As many of you know, I am an extreme ghost aficionado. I have a large library of books I've collected over many years of reading. Every time I go to Barnes & Noble, I always look in the 'New Age' section to see if there are any new ghost books that have been printed. I can look through the whole section and quickly pick out any new releases just by looking over the shelf. I've read that many of them.As a child, I ran into a problem because I would go to the library only to find that I had already read all the books in the 'Ghosts' section. I can even remember that the ghost books were under 133.XX in the Dewey decimal system. Yes, I was that interested in ghosts. In the gifted children program that I was a part of during elementary school, we had to do one large research project. Of course, I did my project on ghosts. The teachers both loved it.
I've read several books that are solely about the ghosts of Gettysburg. The city is packed full of ghosts. It doesn't take a genius to figure out why that might be the case. Over 175,000 men fought in 3 days' time in and around the city of Gettysburg. Casulties were extremely high (over 10,000 men lost their lives and 4 times that amount were wounded). There was an extreme amount of death and suffering in the battle. At left is a picture of bullet holes in an inn in the town. There were several hundred bullet holes in this wall alone.
One of the most interesting stories regarding the battle involves the handling of the dead following the battle. The dead were buried where they lay on the battlefield to avoid any spread of disease. Wood markers were used to identify the dead with a name when possible. Once the wounded were dealt with, the dead were dug up and reburied in a formal cemetery. One problem is that some of the markers had been knocked down or used as firewood. As a result, when the citizens finished moving the dead, they found that there were 700 war dead that they could not find. Those 700 war dead are still buried in various parts of the city. There is actually a modern neighborhood that is now build over a portion of the battlefied. There were several war dead found when digging the basements in that neighborhood and there are many reported hauntings in this neighborhood. It would appear that many graves were probably disturbed in this area.
Another place where there is a high amount of activity is in the Gettysburg National Cemetery. This is where most of the Gettysburg dead are buried (many are unknown graves) and President Abraham Lincoln gave his Gettysburg address when the cemetery was formally created (there were many people already buried there, both civilian and military, but the cemetery was not officially a National Cemetery until his visit).I decided that I was going to go ghost hunting in the cemetery at dusk with my camera. I got several good photos of various monuments and graves. Nothing really of interest, but nice pictures of the various sites in the graveyard. Here's a couple of them.......
One of my last pictures was just a random shot of the graveyard. It was sunset. There are small, square stones on the ground. Each one of those stones marks the grave of a soldier. There are a couple hundred graves in this picture alone. The graves in this picture are all soldiers from a specific state. The state that the soldiers are from is noted on the larger stone on the extreme right of the picture about 2/3 of the way down. The specific state is not visible in this picture, but I believe I took the picture because it was the Maryland soldiers. The sun is setting on the extreme right of the picture behind a mountain.
The intriguing part of the picture is located on the left side of the picture between the two trees just beyond the graves. If you look closely, there is a small, white orb of light located between the two trees. Orbs are generally recognized as energy that indicates a supernatural presence. Obviously, the first thing to look for is possible reasons for the orb of light. First, the sun had already set to the extreme right behind a mountain, so no direct sunlight was available to cause the light. Second, some multicolor object are visible just over the wall in the background. Those are actually where the maintenance vehicles are kept. While these vehicles could possibly produce the light, the maintenance workers had already gone home for the day, so there was no one in that area. Finally, the most convincing piece of evidence that can be notice in the photograph. There is a tree limb that directly crosses the area where the light is located in the picture. If the light were coming from the area just past the cemetery wall, you would be able to see the tree limb splitting the light source in half. As you can see the light is actually in front of the limb because the entire limb disappears behind the light.
I would suggest that you right click on the picture and save it to your desktop to get a better look at the picture and the orb in the picture. It's certainly interesting and I was excited to get something on one of the pictures. If you would like the hi-res version of the picture, e-mail me and I can send you the picture file. There is a group that will be doing a ghost investigation in the coming months in an old inn in Gettysburg. If I get the chance, I'm heading up there to check it out.
