Gettysburg Unearthed:

“Some eye that never saw the battle will select, and some pen will write what will be named the history”

     Frank A. Haskell (1908:181-182)

This is an alternative story of the battle. It is the history of the Gettysburg ghost soldiers. It is not so much an historical account, as it is a creation myth: the origin and development of a Gettysburg ghost mythology. The “eyes” and “pens” mentioned by Haskell (who fought at Gettysburg) are manifesting today in the narrative accounts of the ghost authors of contemporary Gettysburg. This is an analysis of their history of the battle, one that, according to their mythology, continues today at various locations on the Gettysburg landscape. This alternative history is for now the “popular history” of contemporary Gettysburg. This popular version of the Gettysburg experience is the basis of ghostly myth-building, because, it has been said, when “popular history sings of events and makes them great, it transcends the realm of record and enters that of myth” (McRandle 1994:53-54).

Gettysburg, as a sense of place, has changed through the years from one derived from historical and oral narratives to one of immersed “embodiment”. It is a transition from a re-enacted experience to a re-living of the past, as embodied in its “perceived” ghosts. This is a history of social engagement with the landscape that has evolved from description and passive (contemplative) experiences, to one of penetration and a personal intimacy with the past. This is bound up with remembrance and time. Its construction is tied into networks of associations and memories through a process called “inter-animation”, and is largely a subjective experience.

As humans create, modify, and move through a spatial milieu, the mediation between experience and perception creates and legitimizes the social reality associated with a landscape. But, at Gettysburg, is this social reality a haunted landscape?

It is the purpose of this book to excavate this alternative history in order to expose these ghostly presences to the reality of contemporary scientific practice, and one that is framed in its proper cultural setting. Here, at Gettysburg, myth and history intertwine freely on these fields of drama and it will take extensive excavations to unearth and separate each myth from history, by identifying their significance to the reality of a haunted Gettysburg battlefield.

                                                       Preface

“Invisible bodies, no doubt by definition, can be done away with

much more easily than visible ones. Since…ghosts…take up no

physical space in our empirical world, the liquidation of them

involves no bloodletting, leaves no corpses, and calls for no

official inquiry”

       William LaFleur, “Hungry Ghosts and Hungry People…”

The analysis of 21^st c. engagements with the Gettysburg “ghost soldiers”, in contrast to the famous military encounter, involves an unearthing of the field of battle in which there is no need for re-interments. The stench, decay, and physical remains of death and destruction are contained, lost in the earth of yesterday. A new (alternative) approach to potential haunting manifestations is underway. In this approach, one does not assume, or prejudge, an outcome with any perceived or recorded encounter with “the other side”.