
The President’s Message:
We will no longer have our pot luck holiday
dinner buffet at the December 12th meeting.
However, coffee, soft drinks, and
dessert will be available that evening. Bob
Schuldenfrei suggested that members who would like to have dinner could
meet at 5:00 PM at the Atlantis Grill, 5805 South Congress Avenue (at
the intersection of Lantana and Congress), Atlantis 33462, telephone
641-3330. If you would like to
have dinner at the Atlantis Grill at your own expense, please call the
restaurant to make a reservation. Mention
the Round Table group when you call.
There will be a raffle at the December
meeting. Any small gift cards for
the raffle drawing would be greatly appreciated.
Our speaker will be Robert Macomber, a great
friend of the Round Table. Please
pay your dues at the December meeting. There
will be envelopes available to mail your dues at a later date.
Gerridine
December 12, 2018 Program:
As is usual for our
holiday meeting, we have Robert Macomber back with us again.
His topic will be
The
Crucial Role of Key West in the Civil War.
You will relive the island's transformation from pre-war
backwater supply depot and site of liberated African slaves in 1860, to
occupied enemy territory in 1861, to the most important Union outpost in
the Gulf of Mexico in 1862.
You will vividly experience a remarkable demonstration of American
military honor in 1863, the horrific epidemic of 1864 and, finally, the
terror of potentially the last great sea battle of the Civil War in
1865. This amazing story
will change your view of the island forever!
November
7, 2018 Program:
Peppy Lizza gave a presentation on haunted
Civil War sites. He
introduced his program by saying this is not your average Civil War
talk. It was a little bit
outside of the realm of history.
He clarified that this was really history in a different form.
In addition to the facts, you will hear some incredible stories.
These are real stories that happen to real people, and I’m just
here tonight to report that.
He suggested that tonight we will go on a ghost tour.
He asked people in the audience if they had ever been on a ghost
tour. Many people said they
had. With many ghost tours out
there, it kinda makes you wonder.
“What’s going on here?”
Peppy said that he had personally never seen a ghost.
He doesn’t think they appear to Italian people.
It might be the high garlic content in our blood.
However, there are many ghost tours, even here in Palm Beach.
Additionally, he described hauntings at the Blue Anchor Inn, the
Colony Hotel, and even a plane crash in the Everglades.
Peppy is a retired letter carrier.
He bought a home and discovered that there was a haunted cottage
not far from where he lived.
At one point during his career, he was handed a letter to be delivered
to the supposedly haunted cottage.
So, we went up to the place, went in, and talk to someone in
there. He told me the story
of this person’s mom. She
was told it is not safe to stay there.
She said no, no I’m fine.
When other people went back to the house, they found the lady
sitting on the curb. She
explained that things move in there, all by themselves.
Other stuff falls off the mantle.
This was a little more than she could handle.
Peppy Lizza travels to many Civil War sites.
When he arrives at a new site, he would ask people if they have
ever heard of a haunting.
Not only the regular people, but most importantly he would ask the
employees if they ever experienced the supernatural.
He would ask, “has anything unusual happened to you?”
Before he ventured into the stories of the evening, he explained
that ghost stories are as old as literature itself.
Washington Irving, Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and Edgar Allan
Poe all wrote about ghosts.
Hollywood films have portrayed ghost stories.
“What waits for us when we leave this mortal plain?”
An attempt to explain what gives with all of these stories, Peppy
zeroed in on unnatural death.
Of course, war is full of unnatural death.
In America, there was no greater source of unnatural death than
the American Civil War. It
was a very young country.
There were over 620,000 killed in that conflict.
That’s one out of every 50 Americans.
The people, and the country, never recovered from that.
The average age of a Civil War soldier was 25 years old.
By and large, these were not professional soldiers.
They were farmers or bankers or all types of normal civilians.
Many of them, in the beginning, saw this is a great source of
adventure and they didn’t want to miss it.
Most of these people had never been far away from their homes.
We are about to start our stories.
I will begin each story with a quote.
I would ask you to try and guess where we are going.
Peppy’s
first quote was a little different from what I have found on the
Internet. This is what was
found in the historical record: "The crimes of this guilty land can
never be purged away but with blood."
A member of the audience correctly identified the speaker as John
Brown. This was the
introduction to the story of Harpers Ferry.
A large arsenal was there, and Brown, along with a ragtag group
of raiders, wanted to seize arms that were stored there.
He did this because he was an abolitionist and needed arms to
foment a slave uprising.
Back then, many of the people dislike slavery, but they were not
abolitionists. Abolitionists
wanted the immediate end to slavery.
He came from Kansas along with his sons, and he wanted to free as
many slaves as possible. Not
only did want to free the slaves, but he wanted to arm them and
terrorize the slaveowners.
John Brown however, was not a very good military man.
He did manage to capture a few slaveholders and hold them for
hostage. One of the persons
he captured was Lewis, Washington, a nephew of George Washington.
One of the artifacts from this capture was a sword that George
Washington was given by Frederick the Great.
Brown took the sword, and as a symbolic gesture, gave it to a
slave. At Harpers Ferry, he
just showed up, got into a brief firefight, and was easily captured.
It is interesting to note that at Brown’s capture a United States
officer was in command. This
was none other than Robert E Lee. On
December 2, 1859 he was hanged.
In the summer of 1974 something very odd happened in Harpers
Ferry. The Park Service saw
this guy walking around, wearing old clothes, wearing a beard, and
somebody remarked that the man looks very much like John Brown.
This guy, who looks a lot like John Brown, has been seen by many
visitors. A group of people
from the South decided to take a picture of this man.
So, this is where the story gets a little weird.
The group returned to Mississippi and had their pictures
developed. This man was in
none of the pictures.
Peppy wonders if this was a portal in time.
It certainly is odd that the man showed up in none of the
pictures.
Peppy’s next quote was likewise imperfect.
“What is this knocking at my door?
Only the wind and nothing more.”
Once again, the audience identified this correctly as Edgar Allan
Poe. It was from the poem,
The Raven.
While there are plenty of references in the poem to noises, the
word knocking does not appear.
In the second line from the quote was: “’Tis the wind and nothing
more!” This was a good
lead-in to the story of haunted Baltimore.
There are lots of places scattered around town that are claimed
to be haunted, but the most haunted spot is somewhere out in the harbor.
It is USS Constellation.
Peppy noted that this is probably as close to the energizer bunny
as you can get. The ship
keeps going and going and going.
The ship was built primarily to deal with the Barbary pirates.
When we were a colony of Great Britain, the pirates did not
bother a colonial entity.
But after we won our independence, the pirates knew we were there.
From that time forward, American shipping was victimized.
President George Washington signed a bill authorizing the
construction of six ships.
Only three of them really got built.
They were: Constitution, Constellation, and United States.
Each shipyard designed the ships to their own specifications.
Constitution and United States were gun heavy ships.
Constellation was built for speed.
The shipbuilder was a yard that built yachts.
He wanted the boat to go fast.
The nickname for Constellation was the Yankee racehorse.
The first captain of Constellation was Thomas
Truxtun. He was strict, he
was a disciplinarian, and therefore a regular Navy guy.
But he was a good captain.
While he was only a captain for a short period of time, in that
time they captured a lot of pirates.
His action gave the American people a real sense of pride.
He leaves the Constellation in 1801 and writes the Navy manual on
tactics at sea. The ship
went on to have a glorious career.
In the 1820s, Constellation stood patrol for slave ships.
This was done off the African coast.
It was active in the Seminole Indian war.
It cruised in all the major oceans of the world racking up about
58,000 miles. In 1853 the
ship needed an overhaul. The
overhaul was really a rebuild of the ship.
The ship was made longer and had many new parts.
But it also preserved many of the old parts from the original
ship. So, by 1859, it was
back in duty. It was active
in the Civil War by looking out for blockade runners.
It was also used as a training ship.
At this time in history, steam and ironclad ships began to change
the nature of warfare at sea.
However, this ship was so special that it got special use.
Besides being a training ship, it transported foodstuffs to
Ireland during the famine.
It was still afloat at the end of World War II.
However, the ship needed major repairs.
The citizens of Baltimore wanted to restore the ship.
They had a series of fundraisers to collect money necessary for
the repairs. After the ship
was formally decommissioned in 1955, she was moved to the harbor in
Baltimore. A funny thing
began happening, starting in 1968.
Ghostly sightings were spotted on the decks and below.
One night someone saw a figure dressed in an old uniform on the
ship so they called the police.
The police showed up and is customary they bought their police
dogs. As they got close the
police dogs stopped, the hair stood up on their backs, and they refused
to get on the ship.
Something was on that ship that prevented the dogs from doing their job.
Right next to Constellation was USS Pike, a retired submarine.
Even these guys saw strange figures on Constellation.
A strange consistency involved these stories.
They all happened around midnight.
These apparitions walk or float on the ship decks amid the smell
of gunpowder.
A number of these spirits have been
identified. The first one
was Neil Harvey. Neil Harvey
was on
the original ship in 1799.
He was accused of leaving his post and being a coward.
He was executed by Capt. Thomas Truxtun.
First, one of the sailors ran his saber through him and then he
was mounted on the front of a cannon and literally blown away.
You might understand that if he was innocent, his spirit might be
a little upset. Another one
of the apparitions was Capt. Thomas Truxtun himself.
He is seen in his uniform and he appears consistently on the
forecastle deck. One of the
sailors on Pike took a picture of him, which appears as a bluish white
radiance. Another ghost
seems to be an 11-year-old boy who appears on the deck.
This boy was killed in 1822 by a couple of sailors.
He was the ship’s surgeon’s assistant.
The story was revealed that the boy was killed with a knife.
The author of this story was a local psychic.
And finally, we have Carl Hansen.
Now Carl was from the 20th century.
He was a watchman on Constellation.
Anyone who knew him knew that he loved the ship.
And somehow or other, he’s back.
There’s one more story about a priest who was standing around
waiting for a tour. When the
people who are running the tours came back to the priest, they said to
him, “ready for your tour?”
The priest said that wasn’t necessary as “the old guy showed me around.”
There was nobody else on the ship.
The only explanation was Carl Hansen must’ve given him the tour.
These
transcriptions take a great deal of time to get down on paper, so I’m
going to jump right to the Gettysburg story.
The quote from this story is: “these dead shall not have died in
vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and
that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not
perish from the earth."
Everybody in the audience knew this one.
Peppy explained that Gettysburg is the most significant battle in
this hemisphere. The battle
here, once again, was an accident.
Robert E Lee was trying his second invasion of the North.
He used South Mountain as his cover.
He’s heading for Harrisburg to drum up some support from the
people of Western Maryland.
His objective was to end the war.
The people were ready for this war to end.
It was the politicians who didn’t wanted to end.
Peppy retold the story of Harry Heath asking AP Hill if he could
go into Gettysburg to look for some shoes.
Peppy acknowledge that this story has been debated and may or may
not be true. Because Harry
Heath wrote the shoes story in his memoirs Peppy is going to run with
it. So, he starts for town
and instead of shoes he finds Yankees.
Neither army was set up to fight at this
time. They just ran into
each other. Gen. Lee has
ordered his generals not to engage the enemy until the Army is brought
up. Gen. Lee asks Heath
“didn’t you understand my orders?”
Peppy describes the scene as illustrated in the movie
Gettysburg.
In the movie Heath reply was “my boys just got their dander up.”
The rebels succeeded in taking the town, after meeting up with
Buford and his cavalry. Gen.
John Reynolds brought up his unit, the Iron Brigade.
While the rebels won the town, unfortunately for them, they push
the union back up on Cemetery Ridge.
Anchored by Culp’s Hill, this was a much better defensive
position. It is certain that
Lee did not want them to do that.
The presentation continued, describing all three days of the
battle. The common objective
of all three days was to move or destroy the Union line.
The third day was marked by a two-hour cannonade attack, an
attempt at encirclement by cavalry, and the well-known frontal assault,
Pickett’s charge. As you all
know, this did not go well for the South.
Thus, began a long retreat.
There is actual documentation saying a Confederate band playing
Lowell Mason's hymn Nearer My God to Thee.
The retreating force formed a 17-mile-long wagon train.
Gen. John Imboden was the cavalry for Lee’s rearguard.
With all the death, this venue was ripe for
ghost stories. A park
ranger, Mark Nesbitt, has written a
series of books about the ghosts of Gettysburg.
According to him, many of the sightings were actually noted by
park rangers. So, the park
rangers are really the best source for this information.
There are many ghost tours in Gettysburg itself.
Nesbitt retells that at Gettysburg College, which used to be
called Pennsylvania College, late at night, two college administrators
were riding the elevator to the first floor.
The elevator did not stop at the first floor but continued down
to the basement. The door
opens up and there a lot of old boxes there.
There was a horrible scene.
Men with arms sawed off, soldiers in agony, people calling out,
when one of the sergeants did this to them.
At this point, Peppy illustrates sawing off a limb.
The two administrators push the button wildly, and finally the
door closes and goes to the first floor.
The administrators report this scene to security.
“Oh my God, what have we seen?”
Security went down the next day, but all they saw was a series of
boxes. Now, realistically,
this could have been some kind of college prank.
Peppy suggests that it was a scene out of history that they saw
when the doors opened. This
is just one of Nesbitt stories.
He has written four books on this topic.
Another
one of Nesbitt’s stories concerns John Reynolds, which was already
mentioned. He was a rising
star in the Union Army. He
graduated from West Point.
He was an instructor at West Point.
He was a veteran of many campaigns, including the Peninsula where
he was captured. A little
later on he was exchanged.
When he was exchanged, they gave him a promotion.
He was given the First Corps, the Iron Brigade.
The movie, Gettysburg,
was quite accurate in the portrayal of John Reynolds riding up and
meeting John Buford.
Reynolds asked, “can you hold?”
Buford replies, “there will be the devil to pay.”
As Reynolds is putting his troops in defensive positions, he is
killed by a Confederate sharpshooter.
Of the 120 generals that were on the field at Gettysburg, nine
were killed. Four were on
the Union side, one of them was Reynolds.
He was from Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
His body was placed in a coffin and left on Steinwehr Avenue, the
main street in town. They
are waiting to send the body back to Lancaster.
So here we are, back in our time, and people are walking around
Steinwehr Avenue. It’s late
at night and people are looking in an old photographic store and they
see a man in a coffin, with a lady dressed in black standing over him.
It is very odd in this time period, to see something like that.
Next day they come back to see the dead man in the store.
Oh no, there’s no dead man here.
Oh yes, there was a door here last night, just behind that
pegboard. This kinda shocked
the people who worked in the store because they didn’t know about that.
Peppy muses that, rather than ghosts, it is another time that is
intersecting with us.
The last story on the record is about the
Cashtown Inn. The Cashtown
Inn was built in 1797. It
didn’t open as an inn until 1815. The
reason is called the Cashtown Inn is because the first owner, Peter
Marck, only accepted cash in his establishment.
Other places allowed you to work it off or barter for your room,
but not Peter Marck. It was
strictly cash. When the
stagecoach drivers were coming up to the inn, they would yell to the
passengers to make sure they had cash.
So that’s how the town was named.
There’s a famous illustrator named Dale Gallon.
One of his nice works of art shows AP Hill in front of the
Cashtown Inn. The scene has
been reproduced in the movie Gettysburg. In the movie
it shows our old friend Patrick Falci as AP Hill.
During the Civil War, the innkeeper at the time claimed that
Robert E Lee was no more than 20 feet from my bar.
The road going through Cashtown was Lee’s most valuable supply
line. The town was the
headquarters of AP Hill.
Now, Gen. Hill suffered from a multitude of ailments at this time.
When he saw this place, he made up his mind that this is where he
wanted to stay. It’s got all
the things that makes up a good headquarters.
It’s got a spring, two big ovens, plenty of rooms, and everything
you need to support a commercial bakery.
That is what he did.
They turned out bread for his entire army.
And the hierarchy of the Confederacy actually stayed there.
Peppy has a book about the haunted Cashtown
Inn. The book was written in
the 1990s by the owners of the inn at that time.
These people bought the inn before they knew the inn was haunted.
However, they soon found out.
Once they discovered this fact, they decided to feature it.
In each room of the inn there is a journal.
There are instructions that if you see anything unusual you are
to write it up in the journal.
Peppy proceeded to read some of these journal entries.
I’m only going to reproduce one here, so that you can get a
flavor of this haunted place.
The innkeeper, Mrs. Hoover, confronted the ghosts and said, “I
don’t know how many of you are here, but can we make a deal?
I will not bother you if you don’t bother me.”
She also related the story about how the chef heard the crashing
of china in the kitchen.
Certain that all the plates had fallen on the floor, they rushed into
the kitchen to find that nothing was out of place.
These are the kind of things that happened at the Cashtown Inn
and they are still happening today.
Last changed: 11/21/18 |