There is a huge body of circumstantial evidence of
battlefield hauntings stretching back to ancient times, when ghosts were seen
and heard to engage on the plains of Marathon after the battle (the Battle of
Marathon was fought in 490 BC).In the
1930s visitors to this region of Greece were still claiming to have heard the
sound of metal clashes and screams coming from the battlefield. In Vita Isiclori, Damascius tells us that
after a battle outside the walls of Rome against the Huns in 452AD, ghosts were
reported to still be fighting for three days and nights after the battle, the
clash of their weapons being heard all over the city.The first major battle of the English Civil
War (1662) produced a well-documented case of ghost armies fighting as reliable
witnesses reported the phantom soldiers engaged in battle.King Charles I was so intrigued by the
stories that he sent a Royal Commission to investigate.The trusted officers of the Commission
reported back that they too had seen the ghastly spectacle and even recognized
the ghosts of some of their fallen friends.The phenomenon continued for some time, gradually lessening over time,
until now there are only occasional reports of people hearing the sounds of
battle at Edgehill.
How do we account for such stories?The two most often reported types of
hauntings are categorized as residual hauntings and intelligent hauntings.Residual hauntings are the most common form
of hauntings and may eventually be found to be natural phenomena.A residual haunting is similar to a DVD that
is played over and over again.In a
residual American Civil War battlefield haunting, for example, the sights,
sounds, and even smells of battle are continually replayed and are always the
same. Apparitions may be seen, but they will not notice living people around
them.The theory here is that energy
created by the strong emotions created in battle imprints itself on a physical
place and that an individual sensitive enough to pick up this embedded energy sees
and hears ghostly events while those who lack such sensitivity do not. Since
current science has no instruments to measure such embedded energy or test for
individual psychic sensitivity to that energy, such hauntings are dismissed out
of hand, even though they may actually exist. Paula Ann Kirby, author of A Yankee Roams at Dusk, describes two types of hauntings that may be occurring at
Manassas, (1) residual hauntings, which are a manifestation of stored up energy
replaying endlessly like an old movie, and (2) intelligent hauntings, which are
rare instances in which ghosts try to interact with the living.
A brief but fascinating look at humor in the
Civil War including: (1) Stories Around the Campfire, (2) Parody, (3) the
Irish, (4) Humorous Incidents, (5) Civil War Humorists, and (6) Lincoln.
Do ghosts from the American Civil War
still walk amongst us, or are reported spectral visions and unearthly things
that go bump in the night the product of over active imaginations? Trained lawyer and paranormal researcher
Arthur S. Berger points out that paranormal research is not unlike legal
advocacy. In a criminal court both sides
present evidence, but evidence is not proof.
It is up to the jury to decide if the evidence presented represents
“proof beyond a reasonable doubt”. If
juries have difficulty making decisions even in some fairly straightforward
criminal cases, how much more difficult must it be to establish “proof beyond a
reasonable doubt” of ghosts.
More useful is the standard of evidence
used in civil cases, “preponderance of the evidence”. Preponderance of
evidence is based on the quality of the evidence presented and its probable
truth or accuracy, and not on the amount of evidence presented. Thus, one
clearly knowledgeable witness may provide a preponderance of evidence over a
dozen witnesses with hazy testimony. If
a sceptic provides a demonstrable scientific explanation for a seemingly
paranormal event, the explanation represents a higher standard of evidence than
a dozen sightings by individuals of the paranormal event.
Take for example, what
are known as “rare atmospheric phenomena.”
In March 2005 a man in Clifton, Virginia reported, “We had a power outage
last night and my wife was awakened by the answering machine clicking on and
off as the power tried to recover, and then it went out completely. She went to
the front door to see if it was raining or windy and saw a very large object
hovering over a nearby house about 1/8 of a mile from our house. It was larger
than the house, seemed to be at an angle to her view with the bottom exposed
and had lights all around it evenly spaced. When it began to move away, several
lightning flashes were seen and then it was gone. The power returned two hours
later”. The appearance lasted just a few seconds, from the “balls of light”
formation to the vertical lightning flash. The woman thought she was seeing a
UFO, but was actually witnessing a natural, “rare atmospheric phenomena”
involving multiple ball lightening, which, while an extremely rare event, is
scientifically demonstrable.
Preponderance of evidence cuts both
ways. For thousands of years Europeans
believed all swans were white. Black
swans were thought to be as mythical as unicorns. There were “no such things as” black swans. It only took the discovery of the first black
swan in Australia in 1790 to topple thousands of years of European scientific
“knowledge”. Similarly, those who said
that tiny invisible organism were swimming in a clear glass of water and
causing disease were laughed to scorn until 1676 when Anton van Leeuwenhoek
observed bacteria and other microorganism using a single-lens microscope of his
own design.
Norse mythology describes the Battle of Heodenings, where two phantom armies fight for
all eternity, the dead rising daily to renew the fight afresh. Is something like this happening on the Civil
War battlefield at Manassas, Virginia?
Paula Ann Kirby, author of A Yankee Roams at Dusk, describes two types of hauntings that may be occurring at
Manassas, (1) residual hauntings, which are a manifestation of stored up energy
replaying endlessly like an old movie, and (2) intelligent hauntings, which are
rare instances in which ghosts try to interact with the living.
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