Post by blackshuck on May 5, 2012 13:52:36 GMT -6
Since I'm new here, I'll try to be brief until I get an idea as to how much detail is desired or expected in an average post. Your patience will be appreciated. Over the years, I have been active as a "reenactor" with the 26th North Carolina, an actual division that won fame and lost up to 85% casuality rate, more than any other division in the American Civiil War, 1861-1865. We try to be as authentic is dress, weapons, everything down to coffee pots and shoe laces. We do carry firearms, unloaded, but the rifles have powder with them, when shot, are aimed upward. At Gettysburg, there is a long history of "strange events" noted by local settlers and native American tribes in the area. If one believes in ghosts and has an interest, Gettysburg will provide one with perhaps more than they might wish. Over my 30 yrs. of going there for reenactments, I have met many others, like myself, from across the South and the United States, who have shared stories of encountering "other soldiers" from both sides, that varried in apperancefrom appearing to be 'normal" to others, as encased in a mist, showing life ending wounds, just wandering from place to place, vanishing, then reappearing where they started from, as if on some cycle of doing the last act before killed. I had a face-to-face meeting with a "soldier", for lack of a better word, who was passing out ammunication in preperation for Pickett's charge, on July 3, 1863. The ammo was quite real, a severe breaking of park rules, and his languaage seemed to have an Irish twang to it. He spoke to 3 of us just resting ater lunch, seemed very aggitated as he passed the ammo out he was carrying, tip his hat to us, slid down a rock we were on and for all intense and purposes simply vanish, as there was no diresction he might have gone that all of us would not have been unable to see him. We spoke with some others reenactors who had the same visit repeated with them, by apparently the same "ghost", who just seemed to quicckly ran off to pass out more ammo. We, in total ,spoke with about 100+ men, who all had the same story. Who he was, where he came from or where he went to, none speculated. I have had firearm experts and historians inspect the 5 rounds I was given and have been proven authentic for such used in or around 1863. I still go to several battlefields to do reenacting and have always left having seen or heard something(s) that were not quite right or someone that seemed out of place in this time, aside from your average, thin, whispy, phantoms, most battlefiellds abound with.