Gettysburg Ghosts

The air feels different on the east coast.  Not only is it more humid and verdant down there at sea level, but I swear you can taste the history you're breathing.  The air is thick with it; it drips from the trees.  Not that we don't have our share of history in the Rocky Mountain west, mind you,  but it's not as concentrated here in tension and tragedy and portent as the hills and valleys, forests and townships of the original thirteen colonies. In cities like Philadelphia and Boston a tourist can't walk a block where something momentous didn't happen.  There are markers and monuments scattered along the roadways thicker than our prairie tumbleweeds -- and understandably so.  It was in our eastern states that those early years of debate, struggle, and suffering wrung this nation into being.  And you really can feel that when you walk the streets and pathways that were colonial America.



Monument to the
Fighting Irish
in Gettysburg.

I grew up on the east coast and have been to many historic sites.  I've visited Monticello, Mount Vernon, Jamestown, Williamsburg, Charleston harbor, Yorktown, and countless places of note throughout North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, D.C. and Maryland...  And, even as a child I was moved by the drama of the history in those places; I've grown up expecting goosebumps of inspiration and awe at historic tourist destinations.  But, that said, there has been nowhere that has affected me as much as Gettysburg this past week. 

There are ghosts in Gettysburg.

In recent years ghosts have become an industry in Gettysburg -- a fact which begs the question of whether it isn't the power of suggestion that sends tingles down the spines of credit-card bearing tourists.  You should see them all: waiting in line for the nine or ten different walking ghost tours that meet at dusk every night on the curbs of the town; huddling in paid-seats in dark damp cellars listening to ghost stories; wandering past the markers and monuments of the battlefields in the surrounding hills, snapping photos on their digital cameras and then examining them for orbs...  There's no doubt that all the hype fans the ghost hunters' flames. 

But there's a lot to tell about this place that gives reason for haunting.  If you spend enough time in Gettysburg (we were there a week), you can't help but learn (almost by heart) all the tales of human drama and tragedy.  The town was, after all, a Civil War battlefield.   The approximate death toll of the three-day conflict in 1863 was 7,000; the total casualties, over 51,000.  Families hid in the cellars of their homes while Union and Confederate forces shot at each other through the ground floor windows.  Brother met brother, father met son on the battlefield.  Medics scrambled to save the wounded; soldiers and civilians struggled to bury all the dead.   And now, in 2011, Jenny Wade, the only civilian to be killed in the battle, dies hundreds of times a day in the telling and retelling of her sad story.  The woods fairly vibrate with the miniballs that are still found embedded in the many "witness trees" still standing.  The pock-marks of bullet holes on the brick houses silently tell the terror of the soldiers and civilians who heard the sound of them hitting 148 years ago.   Too much happened in Gettysburg for the tales not to live on.



From the top of Devil's Den, looking toward Little Round Top. 10/13/11



But I think more lives on than just the tales.  If you know me, you know I believe in ghosts; I've had to, as they've lived on the fringes of my life for a long time.  I can't say I really understand why they're here, but I know, personally, that they are.  I have no doubt that some manifestations are demonic -- though, thank God, as far as I know, I haven't ever witnessed any that were evil.  We know that saints and angels are permitted by God at times to communicate with us, and the Holy Souls in Purgatory have also been known to "come back" with cautionary tales and pleas for prayer.  But, there are other ghosts, too.  If you watch any one of the slew of ghost programs that are popular today, you 've probably heard of "residual ghosts" -- and that's as good a name as any for them. I think that sometimes, an event or emotion is so powerful that the echo of it lasts through the years -- leaving a "residue".  If you can imagine that time is not lineal, but circular and possibly fluid and waving, you could understand these residual hauntings to be "wrinkles in time."  And, given the highly charged events in Gettysburg, July 1-3, 1863, it's easy to imagine that time in this place is like a bowl of noodles, criss-crossing the past with the present.  If you're paying attention, and look at the right place at the right time, there's no telling what you might hear, or smell, or see...

There were many strange, thought provoking things that happened to us in Gettysburg, during the rainy (full moon) week my sister, my cousin, and I got to visit.  We had a portable DVD player that kept coming on by itself -- and the channel changed in the middle of a program, though the remote was on the other side of the room, untouched.  My sister took several photos that have amazing, unexplained balls of light in one shot, which are nowhere to be seen in a shot taken immediately after, and at the end of one of my sister's videos, you can hear in the distance the strains of what sounds like band music -- though we were in the middle of nowhere at the time, and heard nothing with our naked ears.   We all felt tingles up our spines when walking through certain areas, and there are a couple of my photos of houses where it looks like faces peer out of the windows... Still, though these experiences were compelling evidence to those of us who were there, skeptics would find numerous ways to explain them away.  No question about it.  And I wouldn't complain if they did, because I'm doubtful of them, too.

But, then there are these photos:

This first one is the original, untouched photo, as seen in my header.  Taken, pointed toward the forest on the back side of Little Round Top, I was aiming only for the beauty of the foliage and the rocks -- but I appear to have happened upon something else...  (Unlike my header, this photo can be clicked to enlarge.)

See him?  Check out the anomoly pointed out by the arrow toward the bottom right of the photo.



Here it is, closer.  The area behind the rocks, where you see the "anomaly" falls back and downward into a gully.  The ghostly image, therefore, is actually further away than it would seem. 




And closer still.  When I first pulled this photo up, my eye was drawn to this guy, and I thought maybe there was a tourist sludging through the muddy woods (it was raining that day) -- but on closer examination, we could see that if this were a tourist, he was missing the bottoms of his legs...  He appears to be standing down there, looking up at me with my camera, arms folded in front of him.  His right leg appears to be bent, as if he were resting it on a rock that we can't see.  His uniform appears to have the long coat and is grey -- or Confederate.  He looks like he has a beard and thinning hair, receding, or with a bald pate, and a broad forehead. 

 Crazy, huh?  If I didn't know better -- If I hadn't taken this picture myself, and downloaded it with my children looking over my shoulder, I'd think it was photo shopped.  But it wasn't. Amazing, isn't he?  Our bearded and balding Confederate soldier.  God rest his soul!

Ghost Post

Can a Catholic, in good conscience, believe in ghosts?

I guess the question is whether or not we can believe in the supernatural, actually. Which is almost like asking, "Do you believe in UFOs?" Well, of course; everyone has to believe in UFOs. Flying Objects do exist that are Unidentified. Do supernatural occurences exist? Of course they do. They happen all the time. I know very few people who don't have some story of the unexplained. But, like the UFO question, it's not so much a matter of if they exist, but what they are.

There is no specific teaching of the Church about these things, other than to verify that the Communion of Saints and their intercession is real and true. Miracles are supernatural, or "above nature." The lives of the saints are liberally sprinkled and sometimes drowning in the supernatural. And devils, of course, exist. But, many supernatural events occur which aren't necessarily connected with any of these things. What are they all about?

My husband and I think there are five different categories of "ghosts." We've experienced them all to one degree or another, but (thanks be to God) most are the benign varieties.

1. Signal Graces: Signs from God through either His direct intercession or those of His saints. (St. Anne, St. Philomena, and St. Theresa the Little Flower have been very generous with us in this way.)

2. Demonic Forces: Very real. Very scary. They can only become a part of our lives to the extent God permits it, so we can at least take comfort in that fact. (Praise God, we've only had a couple of fleeting scares on this front, and pray to never have more than that.)

3. Human Souls: Those can be of the condemned variety (rare, we believe), souls in Purgatory seeking our assistance in releasing them from their sins, and those who have gotten trapped between this life and the next. Of that latter group, we know that "it is appointed unto each man once to die and then the judgment," but we know precious little about the specifics of God's judgment for us and the anecdotal evidence seems to suggest that it's not as instantaneous (at least not according to our sense of time) as we would think. It's one to wonder about for sure.

4. Residual or "Echo" Ghosts: It seems that intense emotion, strong personalities and life-changing events can leave a mark on a place, causing a moment in time to repeat. These ghosts don't communicate or react in any way with us, but move about more like a record with a skip in it.

5. Wrinkles in Time: Sometimes a ghost can be interactive, but does not appear to have a spiritual agenda, either good or evil. It's a theory of ours that time doesn't always work the way humans expect it to. We know so little about it from God's perspective. Could it be possible that our time overlaps with another one sometimes, and unexplained voices and things we see exist in real time, but not our time? We can only guess.

*Please understand these represent merely our theories, and do not reflect any teaching of the Church, whatsoever. We don't think they contradict any, either.

Most of our experiences, though, have been Echo Ghosts, and I'll tell you about some of those here, if you want to pull up a good thunderstorm and tuck in with a cup of cocoa and join me...

In the first house my husband and I lived in (built in the '40s), we would periodically smell roast cooking in the kitchen. One time we came in the kitchen and all the cabinets were open, and none of us had done it. My sister had an apartment in the basement of that house. One night, hearing all the tramping and noise of us coming home after an outing, she came up to say howdy. But, when she came upstairs, we weren't there and the doors were all locked.

I seem to be sensitive to visual apparitions (this kind of sensitivity seems to run in my family), and glimpsed a man in blue cover-alls several times in and around the place. He seemed very sad, but moved about oblivious to us ~ just an echo of another time in that house, I'm sure.

-------------------

In our circa 1898 home on the Western Slope, I would catch a girl sitting on the fifth step from the bottom of our staircase every so often. She was wearing a long peach-colored dress and had her elbows on her knees, her chin cupped in her hands. She looked miffed. I've always wondered what event that recorded. Did someone stand her up?

Several times in that house I saw a woman in a long white nightgown go from one room to another, crossing the landing outside my bedroom door. She was going to the old nursery; we think she was probably a young mother who must have lived in the house many years before. Neither of these were ever scary to see, and were actually more of an interesting novelty and almost a comfort.

(I'm afraid we're not personally acquainted with the ghost pictured above.)
--------------

When we first moved into this house ~ the old farmhouse on the high prairies, I was surprised to wake up one morning to an old lady in a rocking chair sitting next to the window in my room. She was there for just an instant and disappeared. I prayed for her soul and never saw her again.

-----------------

But the ghost we see the most often here at the farm is the young man in jeans and a cowboy hat. I catch him walking across the property fairly often. He's always outside.

One time, he was standing outside my bedroom window (which used to be the kitchen window of the house ~ incidentally, the same window near the old lady in the rocking chair). He was leaning in, as if he were getting ready to say something to me, with his hands braced against the top of the window frame, his hat pushed back on his head, wearing blue jeans and a blue shirt. He has much the same build as my oldest son, and, as I caught him out of the corner of my eye, I thought it was Paul ~ until I turned to say, "What do you need?" and he was instantly gone. That's how these ghosts are. Almost as soon as you realize you're seeing them, they're gone. But, since they're just echo ghosts, there is no feeling of fear that comes with them. I wish I knew who they were. I wonder if the young man was the builder of this house.

----------------

One time I was sitting in the north room looking toward the big west window. The sun had just set, so it was dusky outside, but you could see a bit of reflection on the glass from inside. I saw what I thought was one of my children pass behind me, because I saw what I thought was their reflection in the window. I turned around to see who had come into the room, but there was nobody there. What I think I actually saw was an echo of someone coming out of the door that used to be at a right angle to the big west window. There's no door there now, and there was nobody outside. At least nobody but the ghost who had just come out of a walled-over door.

---------------

My sister lived in a trailer on our property, just east of our house a few years ago. She's the member of the family who hears ghosts, while I tend more to see them. (Go figure that. We're an odd bunch, aren't we?) Anyway, Nina has told many stories of hearing people outside the trailer, when, after investigating, noone was there. (We live far from any other houses, the family was all accounted for indoors, and the animals ruled out, too.)

She was also the one who had someone sit on the end of her bed when she was sleeping in the old nursery in our last house (the one with the ghost mother in the white nightgown). She thought it was me or one of the kids coming in for some reason, and grabbed her glasses to see who was there. There was nobody there. Everyone else was sound asleep.
---------------
When we were getting ready to move back to the prairie from the Western Slope, my husband delivered a truckload of paraphernalia back to the old farm. While he was here, he took a walk-through of the house. He was alone, standing near the base of the stairs, when he heard something thundering down the stairs.

It sounded exactly like our oldest children, who used to love to stampede down the stairs like a herd of elephants. Drove us crazy when we lived here the first time! He says he heard the noise and kind of rolled his eyes, not too surprised. No sense of fear at all. Is it possible that we have already created our own "echo" ghosts? Or maybe it was just a wrinkle in time window that opened up for just a minute.

Strange experience, regardless.

It's always just a little strange, to say the least, but, if you think about it, we shouldn't be surprised. We can't expect to have everything completely figured out. On many things we can only make guesses.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy ...

A priest once told us that it is likely that anything evil would bring with it a definite feeling of evil and fear ~ most especially if we are in the state of grace. So, never having felt an evil threat, we figure, to cover all bases when faced with a ghost, it's good to say a prayer for the soul, in case it's a member of the Church Suffering, looking for help from us. That's the best we can do. We don't worry about it much, otherwise. But they make for interesting conversation! Who doesn't love a chance to swap tales and spin theories? Especially now that it's thunderstorm season on the prairies...

What are your ghost stories?

(There's a lot of entertaining reading out there about ghostly encounters, but none are as good as first-hand stories!)