Gettysburg Battlefield Investigation

Location: Gettysburg, PA.

Date: Saturday November 12, 2005.

Moon Phase: Waxing gibbous.

Solar Weather: M class solar flares, geomagnetic field unsettled.

Investigators Present: Hillary M., Paul M., and guest investigators Clay and Joye C.

Equipment: Olympus C-3000 digital camera, Extech EMF meter, Olympus DS-1 Digital Voice Recorder, Canon PowerShot S2IS digital camera.

History: The Battle of Gettysburg took place here. It was fought from July 1 through July 3, 1863, marked a turning point in the American Civil War in the North's favor. Roughly 4,000 Southerners and more than 3,000 Northerners were killed in the battle. The total number of casualties-those killed, wounded, missing, or captured-was about 23,000 for the North and from 25,000 to 28,000 for the South. More detailed history can easily be found on the web.

Investigation: We began our investigation around 5:45 p.m. at the top of Triangular Field. Our friends (and ghost enthusiasts) Clay and Joye were down visiting from Maine, and they wanted us to show them the most active parts of the park. I told them many park rangers will not venture into Triangular Field after hours because of the number of sightings that have been had there, and our friends knew immediately that's where they wanted to start! Unfortunately, when we arrived, there was a small group of people at the bottom of the field making lots of noise, which meant recording was impossible. I told Clay that people had seen soldiers in the woods to the right side of the field, so he walked over to the stone wall and sat down on a very large rock. Paul, Joye and I hung back. A few minutes later, I got a picture of an orb hovering far over Clay's head. Paul immediately took a picture and also got an orb hovering over Clay's head, but not as high up. We then both took another picture, almost simultaneously, and both got a picture of an orb hovering over his head, but further to the left! That means we captured the same picture, from two different cameras, from two different vantage points!
  We stayed in the field for about 45 minutes. Paul and I took several pictures while Clay and Joye walked to the bottom of the field and back. The hour was getting late (the park now closes at 7:00 p.m.), so I suggested that we run over to Spangler's Spring to spend some time at the monument in the woods.
  We arrived at the monument at 6:45 and began recording. Unfortunately, we obtained no positive results at this spot. Even the red orb that we have so often recorded there was nowhere to be found. However, true to form, as we were walking down the road back toward the parking lot just before 7:00, Paul and I each got a picture of a moving orb following us.
  From there, we decided to push our luck and head over to Sach's bridge. As usual, there were a number of people there already. Again, we obtained no positive results here. We decided to call it a night and head out of Gettysburg at about 8:00.

Conclusions: Every time we investigate Gettysburg Park in winter, we seem to get excellent results. I'm sure you can imagine how disappointed we were to come out of the park that night thinking we got nothing, especially since ours friends had come all the way down from Maine hoping to experience something ghostly. The usual electricity was not in the air that night; the place felt dead. Because we were sure we got nothing, we put off analyzing the pictures and audio. Eventually we got around to it, just to get it out of the way. Boy were we surprised at what was on those pictures! That just goes to show that you never know how successful an investigation is until you examine all the data. Just because a place seems inactive, doesn't mean it is. We came out of there that night with one of our best pictures yet.

Submitted by Hillary Murdoch