Giving Up the Ghost (20 page)

The Gettysburg National Military Park closes at 10
P.M
. In mid-July the sun sets at 8:19
P.M
. That leaves a little less than two hours of darkness for hundreds of terrified tourists to roam around the park’s six thousand acres looking for ghosts.

The ghost-hunting weapon of choice: digital cameras. Tourists climb rocks, slink through woods, and slowly creep down paths clicking picture after picture, hoping to capture some of the ectoplasm, mist, and strange apparitions thought to be as common as Civil War–era bullet fragments. Stand on any high point between dusk and closing time, and the battlefield glows with microbursts of light.

“I got an orb! I got an orb!” someone screams.

You didn’t get an orb, I want to tell him. You got a dust ball.

Devil’s Den, the boulder-covered hillside near the southern end of the battlefield, is thought to be among the most haunted spots in the entire park. My friend Meghan and I show up at a little past dark to search for ghosts. It seems that well over a hundred other Gettysburg visitors have the exact same idea, though they treat their ghost hunting like it’s a ride at the county fair. Everyone seems to be running about screaming, giggling, and snapping pictures, while still being scared of what lies around the next corner. Chances are, it’s a sunburned and bloated vacationer from Iowa looking for a ghost, too.

Shortly after arriving, Meghan wondered out loud how long we’d be walking around Devil’s Den before we came across someone with a bald eagle or American flag tattooed on some exposed area of the body.

Answer: four minutes.

And both tattoos were on the same dude.

I’m not entirely sure why Meghan joined me on my trip to what many people believe is the most haunted place in the entire country, but I have two theories. First, she’s married to Joe, who accompanied me on my trip to Clinton Road. So if Joe got to go on a ghost-hunting trip, she should too, she probably thought. Second, Meghan lived in nearby Hanover for several years. As a result, she knows her way around Gettysburg fairly well and has hung around the battlefield, at night, on numerous occasions.

It’s here at Devil’s Den where Meghan herself had an experience that she couldn’t explain.

“My friend Brian was coming through town on a road trip from New York to Texas,” she says. “He’s a huge history buff,
so we came out here on our way to get beers and pizza in Gettysburg. We were walking up through Devil’s Den, and this huge fireball flew right in front of me.”

It was a ten-inch ball of light, a few feet away. It just whipped by, then, just as suddenly, disappeared. By the time she realized it was happening, it was over. She’s come back many times since but has never seen anything else like it, nor does she have any idea what she saw that night.

Meghan isn’t the only one. Hundreds of people report seeing weird stuff such as strangers standing among the rocks, then suddenly disappearing. There are stories of whispering voices, gunshots, and the reported sense of being watched.

In fact, there are literally thousands of ghost stories connected to Gettysburg. Most of these, of course, stem from the 51,000 men who were killed or wounded over the three-day battle in and around Gettysburg in July 1863. At the end of the campaign, more than 8,000 bodies littered the battlefield; many were so hastily buried in shallow graves that rain left exposed arms, legs, and heads popping up out of the ground. This ghoulishness bred ghost lore like mosquitoes in an old tire.

There is one person at Devil’s Den who isn’t freaking out at the idea of finding a ghost here: me. Before visiting Clinton Road and Lily Dale, I was unable to sleep for days. During the visits themselves, I was constantly on pins and needles. However, this time, it just feels like something to do. It isn’t like I had some epiphany or breakthrough, or that I’m not still scared of ghosts in general. But when I see all the tourists jumping around Devil’s Den, I just suddenly realize that I’m not experiencing any of the excitement and nervousness and adrenaline that I see in them.

There’s precious little in Gettysburg that doesn’t center on
the tourism industry. At most summer tourist destinations, evenings are spent playing mini-golf, eating ice cream, and watching movies. Not so in Gettysburg. At night, the streets of downtown Gettysburg swarm with ghost tours. The ghost business is big business in Gettysburg.

Walking down Baltimore Street, you quickly realize that ghost tours are to Gettysburg what casinos are to Las Vegas. There are fourteen companies offering ghost tours in and around the city itself and the battlefield. Since most companies offer multiple variations, on any given night you can take your pick of several dozen tours. There are walking tours, home tours, battlefield tours, bus tours, hospital tours, theater presentations, and even ghost tours on horseback and Segway scooters. It seems like just about any building that was standing in the mid-nineteenth century has an accompanying ghost story and can be toured at night for ten dollars.

In addition, more than twenty local hotels and B-and-Bs claim to have spirits-in-residence. One major modern hotel chain claims to be haunted, saying that guests hear ethereal cannon fire from their beds. However, given the target demographic for said hotel chain, the spooky booms are more than likely from an errant Molotov cocktail or a traveling meth lab set up in room 218.

But it wasn’t always this way. In fact, not that many people really associated Gettysburg and ghosts until the early 1990s. The man largely responsible for all this is Mark Nesbitt. Mark was a Ranger Historian for the National Park Service at Gettysburg in the 1970s before embarking on a career as an author, with most of his work related to Gettysburg. In 1991 he published a book of ghost stories he’d collected called
Ghosts of Gettysburg
. It was a smash hit. Mark went on to author nine more books of ghost stories and ghost-hunting exploits (including
five more
Ghosts of Gettysburg
volumes), as well as several other novels and nonfiction books—almost all related to Gettysburg.

After the initial success of
Ghosts of Gettysburg
, the borough of Gettysburg was soon brainstorming ways to attract tourists downtown once they came to visit the battlefield. They asked Mark if he’d be interested in creating a tour of downtown locations mentioned in his collected ghost stories. Mark hosted his first Gettysburg ghost walk in June of 1994. By that fall, he was running tours seven nights a week. In 1997 he bought a building downtown to serve as his home, office, and retail store for his books and tours. Later that year, another guy in Gettysburg decided to offer a competing tour. And, as Mark says, things just exploded from there.

The competition hasn’t hurt Mark’s business. On most nights, he runs six different tours. He has expanded his tours to Fredericksburg and Charlottesville as well. He offers ghost-hunting weekends at haunted bed-and-breakfasts, as well as private tours and investigations. He even sponsors a ghost-themed cruise.

“Everyone who comes to Gettysburg will tell you, it has a special … feeling,” he says as we sit talking in the back room of his house, which he claims—wait for it—is haunted. “I liken it to walking into a church. A church is just a building, but yet you get a special feeling when you go in there. You know, you go out to Pickett’s Charge, and you just get this … a friend of mine said, ‘It’s like the great crush of souls’ that you feel here. I don’t know what another explanation could be, except that they’re still here, all those people. The ones who survived, we know they came back to visit. Why wouldn’t the dead?”

“So let’s just say that a person is visiting Gettysburg,” I say. “And let’s say this person found all this a little overwhelming.
And let’s say he doesn’t have a big issue with trespassing or being places you aren’t supposed to be—theoretically, of course. And let’s say that this person is very scared of ghosts, and if he is going to go through the self-torture of looking for ghosts, this person doesn’t want to waste his time. If this person were to go to one place in Gettysburg to have an experience, where would you tell this person to go?”

“To experience a ghost?” Mark asks. “The place that most consistently produces experiences is the Devil’s Den and Triangular Field area,” he says. “I’ve had more weird things happen there than just about anyplace.”

A few hours later, Meghan and I are dodging tattooed tourists with digital cameras trudging through Devil’s Den on our way to Triangular Field—and the clock is ticking.

“We need to be really careful about not getting caught in the battlefield after hours,” Meghan says, referring to the National Park Service’s unambiguous prohibition of after-hours lurking. “They patrol it pretty thoroughly.”

“Who patrols it?” I ask. “Park rangers?”

“No, self-righteous reenactors and Civil War nerds.”

Gettysburg is, of course, the Mecca of Civil War battlefields. I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that the die-hard reenactors are pretty protective of it.

“Wait a minute,” I say. “If the battlefield is supposed to be haunted by the spirits of thousands of Civil War soldiers … and the battlefield is filled with thousands of reenactors dressed like Civil War soldiers, how can we tell who’s a ghost and who’s a reenactor?”

Meghan pauses to consider this.

“The smell,” she answers.

The large open field adjacent to Devil’s Den, Triangular Field, is the mother lode of Gettysburg ghost sightings. There
are entire websites that just collect pictures taken on the field. Strange things are routinely encountered here: “rebel yells” heard when no one is around, peculiar depressions seen in the grass as you walk by, the moans of dying soldiers, and the smell of gunpowder.

As we shortcut down some deer paths, looking for the main trail, we do what everybody does: take photos. Despite the number of ghost photos taken there, an often-told piece of Triangular Field lore is that cameras and video equipment often jam or stop working. If by “not working” you mean “not capturing any ghost images,” I’d have to agree it’s true. Our photos contain rocks, grass, and darkness. The same rocks, grass, and darkness seen on the Triangular Field websites, minus the ethereal fog, forms, and apparitions. Though before I leave his house, Mark does warn me against expecting too much from my eyes. He says we need to pay attention to our other senses.

“Of all the ghost experiences we document out there, you know, only about ten percent of them are visual. Auditory, now that’s about sixty percent. You hear a lot out in that field. In fact, you can experience ghosts with just about all your senses,” he says, then pauses. “Except taste. I’ve never had anyone tell me they could taste a ghost.”

As we slog through the valley, the Ghost Meter in my left hand periodically jumps to life, beeping and lighting up. The Ghost Meter was a Christmas gift from Meghan and Joe. It’s basically an EMF meter, a simple electrician’s tool used by thousands of other ghost enthusiasts, who claim that dead spirits emit a low amount of electromagnetic radiation, which registers on the meter. The Ghost Meter adds a certain flair to the process; it’s housed in a casing made of clear and orange plastic that looks like it was designed by Apple Computer in 1997. I
tested it around the house before bringing it “out in the field,” as those in the field might say. According to the Ghost Meter, the radio in my dining room and my KitchenAid mixer either are haunted or produce a significant amount of electromagnetic output. Whenever it gets a signal that moves the meter at least halfway, orange lights start blinking on top and it starts to beep. My excitement over the intermittent beeping and lights ceases when I realize that it’s registering a signal every time it comes within a few inches of my cell phone. It doesn’t occur to me until later that I’m not terribly concerned at the time that my cell is emitting enough radiation—four inches from my testicles—to set off the Ghost Meter. Every time it happens, Meghan jumps, looks around, and then yells at me to hold the Ghost Meter in my other hand.

As I snap pictures in the moonless dark of Triangular Field, I periodically catch Meghan in my pictures and notice the look on her face. It isn’t quite fear, but there is a growing amount of concern on her face as we walk deeper into the fields and woods, farther away from the picture-taking tourists who seem content keeping close to the road and trailhead.

As we go deeper into the field, our photos still contain nothing significant at all, except dust balls. Oh, excuse me, I mean orbs. Orbs are little balls of opaque light that show up in photographs. According to paranormal investigators, orbs are spirit forms floating around unseen by the naked eye but capturable by a camera.

Ghost hunters will always say there is “quite a bit of controversy” surrounding orbs, but the “orbs controversy” is about the least controversial controversy I’ve ever encountered. I could not find anyone who actually takes the “pro-orb” folks seriously, except the pro-orb contingency themselves. It’s pretty cut-and-dry bullshit.

Because of the cheap and fairly low resolution of most digital cameras, orbs are common in digital pictures. That is, until the photographer cleans the lens. If you are in a location with a lot of dust in the air (like most supposedly haunted locations), you spot a lot of orbs. Also, when you leave your camera on and the lens exposed for long periods (like, for example, when you’re on a ghost hunt), you get a lot of orbs.

Some orb catchers will show blown-up pictures of orbs, pointing out facial features in the pixelation. I could take a close-up of a freckle on my arm, blow it up, and put up at least a half-convincing case that you could see in it the features of Chairman Mao. You see what you want to see.

Walking through the field, I start to think about the people who take all these ghost pictures, passing them along to the Triangular Field websites. Are they fooled by what they see? Are they looking for something, and do they keep looking until they find something that fits what they’re seeking? Are they looking for acceptance and attention by faking it? I mean, half those ethereal-fog photos could be early-morning mist or stray cigarette smoke.