WEBVTT
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Almost every one of them, I had an experience, a
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paranormal experience in it, something I could not explain. My
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experiences there began almost from the beginning and unsolicited, and
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I finally started collecting them, jotting them down, and eventually
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had enough stories. Actually ten twelve years before I had
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enough stories to come out to approach a publisher about
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an idea for a book.
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Broadcasting Seeds.
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Broadcasting Seeds play Truth in the Minds of the Beato.
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All right, hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of
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Broadcasting Seeds. I'm your host benat Tanton, and today we
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have a special guest. His name is Mark Nesbitt, and
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he is from Gettysburg. But I'm gonna let Mark tell
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us exactly who he is and what he does. Mark,
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thank you for coming on the show.
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My pleasure, Bennett, thank you for having me. Yeah. I well, yeah,
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I have a long and uh and uh, perhaps sordid
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history in Gettysburg.
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Tell it all, Tell it all to talk.
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To some people, and that's that's true. But I started
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actually I started as a tourist, like everybody does. My
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family went to Gettysburg and when I was when I
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was a kid and teenager, and in my summer before
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my senior year in college, I got tired of work
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in construction for my dad, and I said, I'm going
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to try and get a job in Gettysburg. Anywhere in Gettysburg,
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And they knew the place, so they felt comfortable there,
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and lo and behold, I managed to land a job
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with an now Park Service as a seasonal park ranger.
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And so I began my professional career at Gettysburg as
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a park ranger and lasted in the park service for
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about six years while I and this kind of gets
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into some of the other stuff that I think we're
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going to talk about while I was there. Of course,
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before I got there, I was just casually interested in ghosts.
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I think in a couple dozen visits. I asked one
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of the lifeguards once are there any ghost stories about Gettysburg?
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And she gave me one. But when I was working
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for the park then we would get people coming in
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and asking are there any ghosts at Gettysburg, And in
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fact so many we asked our bosses upstairs what should
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we tell them, and they said, tell them there aren't any.
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There's no such things as ghosts, and they certainly aren't
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here at Gettysburg. I'm like, okay, but they would come
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in and we'd give them that little those lines and
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then we say why what happened to you? And so
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we would get those stories. And I heard scores of
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stories just standing at the information desk there. And when
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I sort of got on semi permanent there, they put
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me in a couple of the houses actually four of
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the houses in Gettysburg on the battlefield, I'm sorry, on
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the battlefield, And they did that with the rangers for
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security purposes, and almost every one of them I had
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an experience, a paranormal experience in it, something I could
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not explain. And so the the my experience is there
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began almost from the beginning and solicited, and I finally
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started collecting them, jotting them down, and eventually had enough stories.
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Actually ten twelve years before I had enough stories to
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come out to approach a publisher about an idea for
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a book, and we wrote that. I wrote that first book,
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Ghosts of Gettysburg, and it it took off. And the
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strange part about it is maybe not so strange, is
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that within two weeks of releasing the book, I started
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getting letters, phone calls from the old fashioned faxes from
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people saying, you know, we I and my family had
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experience and experience at Gettysburg. Here's what happened to us.
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And they came in. They literally came in by the thousands.
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I have, between interviews and letters, a couple thousand letters
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and communications with people, and of course it turned into
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nine volumes. Then I just came out with the ninth
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volume this past year.
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That's amazing.
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So yeah, it's it's it's it's truly amazing. So I
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guess what the Park Service wanted us to tell the
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people that there are no such things as ghosts at Gettysburg.
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That kind of like by the wayside.
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Right, But what what is the best place for people
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to find you and like your books and everything.
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Well, the best place, I say, is to go to
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our website, ghosts off Gettysburg dot com because a lot
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of times Amazon will say that they're out of the
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book or they're really almost all over Gettysburg. We have,
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you know, a number of outlets in Gettys work, including
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our own shop. Right, we have there's an outlet there,
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but that's that's only open all weekends. But so you
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can you can get them pick them up about anywhere
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in Gettysburg. I'm going to be doing a signing over
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the Memorial Day weekend at the old Gettysburg Wax Museum,
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which is now the Civil War sent I forget what
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they call it now, but everybody knows it as the
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Wax Museum. But it's not there, it's not that anymore.
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But they have a tremendously large bookstore in there, and
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my books are in there.
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Yeah, that's amazing.
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So how.
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How is your understanding of Gettysburg evolved over the years.
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Well, as I said, it started off as just a
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touristy thing, and then it became my home and I
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lived there for close to thirty years, a little over
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thirty years actually, and so it and met a lot
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of townsfolk who are my neighbors and my friends. And
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I started off as a pure historian, yeah, because I
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gave talks out on the battlefield and that type of thing.
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But that eventually, that eventually turned into something a little
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bit different because I collected the history. And when I
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started writing the books, I couldn't help myself. Yeah, either
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ghost stories, but I had to put the history in.
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And it turns out that that's a pretty good formula
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for ghost stories because like, like I say, like I
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like to say that, you know, if you just write
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up a ghost story and tell a ghost story, that's
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like walking past some bushes and somebody jumps out and
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goes boom, you realize that's you're idiot, brother in law,
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and you're like cut it out. But if you have
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a story behind that area that has to do with
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some kind of violence or some kind of tragedy, then
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you realize that there may be is this the genesis
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of this particular ghost story and of whatever seems to
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remain here, it's whatever energy seems to remain here. So
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that's how I wrote the stories. And I think it's
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a natural progression from being a historian to go into
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the folklore and using the folklore and the ghost stories
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to tell the stories of the battle. It's very difficult,
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I know because I had to do it to remember
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the history, okay, of the Battle of Gettysburg, because there's
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so much of it. If you just memorize facts and
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figures and names. But if you have a story along
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with some of these some of this history, some of
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these events that happened, it seems like it's a lot
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easier to remember things and when you had a story
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folklore or ghost story along with it.
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So going back even before, what stories have you uncovered
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from even before the war? Like you know what I mean?
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Like I the.
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Reason I bring this up is I'm not a I'm
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not like clairvoyant or psychic or I wouldn't call myself
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any of that stuff. But I definitely can feel energies
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right and at devil like the Devil's Den, that area,
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that that area I felt I could feel stuffed and
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it didn't feel like energy that was from per se
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the war. The reason I asked that is it like,
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what's the history before the battle that you maybe have uncovered,
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you know, because the place is charged it.
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Just yes, yeah, yes, Well that's a good question because
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and it tells you something about your own perception of
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the other world because the pre battle history, pre war
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history goes back very far. In fact, we don't we're
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not even sure because there were no records what to
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put a date on it, you know, four thousand years
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ago or whatever. But it's the Native American presence in
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that area, and and I can't remember the tribes Subsquehannocks
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and the Iroquois. I don't know, but if you look
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at that they're at a map that they put out
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on on the internet, you can see that there is
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a line between the two tribes and it you can't
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see it well enough, but it shirt sure looks like
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it's going right through Gettysburg or that area.
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Yeah, Like that's like a dividing point, like a bound
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down right.
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And also there were rumors I heard, just the rumors
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of a huge Native American battle, because we used to
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say Gettysburg was the largest recorded battle on the North
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American continent, right, And we said that specifically that way,
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because there may have been some unrecorded battles. This battle
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between the Indians Indian tribes there, apparently it was almost
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as big as the Battle of Gettysburg and occurred according
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to the historians that heard things in the eighteen eighties
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about this battle, it was it took place about a
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mile west of little what is now a little round top,
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which puts it pretty close to the battlefield. And we're
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really close to you Devil's Den. And my own personal
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documentation of that is when I was when I was
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a ranger, I would go to people's home for a
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get together party or whatever. Locals that have been there
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all their lives and they pull out a mason jar
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and they say, there's my battlefield collection, and it'd be
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full of mini balls, bullets, that type of stuff, shelf fragments,
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And I'd say, what's that other one there? That's just
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my arrowheads I picked up while I was picking these up,
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some of a gun that they had. It was filled
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to the top with arrowheads. Now, you can fiddle a
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lot more arrowheads in a jar than mini balls. And
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I'm like, it finally hit me. This must have been
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one hell of a battle between the Native Americans here
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if they fired that many in just a random sampling,
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that many arrows during the course of the battle. So
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there's that. There are other other stories as well. I
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mean people have heard war whoops and Tom tom's and
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stuff like that. Yeah, that would associate with that. Plus
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there are a couple of other, you know, just little
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stories here and there that I've heard. But there was
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a you know, fairly superstitious, inquisitive crowd amongst the Pennsylvania
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Dutch that settled the area in the seventeen hundreds, and
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so you would have you would have them collecting those
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stories as well.
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Yeah, man, it's definitely a history rich area. Obviously, it's
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because it's such a crossroads, right, it just is it.
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I think it's an amazing place. But what so, like, what's
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one of the most compelling first time encounters that you've
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ever experienced or documented in Gettysburg, in and around.
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Okay? Well, the when you you said I wasn't sure
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whether you meant a personal experience. Well, the one personal
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first of all, the personal experience that actually got all
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this going was when I lived in the in the
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cemetery lodge. I don't know if you. I know, I
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don't know if you when.
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You visited house right on the edge of town.
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Yes, right right inside the part cemetery there, Black Gate.
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Yeah, I took some pictures of it atn't.
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I Yeah, it's it's it's a neat house. And uh,
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it was a it was ahead. It was a quarters
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for rangers, you know, who were who didn't who were
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single and didn't have you know, so at any rate
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didn't have a family. And so one two things happened
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to me there. One afternoon, I was sitting down in
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the in the living room kind of watching TV, and
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I was quiet and everything, and my housemate was upstairs,
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and all of a sudden, I heard footsteps come down
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the stairs behind me and stop on the landing, and
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I I waited for a second, and he didn't come
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all the way down, so I turned around and there
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was nobody on the landing. Now I'm so sure I
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heard that, because I I said, I wonder what he wanted.
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So I stood up and I walked upstairs and I
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knocked on his door and he said, and he said
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come in. I said, Bill, what do you want? Because
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what are you talking about? I said, didn't you just
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come downstairs? And he's lying on his bed reading, you know,
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And he's like, no, I've been here. I'm in fact,
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it fell asleep. I said, you didn't come downstairs? No,
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I said, okay, so yeah, you'll just okay, maybe just Metina.
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I couldn't know. It wasn't my imagination. I actually went up.
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And the other thing that happened was one afternoon, I
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was in the house all by myself and I had
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a finished lunch. I was carrying the dishes out to
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the kitchen and I heard like a somewhere in between
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a crying and a wailing, and it sounded like it
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was a child and I stopped. I'm like, what the
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heck was that? And you know, you go through your