Civil War Ghosts

[Beltplate53]

Ok, I'll bite. Though not Civil War, as a Docent at a mansion built between 1817-1834 and belonging to 5 generations of the same family, I had an experience. I was standing in the kitchen area on a wonderful summer afternoon looking at two Victorian era wood stoves as to the best route to take on restoration. A very paralyzing feeling engulfed me for about 6 seconds followed by this intense chill from one side to the other side of my body. I had to leave the room, take a breath and return.

 

[Anna Elizabeth Henry]

@ Anna Elizabeth: My great grandmother, Glennie Pine, lived in the last one-family home on Ocean Avenue. I remember her. She still wore floor-length Victorian style dress, black. This was in the late 1950s when I was just a little spark. She was a reserved ultra-conservative type. She didn't talk much. I think the black garb she always wore had to do with mourning. Her husband passed away at a young age. She never re-married. She was in her nineties when I saw her. Small woman, thin. The house she lived in was right out of the 1800s... dark, full of knick-knacks, heavy draperies around the tall windows, ornate wallpaper. I think she was stuck in the past. She was a Victorian era antique. I looked up the Ocean Avenue address on Google Streetview. There's a big apartment building there now. I will check out Greenwood Cemetery about my cousin, CC Van Aken. Maybe they have records of gravesites from the 1800s. Thanks for that info.

Glennie Pine moved down to Brooklyn from somewhere around New Paltz when she was younger, after her husband passed away. She ran a small hotel up there on the Hudson. It still exists. I would imagine she sold the business and bought the Brooklyn house and moved down there. She worked for a company in NYC for many years.

Your experience reminds me of one my father had in MD as a boy when he met a CW veteran's widow in the early 50s. The house had a similar feel to it and was filled with CW flags, swords, etc. Seems like a lot of them got lost in time. It's not surprising its a large apartment building today. It's such a common issue and a shame in many ways.

Greenwood Cemetery is very large and extensive and has excellent records and the staff are helpful with inquiries. I had a friend in the city doing research there, so you shouldn't have an issue tracking the ancestor down.

 

[shokan]

@ colt Ho, ho. Great story, man. Bet that stuck with him for the rest of his life.

@ Anna Elizabeth I will definitely be looking into this

@ beltplate Whenever something "paranormal" is about to happen, I get a tingling chill on the left side of my scalp.

 

[shokan]

@ Anna Elizabeth I visited New Paltz, Poughkeepsie and Kingston about 15 years ago. Wow. How things change, 40 years ago, those towns were sleepy little villages. Now, they're big, bustling, ghetto-like almost like junky suburbs of NYC..

 

[shokan]

We was on the march to someplace called Hunter's Point. Not sure of that name. Something like that. A darn bumble bee started buzzing around me. I waved my arm around to ward it off, but the thing stung me just below the elbow. My arm swelled up bad. My fingers looked like little sausages.

Not long after that a sniper shot my friend Kevin. The sound of the minie hitting him right in the chest was just like if you'd take a stick and whack a feather mattress. Just like that. He was dead in an instant. I was too shocked to respond. Three other men rushed forward to the tree where the sniper was and shot him dead. His gun fell to the ground but his body stayed up in the tree. His body is probably still up there. I remember that this man wore ordinary clothes, not the clothes of a soldier. His hat was tilted forward after death, his eyes half open, almost a serene smile on his lips. We camped there that day. Flies started crowding the dead man's eyes, nose, mouth and the wounds. That haunts me to this day. There was a bad smell around the tree by the time we got on our way the next morning, about 8 o'clock.

I looked at the gun later. It was one of those really old ones. Fired balls, not minies. A man took a rock and smashed the end of that old gun's muzzle and it was tossed into the brush at the side of the road.

 

[Waterloo50]

When I was a boy, my mother used to take me to visit many old castles, I can still remember that some of the rooms in the castles that we visited had different atmospheres about them. Some rooms would feel warm and welcoming and others would have a more sinister feel about them. I remember one castle that we visited had a room where a murder had taken place, the strange thing was, that even as a child I was able to sense that something horrible had happened in that very room. My belief is that buildings and battlefields absorb energy and emotions, I'm not sure that ghost exist but the energy from past traumatic events do. I suspect that many people who are open to these emotions are able to feel and sense the terrible events that happen on battlefields, this could perhaps explain why people sometimes experience anxiety, panic attacks and a sense of foreboding when they walk across places like Antietam.

 

[southern blue]

I have experienced the feeling that 'something bad happened here' several times in various only to find out later that something bad had indeed happened there...and once it was feelings of immense joy.

If you visit the Fishers Hill Battlefield outside of Strasburg VA you will turn off the road by a very creepy abandoned house. It was there at the time of the battle and part of the battle was actually fought in front of it and up around the original bridge across Tumbling Run. You all should know that I grew up here in the Shenandoah Valley and have always been aware that there were battles and skirmishes fought all over the place. The church I attended as a child was used as a hospital. Heck...for all I know someone could have been shot and killed in my own front yard. In other words being around battlefields is normal. Knowing a lot of people died here is normal. It was here at the road turning off at Fisher's Hill where I got my first case of that creepy strange feeling that you cannot shake. I thought it was probably the old house...it does have that haunted look about it. In all my years of wandering around I had never had that feeling before.

I found out later that the road originally turned at a ninety degree angle up the side of the hill. During WWI a transport truck was coming down that hill, missed the turn and about 14 people died. Then later there was an altercation with the law and two people were shot in that location. I did not know that at the time. If I were to hazard a guess it was not the battlefield or the creepy looking house that shook me up. It was those two incidents.

Another incident was when my husband and I visited a church in Clarke County VA. The church was surrounded by old stately homes that had been there since the Civil War and I got the same feeling. Something really bad happened here. I found out later that a small child who lived in one of the stately homes had drowned around the time of the war. Once again I did not know that at the time.

But those feelings are not limited to dread and fear. Thinking of Fort Valley VA would fill me with an immense joy and happiness....just looking over at the Massanutten Mountain would make me feel happy. I had no idea why. I had visited there of course but I didn't have any particular happy memories associated with the place. One day I was in the archives at Handley Library in Winchester and I happened upon a book about the history of Fort Valley. There was a story of a horrible massacre by the Natives where all the members of a family were killed except one daughter who managed to escape with her infant brother. Another son went missing. About a year later a strange man was seen walking up the creek. He was bearded and dirty but he turned out to be the girl's missing older brother. He had been captured by Indians but had managed to escape. That feeling of 'joy' that I had felt before came back as I read those words. I almost dropped the book right there in the library.

I have no explanation for this. I do not know what was 'really' happening. All I know is ...it happened.

At Cedar Creek Battlefield you can take the road that the Confederate Troops used when they left in the early morning for their surprise attack on the Union forces. It winds around Strasburg and comes out on Route 11. We have driven that road and I felt that exact same'feeling' once again in a particular place. If this is associated with the battle it would have been before the battle proper....just when the CSA troops were moving through there. There would have been no fighting yet....but I will bet anything that something 'bad' happened there as well. When and What I do not know of as yet.

 

[shokan]

@ Southern Thanks for your post. Intriguing.

@ Waterloo When I was in Wales, I saw a couple of castles on the Wye, across the river. I felt great old dusty antiquity and a feeling of sadness. An overwhelming feeling of sadness. I felt people made mistakes there that they regretted. Feeling this made my mind and body feel heavy, weighted down. I also had the feeling that I was an intruder. Like I had no business being there, and was not welcome. This was a contrast to the people of modern-day Wales, whom I found to be very friendly. I've often wondered why I have a fascination with stuff that went on so long ago. I have a little bit of British blood in me (via the Normans, "de Pine") and a lot of Dutch and German. I've said before somewhere on this forum that it's possible an accumulation of ancestor's thoughts leave an imprint on successive generations. Could be!

 

[Tejon]

Has anyone experienced clear evidence of spirits of ACW participants? I haven't, not of Civil War guys, but in other incidents I definitely have. Freaky.

I stress the "clear evidence" aspect, not just imagination or speculation.

 

[Tejon]

Drum Barracks civil war museum is haunted,one rainy day as the museum director and myself went from room to room opening locked doors turning on lights we stopped in a bedroom with the women's clothing display the director said watch this the ghost in this room likes the bonnet on the wall and each day I lay it on the bed when we are done checking the building we will come back and it will be back on the wall and it was,I went on working stuffing envelopes in a room by myself in a rain storm and went home early,before it was a museum it had a care taker and he lived in the building and had a book full of encounters,Marge the director worked there almost everyday and just accepted the fact the museum was special and more or less made friends with its occupants,one day a medium was on the tour and afterwards told Marge the place was haunted and came back for a private reading,I know that one ghost asked Marge through the medium to move his chair back near the fireplace as his legs were cold,turns out there was a officer who was rehabbing frost bite feet who stayed in that room,there are a lot more stories I think a lot of them in the drum barracks book.

 

[Waterloo50]

@ Southern Thanks for your post. Intriguing.

@ Waterloo When I was in Wales, I saw a couple of castles on the Wye, across the river. I felt great old dusty antiquity and a feeling of sadness. An overwhelming feeling of sadness. I felt people made mistakes there that they regretted. Feeling this made my mind and body feel heavy, weighted down. I also had the feeling that I was an intruder. Like I had no business being there, and was not welcome. This was a contrast to the people of modern-day Wales, whom I found to be very friendly. I've often wondered why I have a fascination with stuff that went on so long ago. I have a little bit of British blood in me (via the Normans, "de Pine") and a lot of Dutch and German. I've said before somewhere on this forum that it's possible an accumulation of ancestor's thoughts leave an imprint on successive generations. Could be!

Shokan,

That was pretty much what I experienced, I don't know what it is about them, but they seem to hold an atmosphere. I visited one old 9th Century castle in the Scottish Highlands (Dunvegan Castle) there is a room with a glass cabinet which contains a lock of Bonnie Prince Charlie's hair. The whole place has a vibe about it, some of its rooms are warm and inviting and others can feel heavy and uninviting. I also understand that feeling of a sense of intruding. If you look at the photo I have included of Dunvegan Castle you will see that it looks nice enough but it is pretty isolated which adds to the atmosphere.

 

[Banjo Pete]

When I spent a semester in the south of France in 1991 I went on a tour of the fortified castle of Tarascon.

It had been used as a prison during one of the numerous wars between the English and French, and there was a great deal of period English graffiti carving throughout the place. While climbing up one of the steep spiral staircases I saw, carved into the stone window sill, in old style seraphic block letters, my exact name. Peter Leonard.

Weird! Took a pencil rubbing of it, wish I could find it. Didn't lose any sleep over it or anything but saw surprised to say the least!.

 

[poorjack]

While I have never experienced anything personally that I was certain was paranormal, there was one incident at a friend's house. His house was built just prior to the war and we would meet there and drill from time to time. One late afternoon we were drilling and his family was gone. I happened to look up at the house and saw a curtain pull back in a window for a moment and was dropped like somebody was looking out. He told me he's certain the house is haunted.

Same guy is supposed to be one of those who is "sensitive" to the paranormal. No how, no way we could force him into the Bushong ice house at New Market. He said he saw the ghost of the morally wounded VMI cadet who died in there.

Probably the most interesting explanation I've heard was on one of Art Bell's shows. He had a guest on who was supposed to be a physicist that dealt with quantum theory and how it related to reality. The guest's take was that we really aren't seeing "ghosts" but probably an echo of the "ghost's" reality "bleeding" through to our time line and they would just as likely be experiencing similar things. His theory was that time is not linear as we are used to thinking but occurs simultaneously and what we are calling paranormal events are "bleed throughs" from other parts of that simultaneous time. Quite interesting and makes sense in a way because at the quantum level, reality disolves away as locality is lost. Pretty much at that level things are everywhere and nowhere all at once. Makes the Cheshire Cat look like a rookie.

 

[FZ11]

I have studied and researched paranormal phenomena's and reports/claims of same for several decades... In my own as well as with a large formal organized research group for years... Particular focus on a host of different specific types of known hauntings and their researched characteristics. Many folks tend to gravitate towards battlefield areas... Many proclaiming them to be some of the "most haunted" places etc. Much of it of course is marketing hoopla to attract in the orb chasers and visitor dollars....

Here is a recent video that was reportedly shot around Gettysburg... Real?.. or Hoax?..... Will let folks see and chew on this before I give my take on it....

http://artbell.com/ghost-in-gettysburg/

Hoax. Blair Witch Project takeoff.

 

[MajGenl.Meade]

Yer all loonies!

 

[Rebelsoul]

L

Has anyone experienced clear evidence of spirits of ACW participants? I haven't, not of Civil War guys, but in other incidents I definitely have. Freaky.

I stress the "clear evidence" aspect, not just imagination or speculation.

 

[Rebelsoul]

I used to live about a half mile below the top of South mountain at Fox's gap. I would go out into my back yard often to look at the stars at night with my telescope and sometimes I'd hear gunshots on top of the mountain. Don't know if it was someone coon hunting or what but it was still quit eerie and spooky ! I'd also sit in my living room on summer nights with the windows open reading one of my Civil war books and hear a what sounded like horses hooves clip clopping down the the road. Loud enough that I'd actually get up an go look outside and of course there was never anything there. The road in front of my house was Reno monument Rd by the way.