We celebrate October as the harvest time, a time for festivals, and enjoying the fabulous fall weather. Here at DLP-HQ we celebrate October as the Spookification Month.

We begin the eeriness with a trip just north of here to Gettysburg National Battlefield Monument, the site of the deadliest battle of the Civil War.

The Union and Confederate armies fought in and around the town of Gettysburg for three official days between July 1-3, 1863. Currently, historians believe the Union army lost 23,000 soldiers while Confederate casualties were about 28,000, but these numbers are purely estimates. Well, that right there is enough to arouse the whispers of ghosts.

Today the battlefield and national cemetery are historically significant landmarks. The town of Gettysburg is a quaint bedroom community for Washington, Baltimore, and Harrisburg. Gettysburg College is a beautiful private university, which includes Gettysburg Seminary, one of the oldest Lutheran seminaries in the country. Gettysburg’s central square has been restored to an eclectic little township full of history, art, and shops.

Of course, the town is a hub of paranormal tourism, too.

Restoring the spirits of the past

The National Park surrounds the town. There are monuments everywhere you look noting skirmishes and troop encampments. There are also a lot of tourists.

I visited the park last Wednesday, where I found the place crowded with tour buses, school groups, and cars with license plates from all over the country. The town of Gettysburg will never again be the serene farming village it was before the troops arrived 158 years ago.

Back in the 1860s, farmers created checkerboard patterns of fields. The land surrounding the town was heavily farmed, agriculture kept the woods isolated in the highlands. Livestock grazing kept the woods free of too much undergrowth. Comparing modern and old photos of the battlefield I think the woods are winning the fight to reclaim their footing.

I spoke to a park ranger and a docent working in the visitor center to get some insight into areas that have been restored to their 1863 appearance. Essentially everything that is owned by the park service has been restored. Many of the sites, especially some old homes that served as field hospitals are still privately owned and out of the hand of the NPS.

The ranger explained that the NPS employs controlled burns and selective tree removal to maintain sightlines. The most recent project, he told me, was the restoration of Culp’s Hill this past winter. The park service removed some small diameter trees to open more area and allow visitors to better view and understand the importance of the hill.

When I finally made my way around to that part of the battlefield (most of the routes are one way) there were too many people to go out and explore Culp’s Hill. I did hike up Big Round Top and I have to say I can’t see the significance of that hill either. It was hard to see the strategic benefit from my vantage point 158 years later. There might be high ground, but it’s far too overgrown now to see anything coming.

The Cemetery

Abraham Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg address (that no one really knows the words to) was delivered during the dedication of the cemetery on November 19, 1863. Just four months after the battle.

There are only a few surviving photos of the day. Looking at those photos, the one thing that struck me was how bare the view was. And by bare, I mean a sea of people and not a tree to be found.

Walking through the cemetery now is a serene, beautiful experience, if you’re into that kind of thing. These massive old trees line the pathways. Just about every tree has a label. Some are so old they have cables supporting the weight of their limbs. There was one that even looked dead except for cuttings grafted to the trunk.

The ghosts of Gettysburg

I’ve never put too much stock in ghost stories, but the silent member of team DLP is all about hauntings- from a scientific standpoint. He likes the “Stone Tape” hypothesis as an explanation for a place like Gettysburg.

This is the idea that energy, in this case spiritual, can be stored in rock. Gettysburg lies within the Gettysburg formation, composed of sandstone, conglomerate, and shales. Rock formations pop up in random places throughout the battlefield like Devil’s Den (below).

The biggest drawback to the hypothesis is the playback mechanism. Magnetic tape in a cassette stores sound energy on the length of tape. A recording of that energy is played back over time, over the length of the tape. Rocks don’t measure time. Even if there was some mechanism to playback the spiritual energy, there is no point A to point B. Ghostly energy would appear as nothing but a blur of light. No full-body apparitions there.

That doesn’t stop the battlefield ghost stories from looming large over the town. There is a whole tourism industry in the town related to the paranormal.

My angle was to look at some of the most haunted sites through a skeptic’s salty eye. Question what it is about that site that makes people see the supernatural.

A funny thing happened when I asked the ranger and the docent if they could direct me to some of those spookier sites. Their whole demeanor changed, what had been a helpful conversation turned frosty. They don’t deal in that they told me, not even on battlefield tours. They went further to imply that I should maybe be ashamed of myself, as a scientist for even asking such a question.

The ranger, the younger of the two, did make an off-hand comment about a conversation he had with a local some time back. The local, he said, had never heard talk of ghosts in Gettysburg before 1994.

Paranormal Tourism

1994. Such a specific date begs for further research.

According to the American Association for State and Local history, back in 1994, the Gettysburg Chamber of Commerce approached a former ranger who had written a book on ghosts of Gettysburg to ask if he’d be willing to conduct a series of ghost tours

Apparently, it was a huge success. A whole paranormal-themed tourism industry grew up after that. The TV features soon followed. The Destination Gettysburg website has six different tours focused on the paranormal. It should come as no surprise that there is a Gettysburg Paranormal Association.

The monuments all over the park surely add a dash of spookiness to the battlefield, especially at dusk. This statue of General William Wells has a twin that stands in his hometown in Vermont. Pretty sure that one doesn’t look near as creepy as this one in the middle of the woods!

Ghosts of Prehistory

Finally, this is one of the niftiest things I found on my tour of the battlefield. The best thing about it was that it didn’t have anything to do with war and human destruction.

Not far from the statue of General Wells there is a small bridge that traverses Plum Run. The bridge is lined with large stones quarried in the late 1800s. Two particular stones, one on each side of the road, contain the fossil tracks of dinosaurs that roamed ancient Gettysburg.

These tracks were made by a type of dinosaur referred to as ichnogenus, meaning they are only known by secondary evidence like tracks. Paleontologists can only estimate what they looked like, but the fossils are from the Triassic period. The species are Anchisauripus, a quick little carnivore, and Atreipus, a small herbivore. This photo is the Anchisauripus I think.

Which begs the question, why are there never ghost stories about Dinosaurs?

The take home

158 years ago, the US fought a battle among ourselves in a small town in Pennsylvania . The effect of that battle was so strong that the place became a monument while the war still raged on. Today we visit that monument to venerate the dead, and maybe try to connect with them. We try to understand their motivations and see the world the way they saw it, however wrong or right they were.

Some people try to see their world through historical reenactments, and some try to reach their spirits. Whether you believe in ghosts or not, you can’t walk the trails of Gettysburg and not feel sacrifice and loss. That is a powerful feeling, and probably the most compelling reason to protect and restore the land.