I was still living in L.A. and decided to fulfill a lifelong dream of visiting Gettysburg. I flew to N.Y., picked up my mom (who was still living there) and made the 5-hour drive down. An attorney I worked with suggested Quality Inn at General Lee's Headquarters as a hotel since it was located on the battlefield and he had enjoyed his stay there with his family. (Yes, this is the very hotel I now work at.) We were booked into a very nice room for a week, literally sleeping on the battlefield.

One evening, my mom and I couldn't sleep so we decided to just relax and read our perspective books while lounging in our beds. After some time had passed, something caught my eye. I looked up and saw three Union soldiers standing at the foot of my bed. They were all facing the front door, so I saw their side views. There were what appeared to be two infantry soldiers on either side of an officer. The officer was wearing a tall black hat with one side of the brim pushed up with a black feather stuck into the flap. The officer in the middle turned his head, looked at me, and then the three of them walked across the room toward the closed front door and then walked through that door. I immediately sat up and asked my mom if she had seen what I had seen. She described the three soldiers as they had appeared to me and the fact that they walked through the closed door.

Once I returned home, I did some research on the area where the hotel is located and on the distinct black, feathered hat the officer was wearing. In short, on July 1st, 1863, in a field a few feet from the wing we stayed in, the 6th Wisconsin Infantry Regiment made a charge against the 2nd and 42nd Mississippi and 55th North Carolina Regiments who were positioned in the railroad cut (which runs the entire length of the hotel). The 6th Wisconsin was able to take that position, preventing the Confederates from flanking the Union army and overrunning that part of the field. The 6th Wisconsin was part of the infamous Iron Brigade. Originally called “The Black Hat Brigade” because the soldiers wore regular army’s dress black hats instead of the more typical cap or kepi, the Iron Brigade was the only all-Western brigade in the Eastern armies of the Union.

This is an authentic “black hat” recovered from the battlefield at Gettysburg. This depicts what we saw the officer wearing.

Last summer, I was at a Dairy Queen with my daughter and I felt that there was some kind of entity present. We were in the dining room and there was just two other people with us and they were at the table which I was facing. I felt an electrical sensation on my right side like there was someone standing to my right. Shortly after that, I felt like the back left leg of my chair was being bumped or kicked and I could hear a particular scraping noise when it happened. No one was sitting behind me and my chair wasn't bumping into the table behind us. My daughter is too young to have been able to reach the chair as she was sitting opposite of me. I was aware that something may have been happening, so I sat very still to be sure I wasn't moving the chair and the bumping continued. I hope to go back there and see if that person is still there. It felt like a teenage boy who was trying to get my attention.

I've felt entities at home too. One night, I was lying on the leather couch sleeping. It was winter and I was wearing warm clothes and I had two heavy blankets on top of me. I had had a dream that I saw a woman standing in the winter amidst snow near a railroad track. I could only see the back of her and she was covered in scarves that looked too thin to be warm. I woke up with a flapping sound in my ears and I was dead cold to my bones. I felt like I was lying on a slab of ice. I turned my head and saw a rounded, solid black form a couple of inches away from my face and immediately, in my head, I thought 'go away' and it disappeared. After a few minutes I warmed up and became a bit overwarm.

Another time, I was sitting on the floor playing with my daughter, who was almost two at the time, and I saw an orb float slowing down the hallway. It was about the size of a grapefruit and was moving along the baseboard during the daytime and it floated like a lazy bubble. I've also heard the exercise weights clink on the concrete floor in the basement when everyone was in bed and the cat was upstairs with me.

We have had a little girl who lives with us. We built our house on what once was a family farm in the 1860's. I think she was or may be attracted to the relationship I have with my daughter. One night I was putting my daughter to bed when she was about two and she started to play peek a boo with someone to my right. She was popping up and down and sort of laughing. Then, she stretched out her hand like she was trying to touch someone. Of course, there was no one there. A few years later, I started to hear footsteps in the hallway at night, always walking down the hall away from my daughter's room after hearing the door to her room open and close. The footsteps sounded short and light, like it was a small person. I was the only adult in the house since my husband worked nights at the time. I would hear her door open and close and then footsteps and then the doorknob to my bedroom would turn with that characteristic metallic springy noise, but the door wouldn't open. I would of course get up and check to see if my daughter had gotten out of bed, but no, she was completely sound asleep. This happened for a number of weeks. I tested it to determine if I was hearing my cat, but the cat isn't big enough to reach the doorknob and her footsteps don't sound the same as a biped. One night I woke up thinking that my daughter was in the room and knew that someone was looking at me from the other side of the mattress and I saw a little blond haired girl in my head. Then, my daughter started to get up in the middle of the night, scared and crying and say that there was 'magic' on her ceiling. I had never talked to her about the little girl. I would calm her down and tell her it wouldn't hurt her. One of these nights, I heard the doorknob to my room turn and in that exact instant, I heard breathing to my right as my daughter was entering the room to my far left. Additionally, one day when we were celebrating my daughter's fifth birthday, I heard a female child's voice say 'Mommy' to my right that sounded very tinny and very far off. No one but me heard it and there weren't any kids playing outside…we live in a very rural area and there aren't any kids in the neighborhood to begin with. Eventually, I had had enough of my daughter getting scared at night and I told the little girl to go to the light, to go to heaven, in German, because a girlfriend and I had done some research into the family that had owned the land from the 1860s to the 1980's and had emigrated from Germany in the 1850's and thought that it was likely they spoke German. The research into birth and death records turned up a little girl Mary who had died of 'dropsy' when she was about 9 or 10. We hadn’t had a problem for over a year, but I’ve been hearing the ‘mommy’ again since my daughter hurt her shoulder. She swears it isn’t her when I ask what’s the matter.

Additionally, I can feel when spirits are around me and sometime I can feel their emotions like fear or intense unhappiness and grief. I once had a little boy follow me around for a few days. I had had the experience of passing a fatal car accident moments before the first responders arrived. I saw a jean covered leg and a tennis shoe. This person was surrounded by people so I didn't see who it was and I was hoping like mad that it was a medical emergency like asthma. But, sadly, I felt a huge black silence as I passed and I saw the picture of a blond haired boy in my head as I drove by. I then felt a presence in the car. I told him he could stay until his funeral and then he had to leave. My husband was quite surprised when I came home and told him about this boy just as the news was breaking the story on tv. This was Joseph Wright who died on September 13, 2007. He was 13. I gave him permission to stay with me because I thought he'd be scared and wouldn't know what to do. The next day they showed his photo on the TV and it was exactly the blond haired boy I saw. He followed me home that night but not into the house, interestingly, and then he followed me around work the next day. I’m not sure, but I think he may be hanging around the house. One day, I was dozing on the couch and I had a dream that I saw a blond haired boy standing in the living room. He turned and saw me looking at him and he ran as fast as light and hid under the arm of the couch and peeked out at me. After that, mechanical things around the house started to act up. Alarms would go off for no reason. Lights wouldn’t work for no reason. The Wii box fell off the TV for no reason. A few months later, I saw a blond head peeking up at me from the bottom of the basement stairs when I came home late from work one night. I wish he’d leave.

The latest one was Dan Zamlen, who died after he left a party and fell into the Mississippi River. We had come back from vacation on April 5th and I was busy the whole day after we returned, going to church, picking up the cat, going to the grocery store, etc. I think it was some time after I gave my daughter a bath when I was sitting in the living room and I saw this tall, thin man with close cropped hair in my mud room. He was sort of slouching and looking at me and I felt this rush of water and aquatic weeds come off him at the same time the thought of ‘oh God, what have I done’. I was startled, to say the least. I thought it was my nephew, but he was taller and had more hair than my nephew does. I knew that he was around Ford Parkway in St Paul and he was found in the river about a month later, by workers who were cleaning out the grate that leads from the Ford Plant to the river. Dan Zamlen was a diabetic who’d been drinking and left a party in an angry state around 2am on April 5th. I just can’t imagine why he’d go off the sidewalk and walk down the river bluffs because they are very steep and treacherous, I’d imagine, in the dark.

Welcome to my world. There are more stories and I hope to find time to write them.

We have a couple of members staying at the hotel this weekend. I just spent a hour with them. They have had some neat experiences here at the hotel and will be telling everyone about them when they get home.

I'm having them come into the office at midnight to take pictures and do some EVPs. Hopefully, the boys will be generous.

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