Dinner in a Field Hospital, and All The Gettysburg Ghosts

 

Check out the balls found embedded in this tree from the Gettysburg battlefield, now on display in the Visitor Center at the Gettysburg National Military Park! Usually the tree grew over the places where a ball or bullet was embedded, and it's only discovered if it later has to be cut down and a saw hits it, so these are rare for how obvious they are.

We were told that it's also a mark of distinction (ahem) to own a Gettysburg house that has bullet marks, so the Farnsworth House, which Mr. Craft Knife and I saw while we killed time hoofing it around downtown before our evening ghost tour, must be a big winner!

All the white pockmarks are from bullets.

After sightseeing all the important spots from the first day of the battle, we ate dinner at Dobbin House, the oldest standing structure in Gettysburg, probable station on the Underground Railroad, and field hospital during the Battle of Gettysburg. Most of the rooms are fancy and require reservations, but you can dine as a walk-in in the basement springhouse, and it feels just as authentic with the decorations, wait staff in period clothing, candles on the table, and just general vibe of old-timey-ness:

I soaked up my Rum Bellies Vengeance, a cocktail so delicious that I just spent the last 45 minutes looking for a copycat recipe (maybe this one?), with an open-faced Reuben and some potato salad. 

I'm not really a ghost tour person, but in Gettysburg, at least during early May, which I was told is still considered the low season, they really roll up the sidewalks downtown after business hours, and I wanted to do *something* in the evening other than sit in my hotel room and watch hockey. I'd even have happily sat in a historic old bar and watched hockey, but those all closed early, too!

So a ghost tour it was!

I'd actually come very close to booking a ghost "hunt" instead, because those at least took place inside a genuine historic home of interest (and they let you hold an EMF detector!) and the weather forecast was looking miserable, but Mr. Craft Knife, who very rarely balks at any of my suggested plans, balked at this one. He said it would be too cornball, but maybe what he meant to say is that he would be too scared.

You know who else was scared?

Our ghost tour guide!

He 100% tried to dodge out of doing our tour, but to be fair to him, it actually had worked up to be quite a bit of a storm right before the tour was supposed to start. I'm normally not one to risk being struck by lightning, but the tour had said "rain or shine," I had on my six-buck poncho that I absolutely intended to return to Wal-mart afterwards (and I did!), and I wasn't dipping out of my tour without my money back, which this dude clearly had no authority to make happen. The other attendees obviously felt the same, considering that we all stood around him wearing our rain ponchos and remaining steadfastly neutral and non-responsive while he exclaimed at every lightning flash and talked about how he'd never seen weather like this before and wondered out loud if we should contact the company and ask for refunds.

Then he called his boss right in front of us to tell her it was storming very badly and he thought he should cancel, and I guess getting shot down while all his customers stood 1.5 feet away listening to the whole thing finally broke him, because after that he gave up and gave us our ghost tour.

And you'll never guess, but when he finally got going, it turns out that he could not stop talking about Gettysburg history and our 1-hour tour turned into at least 1.5 hours, lol.

Also, it was barely sprinkling by the time we got outside, so nobody was actually in (much) danger of being struck by lightning. And afterwards, we tipped him a LOT, so ultimately it was fine and maybe even a good lesson about being brave even when you're scared.

And his stories were VERY good! I wouldn't say that he told ghost stories, per se. He actually told stories from the battle with a lot of historical depth, and then at the end of each one he would sort of tack on some clearly memorized script about ghosts. Y'all already know from my homeschooling days that I am super into place-based learning as a way to enrich one's understanding through the sensory aspects of being present at a target location, and to build context through the physicality of geography, climate, etc., so this foot tour that involved walking down actual historic streets, standing outside each house while we learned about it, turning our heads to follow the tour guide's gestures pointing out the directions of soldiers here and sharpshooters there and field hospitals all around, was interesting and meaningful all on its own, since of course ghosts aren't real.

This is the Jennie Wade House--

--but it was actually her sister, Georgia, who lived there. Georgia had given birth right before the battle, so instead of evacuating she was sheltering in place on the first floor with her mother (the house was a duplex then, so I don't think they had access to the basement). In a brief break in the battle during the first day, Jennie ran over from the family home to shelter with them. She brought a couple more kids with her, so there they were, three women, one immediately post-partum, and three children, one of them a newborn, right in the middle of the fighting.

In the map below, you can see the Jennie Wade House Museum, where they were sheltering. Northwest is McPherson Farm, more north is Oak Ridge, across the street to the south is the hill with Evergreen Cemetery, and immediately to the southeast is Culp's Hill.

In the surrounding houses other citizens who hadn't evacuated cowered in the basements, while in other houses Confederate sharpshooters took over attics and field hospitals were hastily erected on first floors. Field medics performed surgeries and amputations on family dinner tables, and broke the glass out of the windows so they could more easily toss amputated limbs out into the yards. In a few yards, the occasional injured Union soldier lay in hiding, camouflaging themselves the best they could behind a refuse pile or under some of the rubble. Some of these soldiers were aided by Jennie, who frequently left shelter to bring them water from the well in Georgia's yard and bread that she baked in Georgia's kitchen. 

It was while she was standing in the kitchen, kneading dough for yet more loaves of bread, that Jennie was shot and killed. The official story is that it was a stray bullet of unknown provenance, but our tour guide made the excellent point that there were a few houses with Confederate snipers in their attics in sight of Georgia's house, including in the Farnsworth House, and the snipers would have seen Jennie going in and out and known that she was aiding Union soldiers. Alternatively, because the house was in such a clearly dangerous spot, a sniper could have easily assumed that anyone they saw puttering around in the yard or on the other side of a kitchen window obviously wouldn't be a civilian, because that would be CRAZY, and so might have thought that they were sniping an enemy soldier. ALTERNATIVELY alternatively, the house was literally in the middle of No Man's Land, so friendly fire could also have been a possibility.

Regardless, she was a badass and a war hero, and a flag flies over her grave, which is in Evergreen Cemetery just steps from where she died.

Yet another field hospital was located in this building:

Apparently, there really are a ton of people who claim to have experienced paranormal events in this building, and it is true that although it's a historical building in a high-value location, many restaurants have come and gone, with none seeming to be able to stick it out long-term. The most recent, The Hoof, Fin, and Fowl, actually just permanently closed earlier this year.

The national cemetery is on the other side of this house, whose main claim to fame is that fence, part of the same fence that surrounds the national cemetery and that originally came from Lafayette Square Park in Washington, D.C.:

The fence was procured by Civil War veteran and child molester Daniel Sickles, who did a stupid job during the Battle of Gettysburg (he got shot in the leg, had to have it amputated, and it's now in a museum!) but a great job with emancipation, who set up the Gettysburg National Military Park just beautifully but also embezzled a bunch of money, and who murdered Francis Scott Key's kid.

Okay, so the tour guide did tell one story that got to me, so much so that I didn't even take a photo of the house in question, the Gettysburg Orphanage. The orphanage was established after the battle, as a home for the orphaned children of Union soldiers, and during the time of its first headmistress, it was apparently excellent. But the second headmistress was a sadist who did terrible things to the children, so much so that the citizens of the town, who didn't even realize the true extent of her abuses, eventually figured out enough to raise an outcry that led to an investigation that led to her ouster.

Our tour guide said that people who visited the orphanage during ghost tours sometimes reported encountering the ghosts of the abused children, being touched by little hands or hearing cries or the whispers of little voices asking for help. So first of all, I think that it's gross to tell these awful, looky-looish stories about children, but I get that people have jobs and they've got to do them, and lord knows that my own job palpably makes the world a worse place, sigh, so setting that aside, how completely terrible it is to think that or pretend that abused children would not be at peace after death. Why on earth would you think or pretend that the soul(?) of a child is still actively suffering, and that you're going to go pay money to visit it, and that if it touches you and asks you to help it, you're just going to... what? Shiver and be scared and then later talk about it like it's an awesome story? Would you not want to pay all the money in the world to find every exorcist in the world to do whatever it is that exorcists do to send souls on to the afterlife?

I swear, I have never in my life been so grateful to be an atheist, because what the fuck is going on with these ghost-believers?!?

Anyway, the tour guide's story of how a townsperson's pigs got loose during the battle and ate a bunch of dead/dying soldiers was better.

And speaking of dead/dying soldiers... tomorrow, it's back to the battlefield!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!