A dark figure prowled the pines in a place known locally as Sleepy
Hollow. The October chill - or something more sinister? - sent shivers
through the 25 or so spectators gathered to bear witness.
"Their luxuries were few," storyteller Victoria Howe whispered as she
rocked back and forth on her cane. "Their honor, their lives, their
bravery - that was all they had."
Suddenly, through the hollow, came the sound of baying hounds ....
Okay, so they weren't exactly Baskerville hounds - they were bassets
- and some of the people gathered maybe didn't shiver.
But on a recent Sleepy Hollow of Gettysburg Candlelight Ghost Tour
through Gettysburg's eastern end of town, Howe and her helpers did manage
to conjure up enough spirits to whet the imagination of even the most
cynical skeptic.
"Ghosts are people," Howe said. "They are the energy of who we are."
The Sleepy Hollow tour is one of several offered in a town that, according
to believers, is crawling with ghosts.
Ghosts of soldiers. ... Civilian ghosts. ... Ghostly widows looking
for centuries-dead husbands.
"I have walked with two shadows on a number of occasions," said Howe,
referring to the belief that ghosts sometimes tag along with their human
counterparts.
Sleepy Hollow offers tours nightly (with midnight tours each weekend
through the end of October). Howe has been guiding ghost tours for seven
years.
On this particular night, most of those signed up came accompanied
by long-eared, short-legged hunting dogs - basset hounds. Members of
the American Basset Hound Club of America were in town for the 2003
nationals, a sort of Westminster Dog Show for the "hush puppy" set.
Between trials for obedience and agility and track ing, some members
decided to take advantage of the local ghost tour -offering its own
tests in obedience ("Stop sniffing each other!"), agility ("Big step,
thatta boy!") and tracking ("Hey, they might flush out a rabbit!")
"This is going to be interesting," Howe observed as the tour got under
way, "because animals are very sensitive to spirits."
Howe is a bit different than your average storyteller.
"I'm a true clairvoyant," she said.
To hear her tell it, she discovered her talent for connecting with
the other side at the age of 5, when she and a friend went for a walk
along a gravel road in New Jersey.
"I stopped to pick a wildflower," she said, "and all of a sudden, everything
was gone and there was a railroad station ... tracks ... an old man
in a building."
She saw three people, she said, and "they were looking at me like they
knew me."
She heard the sound of a train whistle and started to hurry across
the tracks when she felt something hit her in the face.
She snapped to attention and saw her friend looking at her with concern.
"She had slapped me on the face because she couldn't get my attention.
She was calling me."
Howe asked her friend is she had seen the people. She had not.
A month later, waiting for the bus to go to school, Howe had another
strange experience.
"The only way I can describe it is air," she said. "It smelled awful.
It felt dangerous. And that air stayed with me until I got married."
Years later, she met a Native American shaman and told him about her
childhood experience. He told her it was the merging of her and the
spirit of a young girl who had tried to cross the railroad tracks and
been killed by a train.
Howe and her husband Gerry mixed historical accounts with ghost stories
and personal accounts for a tour that went beyond the scripted.
She told of an experience she had behind a house on Baltimore Street,
where she observed what she described as a man with a long beard and
a dark apron bent over a "stack of bodies."
"And he's calling, 'Anna, Anna, come here,'" she said, "and all I could
do is crouch in the bushes."
Near the man, she had observed a fire, she said. But when she described
what she had seen to her husband, who stood nearby, he looked amazed.
He could see no fire, no man, no bodies - only an empty lawn.
