Does Seeing a Ghost Change Things?

 

I went on my first ghost tour back when I was in college. The late, very great Richard Crowe was just getting started with his Chicago Ghost Tours and I convinced my sister, my brother-in-law, and my younger cousin, to take that bus tour and find out about spirits and hauntings in my city, some of which were familiar, and some of which I'd never heard. It was fantastic. And apparently, habit-forming.

Since that first tour, I managed to take two more with Mr. Crowe before he passed. (Interestingly enough, the man is buried in a cemetery that was included on his tours.) And Jim and I have taken a ghost tour every time we travel, if one is available. And every tour I've taken, from the first to the last, I've heard the history of the place, learned about the ghosts said to be present, and never seen any of them. Until Gettysburg. And that wasn't even on a tour. That was just, well, because Gettysburg.

Now, Jim and I are both history buffs. He is also very interested in Native American History and to that end has taken classes, attended Sun Dances, gone into sweat lodges (taking me along for some of those), and enjoyed Pow Wows. He is very taken with the history of the Lakota, and for that reason, I know a visit to the Little Big Horn Battlefield is probably somewhere in my future.

Do I go???

I am also interested in the history of the Lakota. I introduced Jim to it by having him read Crazy Horse: Strange Man of the Oglalas, by Mari Sandoz, a totally amazing book. And I always wanted to see Little Big Horn. The operative word in that sentence is "wanted."

Since meeting up with a dead soldier from Gettysburg, I'm not sure I'm up for what I've read and heard is present at the site of the Little Big Horn battle. All you really need to do is Google "Little Big Horn" and "haunted" to get, oh, a little over six million results. YIKES. I've read books about the spirits there. Compared to the energy at that Montana site, Gettysburg is a park. And I don't mean that in any disrespectful or derogatory way.

The soldiers who died at Gettysburg, although meeting violent ends, seem to be at peace with what happened to them. I'm sure some of them believed in their cause and gave their lives without hesitation. Others may have simply been resigned to the possibility. But although the town of Gettysburg feels unsettled to me, I can't help feeling like a lot of that is due to the enormous amount of life energy expended at that site in a short and violent period of time. Little Big Horn, on the other hand, seems steeped in terror and anger and pain, and the ghosts that have been documented there certainly reflect that. 

I don't know that any battle with a great loss of life can ever be considered "good," but there is an aspect of that for Gettysburg. It was one battle in a war fought to keep this country together, fought to free a group of people wrongly enslaved, and fought for whatever principles men held dear at that time, in that era. Little Big Horn was fought for that ugly concept "Manifest Destiny" on one side, and for sheer survival and preservation of a way of life on the other. The conflict was not just bloody, it was born of hatred, rationalization, racism, greed, and desperation. The explosion of life energy expended there is certainly tainted by all of this.

So back to the title question: did seeing my ghost at Gettysburg change things? For me, the answer is unequivocally yes. Henry, the name I bestowed on the Union gentleman I saw, was pretty much benign. The only thing about him that was really frightening, of course, is that he's dead. But the spirits at Little Big Horn can appear terrified, anguished, angry, and all other manner of uneasy that accompanies the kind of deaths they experienced. And I'm not really in a hurry to run into that.

At the moment, we don't have plans to head west and see the site. At the moment. If it comes up, I will certainly keep you posted. And as for doing a ghost tour at Little Big Horn? You know, that may be the first and only time I will ever say that I might just give it a pass. Call me a chicken, call me a measly coward; I just don't want to have to call a therapist...

The Portable Ghost: Part II

We went to Gettysburg on a Wednesday and drove home from Pennsylvania on Saturday. All day Thursday and Friday, the uneasy sensation in our hotel suite came and went. I spent my time thinking, he's here. No, he isn't. Yes, he is. No he's not. Back and forth as the feeling of being followed around came and went. When Saturday morning finally arrived, I let him know that I was leaving, that he was not to follow me any longer, and that he needed to go back to the battlefield.

But did he listen? HA! I have written ghostly characters in my books that are stubborn and persistent, and I was far from thrilled to find out that they can be like that in real life. I didn't see him again, but I could still feel him around, even back in our own house, a handful of states away from Gettysburg.

Now, I was in the middle of writing Touching Shadow, Stealing Light, book 5 in my series, and having an extra paranormal guest around was distracting, among other things. One day, in desperation, I asked my older daughter if she had seen a Civil War soldier hanging around the house. She said no, she hadn't seen one. That made me feel better, since she has Michael Penfield's ability to see the dead. And some time after that, the sensation of having him lurking about began to abate. I figured he finally left for familiar territory.

But out of curiosity, a month or two later, I asked my daughter point-blank about seeing my soldier. And then she confessed that while she had never seen him, she had certainly felt him around. "Yeah, one time he was in the hall while I was watching TV." My reaction was not what I would call entirely calm. She went on to describe him (rather like Cassie could describe a ghost for Michael that she had never seen - see Haunted, book one of The Bridgeton Park Cemetery Series) for me. "He was a Union soldier, right? And he was wearing a coat. His hair was a little on the long side, but I couldn't see his face because he was wearing a hat." After some discussion about what that hat looked like, I pulled out a picture of General George Custer wearing the slouch hat favored by so many during that war, and she said, "That's it!" She had described my soldier exactly as I had seen him. Then she said, "I knew he was around. He followed me to my friend's house one time." And I said, "What the WHAT?"

She told me her sense of him was that he was just curious about us. I told her my sense of him was that his name was Henry, I had no idea why, and I wondered if he was from Illinois himself. I found myself searching for pictures of ghosts at Gettysburg, and ran across the one that's featured on my Facebook page today. If you've seen the picture, you have a great idea of what my guy looked like, and finding that picture gave me goosebumps. Particularly since Jim and I had spent so much time in that museum. Is that where my ghost and I accidentally forged some kind of freaky connection?

Anyone who has read my blog posts long enough, or who actually knows me, is aware that I was the only one in my immediate family who had never seen a ghost. Ironic, considering I grew up in a haunted house, and spend my time writing ghost stories, but there it is. And I was good with that, really. And then last summer happened, and a trip to a national battlefield changed my life.

After that whole incident, I figured I was good. I had seen my first ghost. I had survived. And I never needed to see one again.

But I guess someone else thought differently - and that's another story...

The Portable Ghost

 

Gettysburg is a place that my husband, Jim, and I have wanted to tour since forever. We read Michael Shaara's Killer Angels back in the '90's, enjoyed the "Gettysburg" movie based on the book, and were enthralled by what my sister and her husband told us about their own visit to the battlefield.

Plus, it's haunted.

Last summer, we had our chance to go, and we took it, using the one free day we had for the visit. In most ways, it didn't disappoint. While the battlefield itself has its museum, its bookstore, its cyclorama, the entire town is so packed with history that living there would be mind-boggling to me. There's no street that wasn't somehow involved in that three-day conflict, and very few areas that didn't see some of the tragedy.

And it's haunted.

We stayed long enough to visit the museum, take in the cyclorama, and then enjoy the bus tour. (Did you know that the guides on the bus tour must be certified in their knowledge of the battle? Our guide was impressive, to put it mildly.) Then we had dinner and drove back to Hershey, where the rest of our family was enjoying the water- and amusement parks.

That night, I couldn't sleep. Sometimes that happens: I'll be tired enough, but as soon as I lie down and pull up the covers, my eyes open up again and the feeling of sleepiness departs for a few hours. So as I always do, I went out into the other room, put on a lamp, and read for about two hours. I decided at that point that I should go to bed and get what rest I could because the next day was going to be a busy one. I'll state here that I was feeling uneasy, had been feeling that way since arriving from the battlefield, but I was doing my best to ignore it. I turned off the light, went into the bathroom, and then came back out into the darkness of the bedroom.

Where I almost had a heart attack. As I passed the closet area on the way to bed, I caught a glimpse of a union soldier standing just to my left. He was in full uniform, possibly even had a long blue coat on over his blue trousers, and he definitely was wearing a hat. More than that I couldn't tell you, because I stopped looking! I pretended that he wasn't there, went to bed, and closed my eyes, eventually falling asleep.

The morning was bright and sunny, like an August morning should be, and I thought about seeing that soldier standing there, trying at the same time to make the memory a distant thing. Or part of my imagination. But that wasn't happening. There was now an uneasiness in our hotel room, much like the uneasiness I had sensed all over Gettysburg, and I knew my visitor had chosen to stay.

I did tell Jim about what I had seen. He took my word for it, but didn't say much else. At least he never laughs at me! Then I did what I've been told (and what the characters in my Bridgeton Park Cemetery series have been told) to do: I asked him to leave.

I asked him several times. After a while, a sense of calm came back to the room and I felt better. The Union soldier had undoubtedly gone back to Gettysburg and things were back to normal.

But I was wrong. 

Read the rest of the story right here, next week!