Got Ghosts? Gettysburg Does: A Halloween Story

This past summer I had the opportunity to participate in events of the 150th Anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. As a clairvoyant, traveling to a documented, spooky place I was intrigued to find out what makes a place crawl with ghosts --I found the answer: plenty of unsettled spirits.

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania was the site of the bloodiest and most tragic three days during the Civil War, July 1-3, 1863. The Union and the Confederate “Rebs” converged on the farmland and surrounding hills of this small town now considered “hallowed ground.” As part of the 150th Anniversary, there were over 50,000 Civil War re-enactors creating each of the battles of these painful and terrifying days. The point of the event was to honor and somehow heal the suffering and pain that occurred here.

During those three days, over 50,000 soldiers from both sides died on the surrounding fields and in the buildings of Gettysburg. The people of the town, just numbering 1300, were unprepared to manage the number of dead and dying. Many soldiers were left to die alone on the battlefield where they were struck down. The weapons of this war were new, violent types of bullets and cannonballs that shattered inside the victims and left them no way to heal. If an arm or leg were hit, there would be no recourse except to cut the limb off to prevent gangrene -sometimes right on the battlefield. If you got hit in the torso or head, you were made to feel more comfortable and left to die where you lay. Horse-drawn wagons used as early ambulances had just been invented and were rare and inefficient.

The buildings of Gettysburg were filled with soldiers either waiting or suffering the process of amputation - - many with no type of anesthetic. The children who lived in the town had the job of carting away the limbs and making piles of over 10,000 in the streets to be buried. Doctors were called “bone saws” and did their work with rusty, filthy saws and medicine made from mercury. Many soldiers pulled their weapon when they saw a “bone saw” coming their way. Because of the filthy conditions, most soldiers died anyway within weeks due to infection.

The majority of soldiers who perished in this battle were hard to identify except through pictures of loved ones in their pockets. Identification “dog” tags were not in use yet. Many relatives wandered the fields days later searching for their loved ones. They could do this because the number of corpses on the surrounding hills and farm lands were too numerous to bury. The battle took place on Union land so only the bodies of those soldiers were properly buried in the nearby cemetery -- but many up to two years later. Thousands of bodies of the confederate soldiers lay in the fields exposed and “bleaching in the sun” for weeks. The people of Gettysburg did not have the manpower to pick up these corpses and bury them. The armies left behind over 7,000 dead scattered around the battlefield. The sheer number of rapidly decomposing bodies posed an imminent health hazard, if not a ghastly scene. As one Confederate soldier recalled passing over the fields northwest of Gettysburg on July 4, “The sights and smells that assailed us were simply indescribable-corpses swollen to twice their size, asunder with the pressure of gases and vapors…The odors were nauseating, and so deadly that in a short time we all sickened and were lying with our mouths close to the ground, most of us vomiting profusely.”

Needless to say, the remaining soldiers and residents of the area quickly covered the bodies in hasty, shallow graves with no markers. The farmers had to continue planting crops with bodies and bullets strewn amongst the harvests. It wasn’t until nine years later that many of these soldiers were disinterred and moved to proper resting places though not identified. The pain and misery of all these men and the families can still be felt on the lands, hills and buildings of Gettysburg.

I found out that the ground under the farms where the battles took place are made of limestone which has the ability to conduct spirit - just adding to the “unsettled” atmosphere. I wanted to “capture” some ghosts with my camera either in the form of orbs or ghostly light shapes. These days, phone cameras work very well to capture these. I find that dusk or night is the best time. The radiation of the sunlight has an effect on spirits in the atmosphere, it is easier to capture them as the sun (and radiation) goes down. Even though my job as a clairvoyant is to practice “seeing” energy, I use my clairsentient or feeling center below the navel first in my body to “feel” when there is an active spirit nearby. I also feel an excitement in my heart center when a spirit is near. As I get these feelings, I come into my clairvoyant center in the forehead to see and hear. I take a picture into the darkness and ask questions to the spirit (silently from the center of my head). I find that flash helps to “capture” these spirits. I captured these orbs on the battlefield called Cemetery Hill shortly after the memorial service to the soldiers.

These pictures are of three soldiers who were just boys - 15 years old to 17 years old. They were left behind on the battlefield, injured and sick. They were related as siblings or cousins and couldn’t abandon each other. They were sad they did not properly say good bye to their mother and other relatives. I said a prayer and imagined their spirits being lifted to the light of the Supreme Being to set their spirits free from this place of confusion, loss and pain. Here is the second picture -- it’s all light!

I noticed that many of these people who had traveled from all over the country were re-living their past life experiences or had felt the enduring regret of a lost family member to the war. Many were there to “find” their lost relative and redeem the pain for their family. I didn’t have to just use my imagination - there were people acting it out. At one point 30,000 on-lookers like me participated in a battle re-enactment alongside the costumed soldiers on the actual land it took place - “Pickett’s charge.” I realized I had experienced a past life in this misery as well and felt so grateful to be here in 2013 to finally heal!