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Author Topic: Have You Ever Seen One?  (Read 178 times)

December 25, 2007, 09:21:33 PM

  • freddy

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Have You Ever Seen One?
 !amazed Civil War ghost hunting

Civil War battlefields are popular with ghost hunters. For many possible reasons -all the death and destruction, bodies improperly or hastily buried, the dead separated far away from loved ones, lives cut short with promises unkept, etc. - the dead from the battles do not rest in peace. From The Washington Post:

    "As dusk fell, the group of amateur historians were in position, spread out across the grassy field with digital voice recorders at the ready and infrared cameras rolling. If someone -- or something -- out there so much as sneezed, they were fully prepared to catch it in action. Experts have scrutinized these Spotsylvania County battlefields for years, looking for clues to the past. Now this eclectic group of history buffs had come from Maryland to conduct their own homemade brand of Civil War scholarship: battlefield ghost hunting. Why limit yourself to letters and artifacts, they reasoned, when you can go straight to the source: firsthand, albeit dead, witnesses. The group of mostly middle-aged men had picked their spot carefully. Bloody Angle, part of one of three battlefields they visited on a recent night, was the site of the longest, most savage hand-to-hand combat of the Civil War. For 20 hours on May 12, 1864, soldiers shot, bayoneted and clubbed one another. "Rain poured down and the dead piled up in the mud," the welcome sign on the grounds says. If spirits were likely to appear anywhere, the ghost hunters said, this was the spot. More was at stake that night than a simple chase of the fantastical, members of the self-styled American Battlefield Ghost Hunters Society said. On a weekend break from their jobs -- mortgage broker, home remodeler, engineer, construction worker -- they had come looking for keys to historical mysteries -- such as the battle decisions of field leaders and the mentality of soldiers -- as well as answers about the very nature of life and death."

JOHN BROWN'S GHOST
Harper's Ferry, West Virginia


John Brown
John Brown in his earlier days




To the slaves of the south, John Brown was an unrealized savior... to those men who opposed him, this face was the last vision they ever saw.



Here, before God, in the presence of these witnesses, I consecrate
my life to the destruction of slavery......
John Brown, 1837

    Along the streets of Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, a strange, gaunt, white-haired man walks along with a small black dog at his side. The two odd companions stroll past the storefronts and the buildings and the tourists who come here notice him and remark on his eerie resemblance to the man that made this town famous, John Brown. In fact, the resemblance is so uncanny that many will ask this man if they can take his photograph.
    Little do they know that when they get their film developed, no man will appear in their photograph.
    The man walks down the street to the door of the fire engine house, where he abruptly vanishes.
    Such are the encounters with the ghost of John Brown.

    For most of the citizens of America, the Civil War began in 1861 with the firing upon of Fort Sumter, but for many, the war for freedom began many years before. For the abolitionists of the north and the slaves who were held in chains in the south, the Civil War was about the question of slavery. To those people, the war actually began in 1859....although for the instigator of this savage event, a man named John Brown, the war had begun much earlier than that.
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