by Carolyn Hughes (GettysburgLady)
Paranormal Underground e-Magazine

Hear Carolyn’s EVP from Sach’s Bridge.

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.