Daniel Lady Farm--What Do You See? - Mark Nesbitt

And while it is one thing to research and write about unexplainable events that happen to others, it is quite another to experience one myself. In over thirty years of living in Gettysburg (and another dozen or so of previously visiting as a “tourist,”) I have had only a few personal journeys deep into the land of the paranormal. The one that occurred in the spring of 2001, at the Daniel Lady Farm was indeed one of the most bizarre and troubling of all.

It was about 11:00 a.m. on Friday, April 27, 2001. I had returned from an errand and saw that I had a message on my answering machine. It was from the caretaker of the farmhouse where Major Latimer, Captain Brown and so many other brave young men suffered and died for their doomed cause.

“Mark,” said his voice on the machine, “if you want to see a paranormal event happening right before your eyes, you’d better get out to the farm right now.”

That was all. I tried to call back to get more information, but no one answered. I grabbed my camcorder and digital camera and drove out to the farm. On the way I began to have second thoughts. Although I’ve written and researched hundreds of stories and have read hundreds more sent to me, I was apparently driving right into one that was occurring at this moment. What was I going to see when I got there? Ectoplasm rising from scores of graves that once surrounded the house? Objects in a room flying about, launched by some unseen, angry hands? Spirits careening about the grounds where humans did their very best to drive themselves into extinction? The ultimate chaos before the fabled Final Judgment, begun here, on the battlefield where Northern Cains slew Southern Abels? The End of the World must start somewhere, and the site of a 19th Century Armageddon is as likely a place as any.

But perhaps even more ominously, as I pulled into the driveway, the place looked deserted. I anxiously walked to the front door feeling that someone was watching. I knocked on the door but no one answered. I began to go around the house to knock on the back door when the man who had called me met me in the yard.

“What’s going on?” I said, trying not to sound apprehensive.

“Come on,” he said, and led me into the front door.

He gave me the background of events during the last weekend.

Volunteers from the Gettysburg Battlefield Preservation Association had been at the farm doing some much-needed repairs: electrical work and particularly some plaster patching and sanding. It took a while to clean everything up, but it was done after the work was finished, mainly because the farm was to have some visitors.

There had been reenactors at the farm and he had given them basic historical information on the farm and house.

He had discovered, while living there, a piece of iron shell imbedded deeply into a solid oak rafter. It was next to the stone wall of the barn, showing evidence of cannon damage, obviously blown out by a misdirected artillery shell. Inside the house, he showed them the restored and, since the repair work, freshly cleaned front room—Mrs. Lady’s parlor—which he had furnished with a surgeons’ kit so that the reality of the cold steel saw and lancet and scalpel would leave nothing to the imagination as to what happened within the walls of the room.

Imagine the unquiet souls floating about that once horrid room, reliving their former bodies’ agonies as bits and pieces of them were hacked off and their life’s blood drained from them. Some believe that they can see us from the Other World just as we, occasionally, see them from this world. Do they wonder about reenactors—those they see dressed as they were dressed when they last strode this solid earth? Are the dead curious about those they know they will soon meet as we wonder how we can postpone that inevitable meeting as long as possible, all of us, sooner or later, becoming “beggars before the door of God”?

Finally, he showed the reenactors—who were dressed in the same type of uniform that was, when in this room, torn and bloodied—an actual bloodstain, oval, about a foot in diameter, to the side of the room near a wall. As well, he showed them the bloody hand-print—four fingers and a thumb—against one wall near the door, of a man lifting himself, perhaps to be next upon the surgeon’s butcher block. In spite of 138 years of scrubbing with harsh lye soap by Mrs. Lady and the various housewives after her, the bloodstains remained emblazoned, a signature of some men’s—perhaps Major Latimer or Captain Brown’s—unendurable suffering as their very life’s blood pooled below them.

“Where’s the paranormal event occurring?” I asked.

He pointed to the door of the parlor.

“What should I look for,” I asked, not knowing if something was going to fly at me or confuse my eardrums with some strange noise whose source I could not detect.

His answer did not comfort me: “You’ll know it when you see it.”

As we entered the small room, I looked around, concentrating on the walls and the ceiling, since that is where much “orb activity” is photographed. It was when I looked down to take careful steps that I saw it.

In the center of the room, where the operating table must have stood, there was a dark, rust-colored liquid, flowing from apparently eighteen to twenty large, dark spots. Some of the liquid streams had flowed into one another, making even larger splotches. The liquid had flowed from the main area of stains toward the fireplace. (In many older houses the floor is pulled downward by the settling of the fireplace.) Alongside the “flow” there appeared to be a clear, watery substance that had separated out, like serum. The droplets were very dark rust-color and within them some of the liquid appeared to have crystallized into a crust. Some of the serum and drops were still wet.

“Is that what I think it is?” I asked.

“I don’t know. What do you think it is?”

I didn’t want to commit, but the more I looked, the more I realized that it could only be one thing. “I’m not sure I want to say.”

I took out my camcorder and recorded the scene. He said that he didn’t want to be shown in any of the videos or pictures. Respecting his wishes, I kept the video camera pointed away from him when it was running, but his words and the story of the unbelievable discovery were recorded.

We located a yardstick and laid it beside the stains as a reference. I finished taping and began taking still photos. I even took pictures of the white ceiling, thinking that maybe a leak from upstairs had caused the floorboards to yield up some of the ancient stain once applied for decoration. But there was no evidence on the ceiling of a leak; the tape shows that clearly.

I was curious as to what the substance might really be. I got some tissue and dipped it into one of the spots that already looked as if it had started to crystallize. It wicked up the rust-colored fluid and seemed to dry immediately on the tissue. I placed it in a secure pocket of my camera case. Then he took me on a tour of the rest of the house and told me some of his other encounters with the supernatural in this house that had the misfortune to be built on the site where one of the bloodiest battlefields in human history would someday be located.

He told me that he had been hearing strange noises from the time he moved in, especially coming from that front parlor. He and members of the GBPA who had been working at the farm heard, at separate times, jingling sounds coming from that front room as well as what he described as “mumbling.”

I visited the parlor one more time before I left the farmhouse, trying to reconcile the long, gory trails along the floor. I could not.

The caretaker said that he had work to do in the fields and headed out.

I left the farmhouse at about 1:00 p.m. I returned to the Ghosts of Gettysburg Tour Headquarters and finished whatever errands I had. At about 4:00 pm, Carol, my then fiancé, answered the phone and took a message. It was the caretaker of the farm again. He needed me to return immediately.

Once again I packed all my gear and headed out to the Lady Farm. I entered the hallway and was greeted by the caretaker who had just come in from working in the field. He was obviously more agitated than just a few hours before. The first thing he did was apologize.

“If you smell alcohol on my breath, I’m sorry. I needed a couple shots to calm my nerves.”

He pointed to the closed door of the parlor and I took his lead. Slowly, I opened the old door to the room that once contained human agony to overflowing. Again I had the apprehensive feeling as to what might assault my senses upon entering. I walked through the door carefully and moved cautiously toward the fireplace trying not to step on the damp, dark stains. There was only one problem.

The stains were gone.

I stood gaping at the floor. I looked at the caretaker, who stood with a puzzled look on his face.

“What...” I stuttered. “Where did...how?”

He shrugged his shoulders and shook his head.

There was not a trace of liquid on the floor where, just three hours before, the unmistakable trail of what appeared to be the body’s life fluid was promiscuously spilled.

“After you left I did some work outside,” he said. “I came back and this is what I saw. It was right here, wasn’t it? In the video, you can see him squat down where the rust-colored stains once soaked the floor and sweep his hand along it. “What the heck?…Look at this dust.” Not only was the floor bone dry, but coated in a dust so fine you could barely see it on his fingertips. I looked around: across the entire floor was a virtually invisible, thin coating of fine, powder-like dust. It was laid down so evenly as to make one believe that it had taken weeks of settling to produce such a delicate, thin layer.

It was almost as if I had been in a time-warp. The floor with its thin layer of dust should have been there first, then the liquid stains laid down over it. But the video tape and its built-in time-stamp are unmistakable as to the chronology: the stains came first, then their disappearance, then the thin coating of dust, all within two or three hours.

But the most bizarre, alarming thing was yet to be.

Carol remembered the sample in my camera case in the vehicle. She ran out to see if it too had disappeared. If several wide swaths of dark red liquid mysteriously vanished, what had become of the sample I had taken away?

I opened the case and gently lifted the tissue out. There it was, a reddish-brown stain with fading, ragged edges, like serum had separated from it.

Some members of the GBPA are well-connected. The stained tissue was sent to one of the most prestigious crime labs in the country for testing. Three weeks later, the results came back.

The mysterious substance was, indeed, blood.

There was only one more question to reluctantly ask: what species was it?

Again the answer that defies all logic.

The blood was human.