you?” He moved and she saw that he wasn’t alone—that a woman was with him dressed in a long, hoop-skirted dress, both wearing clothes seen anymore only in museums—or when the law requires the exhumation of a 19th Century body from the grave. She apparently acknowledged them again, she recalled, either verbally or mentally. Neither answered her but both had turned to look at her, responding to her voice. At that point they just moved—floated, she recalled—across the room and disappeared…through the wall.
In a moment her husband entered the room. He had been downstairs getting a drink of water.
A later renter of the house, a woman whom Suzanne had known before, approached her and said she had a strange question to ask. She asked her if she’d ever had any experiences with spirits in the house. Suzanne asked her what made her think there were spirits there. “My daughter keeps talking about a man, mainly in the kitchen area. She keeps saying, ‘Mommy, there’s that man again.’ Of course, I can’t see anything even when she says she’s pointing at him.”
Suzanne and her family—there were two young daughters now—moved to one of the “inholdings” on West Confederate Avenue. It was there that they met “T.J.”
Her youngest daughter was a little past two-years-old. She and her older sister shared a front room as their bedroom. The youngest’s bed was near a staircase that had been closed off because the upstairs was rented to tenants. She would tell her mother about the man who would visit her in her room—a kindly, protective, older man who would come down the stairs into her room…even though they had been blocked off by a sealed wooden door. She never saw him, but knew he was there, felt his presence like a stranger behind her back in the room.
Occasionally she would wake in the middle of the night and say there was a man standing by her bed. When asked about the man later, when she was in her late teens, she said that she never felt threatened by his presence; it was always a good feeling, and that she felt he was “a protector of the house.” She felt the presence of the man from the time she was about two years old until she was about six.
When the family got a pet, the dog would act strangely at certain times, staring at the closed-up stairway, moving its gaze slowly from one side of the room to the other, obviously noticing someone or something moving past but invisible to everyone else in the room.
One day they re-arranged the furniture in the girl’s room. When they moved the bed away from the stairs, as if he felt no longer needed, he never appeared to the little girl again.
During one of our many conversations, Suzanne and I discovered that we had mutual friends in a married couple—two of the first people I met when I first moved to Gettysburg.
Lynn and her husband graduated from Gettysburg College. I always remembered her as one of the more mature, down-to-earth people living in Gettysburg over that first remarkable summer I spent here. So I wasn’t surprised years later when we ran into each other again, that she had been working at one of the more prestigious physics institutes in the nation. Her choice of work certainly reflected her skeptical, logical and thoughtful approach to things.
Lynn was helping Suzanne at a party at Suzanne’s house. She was bringing some drinks from the front porch, down the hall. Suzanne said that she saw her pass a door to a closet built under the stairs to the second floor, move out of the way and say, “Oh, excuse me.” She brought the drinks to the end of the hall and Suzanne smilingly said, “What was that little movement?”
“Well, the guy in the tweed jacket just came out of the closet and I almost ran into him.”
“What guy?” Suzanne asked. She had seen nothing except the odd dodge Lynn had made at the empty doorway.
“I almost ran into that guy in the jacket. He almost made me spill the drinks.”
Suzanne had a difficult time explaining that there had been no man in a tweed jacket at the door; there was no one by that description at the party. And, in fact, he was never seen again…at least not at that gathering.
From that day, everyone began calling him T. J. —for “tweed jacket.” The girls would often talk to him, especially the youngest. As with the first spirit they encountered at Gettysburg, there was always a feeling of kindness and protectiveness surrounding their experience with T. J. As the youngest would say, “ T. J.’s watching over us.”
A couple of years later, a relative was visiting who had never heard the story of T. J. She and Suzanne were having a serious talk on the porch. But she kept being distracted, looking over Suzanne’s shoulder, and finally apologized: “I’m sorry. I keep seeing this guy with a tweed jacket standing behind you. I see him, then I don’t see him; I see him, then I don’t.”
When Suzanne first told me that she lived on West Confederate Avenue, I thought that she might have lived in the famous Red Patch, but she said no.
I asked her if she knew anything about the house. She replied that she knew it had an historic sign in front of it, and so it must have had something to do with the battle. Beyond that, she knew nothing. I enjoyed re-telling the story of Colonel Collis and his clandestine parties and the arrival of women in their finery to partake of the Colonel’s hospitality.
She got a funny look in her eye. “Maybe that explains it.” She proceeded to tell me a story of a vision into the past.
One night, her girls were having a sleepover with their young friends and neighbors. One of the little girls who lived in Red Patch had forgotten her sleeping bag and was going to walk to get it. Suzanne stood on the porch of her house to watch over her. As she waited, she suddenly got a strange feeling, as she put it, “a feeling when you’re in another space, another time. It was almost like I was the one in the wrong place.
“There was a scene on the porch at Red Patch. It was all couples, talking directly to each other, four or five couples. It felt like I was in another time. The women wore long dresses, perhaps from the turn of the century. The men in early 1900s-style tails and bowties. They looked almost Victorian, very fancy dresses, and definitely not a working class of people.”
She said the vision didn’t last long, 45 seconds at the most, but long enough to see them chatting, laughing, sipping champagne, and clinking glasses in a toast, perhaps to the late war and its heroes, before the entire scene vanished before her eyes.
“It felt like they didn’t know that I was there and I was in their space rather than me being there and them being in my space.” It is understandable why she would feel that way: Their “space” of course, was not only fifty yards away, but some eight or nine decades previous to hers.
However, as strange as that vision may seem, there is something even more bizarre to the tale. All those experiences—the Victorian cocktail party, “T.J.” the man and the woman apparitions on York Street, the vision of the dead Playboy Bunny, and everything else she’s experienced since—occurred at a unique period in her life.
They all happened after she died.
She was 27 when she had a car accident on the Schuylkill Expressway. Anyone who has traveled that stretch of highway outside of Philadelphia, especially in the 1970s, will remember the name the locals gave it: The Sure-kill Expressway. In her case, it was prophetic. What happened after the crash, which was as horrific as anyone can imagine, is best told in her words:
“I was out of my body. [I only remember that] I got hurt and at that moment I felt this great, incredible lifting feeling. Like when you dream you’re flying. You stay horizontal and just lift up. Then there seemed to be some kind of…” She paused to collect her thoughts and gather in her emotions. It is unsettling to recall one’s own death.
She continued speaking of her visit to the Netherworld: “My grandfather was there and my mother’s mother who died when my mother was two years old. So I didn’t know her. [There were] two others there that I did not know. They seemed to be in a little different realm. They were straight across from me—not above me—and close, but there still seemed to be some kind of unseen, different space. That’s when I said to my self, ‘Oh this is death. I’m dead. This is death.’”
She paused and corrected herself. “But I couldn’t even think that word because there was absolutely no death. People don’t understand me unless I use that word when I try and describe the experience, so I’m using that word. But that’s not what you’d even call it, but I know in my head, ‘oh that’s what this is about.’ Then I was given a choice—it feels like it was a choice—about going back to my body. I was aware I wasn’t in my body but I was so comfortable that I wasn’t like looking down and going….”
She paused to try to reconstruct in words something that goes beyond mere words.
“So I don’t know if I was directed this, I felt like I said it. I was able to say, ‘Hi grandpa!’ And he goes, ‘Everything’s okay,’ but there was no talking. Everything was all done mentally.”
Her next comments were as prophetic as they are revealing:
“The reason I went back to my body is because I had to let people know that we don’t die, and I hadn’t loved everyone I needed to love. Those were the two reasons, but I don’t know if they were ordained reasons or my decision reasons. And just like that in making that decision, I went back to my body, I woke up on the road, they were working on me and I was like, ‘Don’t cut off this jumpsuit, I just bought it, I paid so much for it at Wanamakers.’ They were worried about my leg, not knowing I had a totally crushed chest. It was totally concave. Every rib broken away from the sternum. Everybody dies from the injuries I sustained. But I kept talking. They say because I kept talking I lived.”
She endured eight hours of surgery. Her parents and brother flew out from the Midwest. The doctors, for a while, thought she had jaundice. She was on a respirator and was virtually paralyzed.
“When they came in I could move my finger and I knew that I had to let them know I was okay. I was able to just barely lift up my finger. My brother saw it and said, ‘she’s going to be okay.’”
And, as with all such things, there are a couple of synchronicities, one directly associated with Gettysburg.
It was about two or three years after the accident, when she was living in the York Street house. She and her husband were selling a pump organ. A man entered the house to look at it, sat down and started playing “Jesus loves me” and “Rock of Ages.” He appeared to be enjoying himself immensely. Suddenly he looked up at Suzanne and said, “I know you somehow.” She told him her name. She recounted what happened next: “He leapt from the organ stool and picked me up and said, ‘I can’t believe you’re alive. I prayed over you for a week.’” He had been at the seminary and had an internship at the Philadelphia Hospital. His last week at the seminary was her first week in the hospital after the accident. He left assuming, because of the severe nature of her injuries, she had died.
“When my body decided to get better it was overnight,” she recalled. “I’ll never forget the night it happened. They didn’t know if I was going to live one night, and the next day I was up walking. I’d been on the respirator for a month then they took me off. I was discharged directly from intensive care.” The doctors had planned for her to be in the hospital another two months.
A priest who had been praying for her daily wrote a letter to her hometown paper entitled “I Witnessed a Miracle.”
In the interview I asked her, To what do you attribute your recovery? There was a very long pause. “I think it was a miracle,” she finally said. “I was really cared about here. People sent their prayers, or sent energy….”
Since her death…and rebirth on that Philadelphia expressway, she has always delved into the more mysterious and fascinating aspects of life—both this life and the next…and perhaps the previous ones also. She has studied “chakras” or the energy concentrations in the body. She often talked, when having a bad day, about her chakras being out of line. Suzanne used to meditate regularly. One day she meditated so deeply, she missed going to work. That day she got a phone call from a friend who said, “You saved my life today. I was driving and you were right in the car with me and you told me exactly what to do.” Her friend avoided a potentially deadly accident.
Some paranormal researchers call this an “O. B. E.”—out-of-body experience—or teleportation. It has happened several times to her.
There is another experience this remarkable woman shared with me. I don’t want to say “final,” experience because the story of her life, in spite of Death’s best efforts, thankfully, isn’t over yet. It too is a story of energy. It is a story of how the greatest force in this world is not atomic power or the ultimate, vast energy of the cosmos, but an unseen energy, one that cannot be measured or calculated by instruments, or analyzed by scientists. Its existence is instead confirmed by a feeling, and that, like the paranormal, flies in the face of the scientific method. This energy disregards Newton’s and Einstein’s laws of physics, and pushes beyond time and space, and exists in a realm all its own, much like the soul apparently does.
It is the energy of love.
Suzanne is originally from the heartland of America. She was the quintessential Midwestern girl: raised on her father’s farm, high school cheerleader, dating the hometown boyfriend. She might have married him too, if war, like it has so often over the millennia, hadn’t gotten in the way.
His strong convictions and devout patriotism drew him to volunteer to fight in what may have been America’s second most controversial war (the Civil War, of course, being the most controversial since it literally tore the country in half.) He went to Vietnam. She drifted away: off to college, a job in the east, another man, a husband, children, another life in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Then a divorce, a new house, the always-unique “dating scene.”
Then she ran into him again. As fate would have it, they rekindled the affections they’d held inside for nearly thirty years and were married.
With two daughters in college in the east, she returned to Gettysburg fairly frequently. He is a very successful businessman, and couldn’t travel with her each time. Nevertheless, at least one memorable night, in spite of 1200 miles of separation, they were together.
Upon returning to him from a trip to Gettysburg, she heard her husband—a down-to-earth, no-nonsense, entrepreneur-type—tell her of a strange, nighttime encounter.
“You were here with me,” he said. “The other night when you were in Gettysburg. I felt you right next to me. Your energy was here, in our room.”
Telling me the story, she took a philosophical, practical, even humorous attitude about her ability to teleport: “I wonder if that happens a lot and people just don’t share it with me.” She laughed. “No wonder I wake up tired—I’m off visiting other people all night!”
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