The Ghost of Devil's Den
This ghost story was told by a nineteen-year-old Caucasian student at the University of Maryland. She is from the Baltimore Metro Area and lives with her mother and younger sister. I decided to approach her since she is a notorious lover of ghost stories and folklore. While we were hanging out with friends, I asked her to tell me a ghost story. As soon as I asked, her eyes lit up and she took me to the side, out of earshot of our friends. With great energy and enthusiastic facial expressions, she proceeded to tell me the following story about the Civil War site of the Battle of Gettysburg:
My friend Carl was attending a reenactment of the Battle of Gettysburg. He went to a rocky corner of the battlefield filled with boulders, called Devil’s Den, to take a picture of the battlefield. He took out his camera and as he was about to take the picture, he heard a voice say, “What you’re looking for is over there.” Carl looked up and saw a man who resembled a hippie, wearing a floppy hat, no shoes and had long hair, pointing somewhere in the distance. Carl looked to see where the man was pointing, and when he looked back the man was nowhere in sight.
The Storyteller claimed she once watched a documentary on television about the ghosts of Gettysburg, and it told a strikingly similar story of a ghost in a floppy hat saying the same words to many tourists who were taking pictures at Devil’s Den. Similar stories have been told involving a man in a floppy hat at Devil’s Den. One tells the story of a woman visiting the site of the Battle of Gettysburg. After experiencing no paranormal activity, she sarcastically challenged any ghosts of Devil’s Den to come home with her. A few days later she saw a man wearing a floppy hat and loose shirt in her house. She saw this vision many times, but it would always disappear very quickly. She believed this was a ghost from Devil’s Den accepting her challenge (U.S. Civil War History and Genealogy).
Another version of the story involves a man who was also visiting the site of the Battle of Gettysburg. He took many photographs throughout the day. In the afternoon, a soldier dressed in a floppy hat, gray clothing and “possessing an odor of sulfurous gunpowder” approached him (U.
The battle of Gettysburg occurred over three hot summer days, July 1 to July 3, 1863, around the small town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. It began as a meeting engagement, but by its end involved approximately 170,000 Americans. The battle is considered to be the turning point in the American Civil War and is one of the most studied battles in American history. The events that took place at Gettysburg had a tremendous impact on the outcome of the Civil War and the fate of the United States. It is far easier for us in the present than it was for those at Gettysburg, to look back and determine the path that the leaders should have taken.
There is a lot to say about the Battle of Gettysburg. Many people wonder why this battle out of all others during the war was so great. Many questions were asked. Such as, what did they do for supplies? How did they live? What was the typical military strategy? I will also answer many other questions to in this essay. It’s really hard to believe the things I saw during the movie. It just makes wonder how stupid the government was to even think about starting a Civil War. Millions and millions of men died in this war. For what? Honor? I certainly think they did not die honorably, but just went out there and got slaughtered.
I was told a story about one of Cloudcroft's more famous ghosts when casually lounging in the undergraduate student physics lounge at the University of Maryland, College Park, with a group of students during a lunch break before class. This occurred during early April, 2005. I inquired whether anyone knew any ghost stories or folklore. A friend of mine volunteered that she knew several ghost stories from her travels. The storyteller was a 23-year-old Caucasian female from an upper-middle class family in Baltimore. She currently lives in Crofton, MD, and is a physics and astronomy major.
The Civil War is one of the defining wars in the history of this great nation. The Battle of Gettysburg was the bloodiest battle in American history, and a turning point in the four year war. At the time, Gettysburg was a small, quiet town generally unaffected by the war. General Robert E. Lee of the Confederate States of America and General George Meade of the Union converged in Gettysburg, and a conflict quickly arose. After three long days of battle the Union pulled away with a victory, though not an easy one. This essay will outline the six themes of history; in essence the who, what, when, where, why, and who cares of this infamous battle.
The University of Maryland has a rich history dating back to its founding in 1856 as the Maryland Agricultural College. Built between 1804 and 1812, The Rossborough Inn is the oldest building on campus today (Ghost Tour, 2). With its history, it is no surprise that the Inn has been a hotspot for ghost activity. Knowing that there have been numerous reports of ghosts at Rossborough, I visited the Inn to ask current employees at the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism, located in Rossborough Inn, if they themselves had experienced anything bizarre or if they had known others who had. I entered the small office where three women were talking and with their permission asked about their experiences with ghosts at Rossborough. Upon asking my question, all three smiled, although shaking their head, they indicated they had not. However, they all had heard of the stories, and one of the women replied and told me to speak with the University Archivist. She told me that she has spoken with the archivist, and upon learning the stories, she said that she “got freaked out and really wanted to go home.”
Trudeau, Noah Andre. Gettysburg A Testing of Courage. New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 2002. Page 268.
Nationally the Civil War was taking place and locally the Battle of Gettysburg took place including the location of the picture, Devil’s Den changing hands between the Union and the Confederacy several times.
The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier has struck my interest for the past few years. I have always been interested in historical events that impacted many lives. The Holocaust, the Berlin Wall, and World War I and II have always been something I take very seriously and I am very interested in learning about America’s history. The backstory behind the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is fascinating and after researching it more I learned new things that made me more motivated to write this essay in hopes that I get the honor of laying a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
Boom! A single canon shot rang out, breaking the early idyllic silence. Residents of the small town of Falls Church, Virginia and surrounding areas could hear the battles from their own homes. They were only miles away from many key battle sites, such as Fairfax Court House and The Battle of Vienna, both Confederate victories during June 1861. Located in the infamous region of Mosby’s Triangle, the area was full of marching troops from Col. John S. Mosby’s army.
There’s this really small highway town in New Mexico called Cimarron, and it’s small now but in the late 19th century it was a bustling crossroads for all sorts of people – gold speculators, ranchers, oilmen, and especially those vagrant characters, like Billy the Kid, seeking refuge from whatever lawman was on his tail. In Cimarron is this hotel, the Santa Fe Hotel, and they say that this place is the most haunted hotel still in operation, in the west. The lights flicker on and off, and people, visitors just say they encounter really weird things – like if you go in this one room, you might see a woman out of the corner of your eye, sitting on the windowsill and looking out for someone. And when you turn to face her, she disappears, but all of a sudden you smell a subtle waft of strawberry-scented perfume. Weird – yet you still not sure if this is true? Sounds sketchy, I know. Oh – I should say this hotel is haunted because 23 people have been shot to death in the hotel, either from a bar-fight or card-game or something. Well I went to stay at the hotel for a night, before I headed on to a nearby Boy Scout camp. I went with my troop, and we all got our own rooms. Guess what room I got – the strawbe...
The story was told to me by one of my high-school classmates, who is a resident of the town of Atco. The nineteen year old young man is currently a sophomore at Clemson University and describes himself as being a Roman Catholic of half Italian-American and half Irish-American decent. The young man also noted that he is normally very socially conservative and a staunch Republican. His father is employed as a general contractor and his mother runs her own catering company. He describes himself as a “self proclaimed expert of all things related to the Atco Ghost.” He cannot remember the specific date when he first heard the story, but stated that he can remember knowing most of the details to the story for most of his life. He also claims to have attempted to see the ghost on only one occasion and after what he saw, he refuses to ever go back to that area of town at night. The following is an almost word for word account, which he checked to ensure its accuracy, of the lengthy story as he retold it to me ...
A 19-year old female from Harford County, Maryland, narrated the story of Black Aggie, the urban legend of an overnight stay in a cemetery. She grew up Christian, and still lives in one of the more rural areas of Maryland with her younger sister and parents, who own and work at an electrical contracting business. Accustomed to hearing many ghost stories and urban legends, she first heard the story of Black Aggie during a middle school slumber party. Late one Saturday night over pizza in our Hagerstown dorm, she was more than willing to share her favorite urban legend with me.
The Civil War was one of the bloodiest and deadliest conflicts in U.S History. In Gettysburg there were three consecutive days in July, were the most soldiers were hurt. There were a total of 51,000 soldiers who were missing, wounded, or dead (Goodheart 1). There was no place to bury all the dead. There were about 7,000 bodies of the soldiers left in the battlefield. Some were buried in shallow graves and had very little identification (Goodheart 1). With the heat and rain the town started to smell like decaying animals mixed with the odor of human bodies (Borrit 5). The governor decided to make a National Cemetery were all of the dead soldiers would have a place to be honored. This is where one of the famous addresses
Salem to work as his servant. She was known to practice Obeah, an African cult
a dull grey colour as if it had lost the will to live and stopped