ADC - After Death Communications

NH Civil War Gal

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This was part of a much longer article on CNN today. I thought it was pertinent to the Civil War because last night I was reading about Gettysburg and the vast number of batteries that were "completely silenced" and whole lines of men laying in rows, etc. I don't remember EVER coming across veteran memoirs EVER talking about being visited by their buddies after an engagement. Have any of you come across anything in Civil War readings I may have missed? It would certainly make sense that they were visited if it happened in other wars, why not the Civil War?

"Haunting ADCs also are common during wartime. War memoirs are filled with stories of combat veterans reporting creepy, after-death visitations from fallen comrades or even enemy soldiers they've killed. In the classic memoir, "What It Is like to Go to War," Karl Marlantes, a Vietnam veteran, wrote about how the ghost of a North Vietnamese soldier he killed stalked him years after he returned home.

In one striking passage, Marlantes relates how he exorcised his enemy's ghost. He arranged a private mass with a priest at 2 in the morning at an old church where he says he saw the spirits of the enemies he killed and the comrades who died under his command file into the pews. Even his late grandparents appeared, smiling as if they approved.

Counselors working with veterans often hear such stories, Janssen says.

"I've been doing this a long time and I consider it a near universal [phenomenon] that after a particularly heavy engagement, a lot of people in your unit are lost, it is inevitable that some of those troops are going to receive visits from their buddies," he says."
 
It was an age of Spiritualism in which interaction and communication with the dead was believed possible. Those who apparently had inclinations this way included Harriet Beecher Stowe, Julia Grant, General McClellan and President Lincoln.

My own ACW research uncovered an instance of this: Pvt. Hall survived the war but didn't return to Maine. His wife applied for a widow's pension years after the war's end: clearly she knew when he died--and that she was the legitimate widow. Going through records of his life, I found that Hall's maternal half-brother, a leading spiritualist in Boston, had grown up in an adjacent town--where the rest of the family remained. Long story cut short, the brother insisted that the deceased Pvt. Hall had contacted him, describing details of his death. Then, going into more credible records in Michigan, I did, indeed, find the incident.
 
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