Sunday, August 31, 2008

The 2008 Roadtrip: Part 3

The Sword---Gods of the Earth


MoTW---Broken

(A note before you begin: This is one really long paragraph. You've been
warned.)

9:00 pm: The tour starts. Hooray! About 30 people taking part in our
walk into the mysterious, I'm looking around trying to spot the person
who'll faint. We hand out tickets to a lady dressed in old-timey garb
and follow the leader down an alley next to the store. At the back of
the store we stop and our leader talks about some stuff and then throws
in a little tidbit about how they're volunteers and make their money on
tips to which the woman asked me what they did with the $7.00 per person
charge. Gotta love her for that! So I'm thinking we'll be entering this
little one-story building for some hardcore ghost action but we were
lead around this building into a parking lot where we stopped and our
leader started talking. I'm thinking this is to get us warmed up to the
mysteries ahead so I'm totally cool with it. Our leader asks if anyone
knew who was the first civilian casualty was during the battle of
Gettysburg and for some reason Crispus Attucks popped into my head but I
didn't say anything since that seemed very, very wrong. And it was.
Thanks to some smart ass kid, he let all us stupid adults know it was
Jennie Wade. Cool, so I learned something. So the next 15 minutes we
learned about who she was, how she died and why she was buried three
different times. We also learned about a place in a basement where she
was buried for awhile and sometimes the barrier ropes surrounding where
she used to be buried move by themselves, spooking people. There's also
the Jennie Wade house which still sports some bullet halls and RUMOUR
HAS IT that if women stick their ring finger in the bullet hole in the
front door, they'll get married withing a year! (Or divorced if they're
already married. SO THE RUMOR GOES.) So that was about it with Jennie
Wade who I started calling Jenny Craig which kind of annoyed the woman.
Anyway, on to the next stop which was about 20 yards away, behind some
garages. This time we learned about the stream behind us where bodies
would float down eventually creating a logjam further down so the
townspeople wold have to clear out the bodies so the water could
continue to flow. I managed to have a smoke while our leader told us
about a college that is located on the same ground where a field
hospital stood during the battle and how two female teachers had worked
late one night and then took the elevator down but when the doors
opened, they weren't where they wanted to be but were looking at an
actual field hospital filled with dead and wounded and how there was a
soldier there that saw them and started towards them as if he wanted
their help but they freaked out and managed to get the elevator to the
right floor and never, ever again took the elevator during their
remaining time the college. This kind of peaked my interest but I soon
figured we wouldn't actually go to the college and take this elevator so
I felt a bit bummed. Our leader then told us about a place called
Devil's Den at the battlefield where dead Confederate soldiers were
thrown into crevasses where they sat and rotted until the townspeople
started removing the bodies so they could get proper burials and the
such, but most of the time they would only capture body parts pieces of
the bodies on the hooks they had lowered so it created quite a messy
situation. And RUMOR HAS IT that if you picked up a rock from Devil's
Den and carried it away, something bad would happen to you since it had
happened to many other people before and a lot of them had mailed their
rocks back to Gettysburg (but to who?) so they could be put back into
their rightful place. Told the woman I wanted to pick up a rock and she
said "NO!". Guess she was kind of freaked. As the group left to the next
destination (a haunted house maybe?) I hung back and took some pictures
of the stream since you could possibly capture some orbs which would be
really neat-o keen. (A little note: The stream was dry when I looked
into it, but our guide said it was much deeper than it looked and the
only things I could see were weeds and no water. I just wanted to get
that out in the open for some reason.) When I was done, we noticed that
everyone was gone so we hurried around the garages and finally spotted
our group in another alley. Our guide welcomed us back and I gave her a
little Corky-like wave and she started on her next story and I was
feeling a bit bummed since we were still outside. There was a well at
the end of this alley and bodies had piled up in there as well during
the battle and this contaminated the drinking water, killing two
children. Orbs could also possibly be spotted in photographs taken of
the well which I thought was just fantastic and then I noticed an eerie
red light coming from an upstairs window of the house to the left of the
alley. I lit up another smoke and took some pictures and then saw other
people noticing it as well and I thought I had discovered a paraphysical
anomaly thingy so I walked back a bit a bit to get a clearer look into
this upstairs window and possibly spot this red ghost and finally
spotted it and it was a..........lighted red EXIT sign. So much for
that, but I kept it to myself so as not to ruin the ghost tour for the
others. We were also given small, smooth, black stones for some reason
that I can't quite remember, but were told that if we looked close
enough, one of our initials would be on the stone! WOW! (Another small
note: It was mentioned on the ghost tour flier that everyone would also
receive a small gift or token or whatever and I guessed this small stone
was it.) It was took dark to really see if this was true, but I found
out later that now of my initials were on the rock which didn't bum me
out one bit. And that was it, tour over. I handed the woman a dollar to
give to the guide (fuck it, why not?) and gave her the camera so she
could take some up close pictures of the well and then I walked to the
street and had yet another smoke. After waiting for about five minutes I
went back down the alley and hunter down the woman who said that some
woman had taken a picture of the well and had captured some orbs as
well! I said cool, wow, exciting, etc., etc., and then we walked back to
the car. Then I got the silly idea to go back to Cemetery Hill to check
it out it the dark but didn't see anything ghostly at all so we went
back to the car and went back to the hotel. I made sure to grab a Diet
Dew from the cooler and put it in the room's refrigerator and then went
to bed and fell asleep around 12:30 while watching a special
shark-themed "Myth Busters". And yes, I was completely bummed since I
didn't go into a haunted house and couldn't see right then and there if
any of my pictures had any orbs or ghostly sites since the woman was
adamant about NOT taking the digital camera since a disposable one would
work just fine. Whatever.

COMING NEXT: Part 4!

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