"I grow so weary of the sound of screams": The Real Ghosts of Gettysburg

The infamous "tombstone" / CC Juls K

A special holiday post a few hours early today.

Down on Baltimore Street, in the front yard of the sprawling complex that calls itself the "Farnsworth House," a tombstone used to sit. It was greyish-white, tall and arched at the top. In front of the marker, the dirt sat freshly turned, a single rose marking the grave. On the stone's face was the motif of a cherub. And under the wings were inscribed, "In Memory of Benajah Edwards who Departed this Life July 2 1863."

Below, as a sort of epitaph, read the words, "Ghost Story Tickets in Bookstore."

The plywood of the mock-grave eventually weathered and was removed. The Bookstore closed to make way for a seance parlour, another cashgrab expansion to enlarge what (mocking Lincoln's immortal words) the proprietors call "Gettysburg's Haunted Address."

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My favorite holiday is Halloween. When I was growing up, it meant so many things. First, it meant the chance to wear odd and wonderful costumes to school. Mummies, vampires, ghosts, Frankenstein's monster. Second, it meant the joyous time of sparkling snow was arriving. No matter what the weeks before had been like, Halloween was a guaranteed snowfall in Upstate New York. It was like clockwork.

As I grew older, the fantasy of Halloween took strong hold of who I am. I found Tim Burton. I found the Nightmare Before Christmas and Disney's Haunted Mansion. I found ways to stretch that morbid but jocular holiday out longer and longer. One year in High School, in the week leading up to Christmas break I dressed up each day as the litany of characters from Dickens' Christmas Carol, sporting a top hat for a miserly scrooge, a lighted candle atop my head for the Ghost of Christmas Past and rattling (plastic) chains through the halls as Jacob Marley.

I love the morbid and the dark. I love the twisted fantasy world of Halloween.

But that one word is crucial: fantasy

Halloween is the holiday of the wry smile, more so than any other. We walk into a haunted house ready to meet "ghosts" and "zombies" who are really just local kids looking for some pocket money in a part time job. The Hitchhiking Ghosts that Disney conjures are metal armatures, pneumatic cams and rubber masks. They make us smile and laugh and scream, but we know what's underneath it all. Halloween is a fiction we all pretend is real for a moment for a good time.

I haven't felt too "Halloween" in the past half-decade or so. That warm feeling and my love of the holiday has receded. Most of that I think I can attribute to living to Gettysburg. This community now so often uses the names, faces and experiences of the dead as a cruel joke that the novelty of the Halloween spirit now chafes.

No place in America has the morbid become the jocund so universally than in Gettysburg. I've spoken a bit about why this might be and what we can learn from it in the past. But the reason and the lesson don't change the raw feeling that the product produces in my soul.

That fake tombstone in front of the Farnsworth House really set off a bomb in my consciousness. And now, even though the piece of garbage has been removed from the front lawn, the scar still remains on my heart every single time I walk past the Farnsworth House. Benajah Edwards didn't exist. But plenty of other men did. My Great-great Grand Uncle died at Gettysburg on July 2nd and has no grave. Every time I think of that tombstone, I think of him and the others whose names and resting places have been lost to all eternity.

You can conjure them far more easily than the charlatans down on Steinweir Avenue ever dreamt. Just list the contents of their pockets. Before being lovingly placed in the ground of the Soldiers' National Cemetery, the pockets of the dead were emptied. Some of the trinkets held clues to the identities of the men. Some yielded nothing more than silence. The contents were catalogued and kept, according to the 1867 report on the cemetery, "in the possession of the Cemetery Association at Gettysburg, Penn'a." Where those carefully guarded momentos are now, I have never been able to track down. Their whereabouts have disappeared just like the names of many of their original owners. Still, the tantalizing list remains.

One unknown soldier, whose name disappeared when a bullet or piece of shell drove itself coldly into his body, was wearing two rings and carried a small book cut of wood. Another carried a spoon and a glass inkstand, no more letters arriving at home penned with it's dark contents. A soldier was lain unknown in the cold ground at Gettysburg, the only clue to his identity a testament, written in German and inscribed to him from Catherine Detaupafer. Another held in his pocket a letter from Carrisa Smith. Would Catherine or Carrisa ever learn the fate of the two men?

A young man lay dead on these fields nearly 150 years ago. In his pocket sat an ambrotype of a young woman and a letter. He was real. He was not a fantasy. When that young woman cried, the tears were real. When he bled, the blood was real.

It wasn't plywood. It wasn't a joke.

Veritas: The Power of the Real

There's something about touching the actual thing, something about contacting the real that makes a distant world come immediately to life. There's an excitement about that moment when you see and touch something a piece of another world. A Thomas the Tank Engine character reminded me of this fact recently. Watch the young boy's face as he picks Stanley back up in a cornfield after his favorite toy travels to space and back:

Joy. The joy of meeting an old friend who has had a new experience.

There's power in that moment. There's awe. That feeling is an amazing one, when you realize what you hold in your hand. The young boy in the video feels the thrill of space in the very palm of his hand.

"...a mass of incandescent gas,
a gigantic nuclear furnace..."

It is the same sort of awe I felt when I opened an unassuming cardboard box earlier this year. Inside were two small plastic canisters with the intimidating label, "Caution - Radioactive Material." And safely tucked inside each, in a nest of cotton, was the real.

When the Trinity Test was preformed in July of 1945, the massive atomic fireball, the first ever massive atomic fireball sucked sand from the desert floor into the smouldering nuclear cauldron hovering momentarily over the New Mexico landscape. The sand melted and fell, a rain of molten green silicate. "Trinitite," was born, the curious byproduct of brilliant minds working toward fantastic and catastrophic ends. And inside each of the containers that arrived on my doorstep this past summer sits a sliver of Trinitite, a small piece of that greenish nuclear glass.

It's real. It's an actual piece of the past. It's amazing to hold that in your hand (don't worry, it's relatively low-yield in terms of radiation and mostly safe to handle as long as I don't butter my toast with it or something).

When I hold it in my hand, It's like I can feel the heat. It's like I can see the light of the growing fireball. I feel the doubt of Robert Oppenheimer as he questions the very morality of science. I can hear the echo of his words in my head: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

A photo of that sliver of nuclear glass doesn't do it justice. Pixels glowing on a screen aren't enough. Looking at the real thing with your own eyes, feeling it in your hand, turning it over between your fingers is immensely powerful.

Peale draws back the curtain on
his temple to the real. Part history,
part science but all proof of the past.

Technology is a wonderful thing, but it can never replace the sheer thrill and true meaning-making moment of seeing the real things. There can never be such a thing as a "virtual visitor center." We need places where we can see, touch and witness "the real." Charles Willson Peale realized that fact in Philadelphia in the 1780s, and Americans have been fascinated by the temples of "the real" ever since. The buildings we invest millions in at each of our sacred secular temples are shrines to the real evidence, they are the proof that the past actually happened.

Oftentimes, pixels on a smartphone can't do "the real" justice. Sometimes those things need to lie behind glass in visitor centers, on display to prove that the sadness of the past was a real, tangible thing. Sometimes we can hold those pieces of "the real" right in the palm of our own hands, mailed from a certified mineral supply company direct.

And sometimes we can pick them up in a nearby cornfield, a space traveler come back to earth and returned to his best friend.