- Ghosts will be ghosts: they're fickle, elusive and painfully
shy, especially when it comes to actually showing themselves and, in doing
so, getting us to admit that they really do exist. So when an army of Civil
War spirits rides in like gangbusters, as the men of Palmetto Sharpshooters
say they did on June 5, 1996, it's nothing to sneer at.
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- Naturally, those who were present that morning remember
the occurrence vividly. At about 5:00 a.m., says Don Windley, a re-enactor
with the Palmetto regiment, he and his comrades awoke to an inexplicable
commotion at their campsite on the southern edge of the Piedmont battlefield.
The group had slept there, beside the Middle River Church of the Brethren,
the night before their annual anniversary observance of the battle.
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- "We heard what sounded like three or four wagons,"
Windley recalls. "You could hear chains rattling. You could hear horses
whinnying. You could hear hooves pounding. You could hear wagon-wheels
creaking."
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- Joe Drega, another member of the unit, walked up to the
fence-line to investigate. Then suddenly, Windley says, "he was looking
awfully weird and his eyeballs were really big. As we all walked up to
the fence-line and the noise got louder, Joe's mouth kind of dropped open
and he was looking in bewilderment at the forest."
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- At first the Sharpshooters thought they were being paid
a surprise visit by another group of re-enactors. "Myself and Sergeant
Scott Harris stood there with Joe and his son, Josh, who climbed over the
fence and walked toward the forest to greet the wagons as they came into
camp. But when he reached the forest-line all the wagon movement and sounds
stopped on cue, as though a conductor was orchestrating it. For two or
three seconds there was dead silence, then the birds started chirping and
everything went back to normal."
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- A moment later, New Hope resident Joe Drega realized
it couldn't have been a group of re-enactors after all. "Joe turned
and looked at us and said 'Boys, there's no road in that forest anymore.'"
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- While exploring the woods they saw that he was right,
though they did discover an old, overgrown road trace that Drega said had
been there at the time of the battle.
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- Drega couldn't be reached for comment, but Windley's
story is corroborated by both the unit's Captain, Brocky Nicely, and Scott
Harris. "I was asleep and the sounds woke me up," Nicely remembers..
"What I heard sounded like wagon-wheels creaking and leather gear
pulling on single-trees, the bars that connect the horses to the wagons.
At a reenactment you normally don't pay attention to stuff like that, so
when I heard it I thought somebody had brought up some horses. Then I turned
over and went back to sleep."
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- Harris, who was unaware that the other men had been interviewed
for this story, gives an identical version of events: "It all hit
everybody at once. Everything went deathly quiet and we heard what sounded
to us like wagons rolling up a rocky, dirt road. We walked up to the fence
line . . . we all kind of looked at each other. My hair stood on end and
I got a cold chill."
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- Windley says that nothing like this has happened to the
Palmetto re-enactors, before or since. "It was a fluke. I'm usually
skeptical about such things, but if you had been there it would have made
you a believer in the paranormal."
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