The otherworldly jumble of boulders, twisting paths and shadowy woods was supposedly called Devil’s Den long before the Union and Confederate armies decorated it with corpses back in July of 1863. It’s said that even the Native Americans who inhabited the area that became Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, thought the place was creepy. It still is.
The three-day Battle of Gettysburg claimed over 50,000 casualties, making both the town and the surrounding countryside a breeding ground of spooky activity. Perfect for me. I’ve always believed in ghosts. Halloween was my favorite day of the year when I was growing up, and over the years I spent many hours prowling the Gettysburg battlefield, soaking up the atmosphere and hoping to encounter one of the many spirits that haunt the place - even sneaking into the park after dark - to no avail.
Until the fall of 1993, when I had a face to face encounter with one of the battlefield’s most famous ghosts. Over the years he has been reported by many visitors to the bizarre moonscape that is Devil’s Den: A spectral soldier dressed in rags, most likely a southerner who died among the rocks.
I was on one of my many pilgrimages to the battlefield, and had fallen in with a young couple from Ohio who were there for their first visit. After touring several sites on this clear, sunny day, we wound up on top of a mammoth boulder in Devil’s Den. We were looking down into a portion of the field known as the Slaughter Pen, when the three of us simultaneously became aware of someone behind us. We turned to greet our fellow tourist and there “he” was.
We'd been joined by a hippie.
He wore a plaid shirt and appeared bedraggled, with unkempt hair and a poorly groomed beard. He seemed very friendly. Our visitor was certainly not a ghost...yet. Instead, he was just a smiling tourist who apparently wanted us to look back across the valley to the hill known as Little Round Top. So we turned to look at the rocky hill, then back to hear what he had to say about it, exactly as we might have done for any person who had joined us. But he was gone.
The only way off this boulder would have been to either jump or carefully pick one’s way off it. And he could not possibly have done either in the few seconds that had elapsed, particularly without our noticing. He was nowhere to be seen. The couple and I looked at each other in confusion, speculating on where he could have gone, when it occurred to the man and I: Could we have just seen the famous ghost of Devil’s Den?
She didn't want to believe it, but could offer no plausible explanation. The more she tried to explain the incident, the more hopeless the task of poo-pooing it became. The young man had not been behind us as we'd mounted the boulder. He hadn't made a sound of any kind. We'd seen him and interacted with him. Then, in an instant, he was gone. For all appearances he had simply materialized, made himself known, and vanished.
We wandered among the boulders for a few minutes, chattering about it and searching for our mysterious friend. Not surprisingly, we didn't see him nor anyone remotely similar. The fact that this had happened under the bright sun of a decidedly un-ghostly day actually made it seem all the more strange. The woman, who vehemently claimed not to believe in ghosts, started to get very frightened, then angry, and eventually the couple argued their way back to their car and drove off. I climbed back onto the boulder, mentally inviting the ghostly Confederate to return, but he didn’t reappear.
After a few more minutes I began the long hike back to the visitor’s center where I had left my car. To say I was excited would be quite an understatement. Not at all frightened, but then again our ghost was himself not frightening. He seemed very pleased to be with us, even for that brief moment, and eager to share some kind of information. All three of us had remarked on it: we’d felt as if we were in the presence of a friend. But who was he? Had he been killed in Devil’s Den in 1863? Could he have just been another tourist?
I thought about it as I scooped up a pair of sunglasses that someone had dropped on the battlefield. And I thought about it hard, carefully reconstructing the man’s appearance from head to… And I stopped and smiled, quite content that I had actually seen a ghost. Because I had a good impression of a lean, friendly face, bearded and fringed with messy hair… a plaid shirt, old and worn… loose, frayed pants the color of dirt… And that’s where he ended - as if suspended at the height of a living man, but with no shins or feet anchoring him to the boulder. Whoever he was, I felt honored that he had chosen us for a visit. That he looked as if he'd have been more comfortable holding a guitar than holding a rifle made him seem all the more human. And that was the strongest impression he had imparted: this soldier had been (and in some way still was) a human being.
When I got to the visitor’s center I asked a uniformed staffer if there was a lost-and-found where I could drop off the sunglasses. And I inquired if anyone had seen the ghost of Devil’s Den lately. She paused before answering, then said, “As a park employee, I can’t officially comment on the existence of the supernatural." Another pause. "But if you mean the hippie-looking guy, you’re probably the tenth person who’s asked me about him this season.”
