Do You See What I See?

Imagine you are in your kitchen, baking your favorite bread. What are you thinking about? Are you daydreaming about how good the bread will taste? Are you looking forward to sharing it with your family?

You are kneading the dough with your hands. It stretches and smooths itself beneath your palms. Its rawness has a smell that easily transforms into something you’ve experienced a million times. Maybe your mouth waters in anticipation over the aroma and the taste of warm, baked bread. Maybe you let your shoulders relax. And maybe you allow yourself to slip back to a time when someone made bread for you. When someone, maybe a mother or a grandmother served it with a glass of chocolate milk and a side of hugs and kisses.

I’m not sure that Jennie Wade was quite so relaxed on the day she died. When she was in her kitchen kneading dough and baking bread for the Union Soldiers who were fighting in the streets and fields around her house. She probably didn’t know that she was going to die that day, by a bullet that was meant for someone else.

Now, well over a hundred years later, tourists like myself still visit her home and linger in the kitchen, imagining what it was like to be Jennie Wade on her last day on Earth. The house is supposedly haunted, so we parade through, with cameras and recording devices, not only listening to our guide tell stories about those who fought for our freedom to travel, to visit places like these, and to write about them, but also hoping to catch a glimpse of someone or of some energy that stayed behind.

Although I live in a “haunted house” and I have experienced some pretty strange things, I consider myself a healthy skeptic. I do not believe that all things that go bump in the night are ghosts hovering over me, waiting for the right moment to possess my body. I exhaust every worldly possibility I can think of before I deem a situation unexplainable or paranormal.

So, when my family and I decided to spend a weekend in Gettysburg, we signed up for the tour, not only to learn about Jennie Wade’s life, but also to try and capture something eerie or jaw dropping. Something that would prove her house is as haunted as everyone says it is. We went in armed with cameras and open minds.

It was not our first visit to Gettysburg. We had been there a few times before, but we never had the opportunity to go inside the Jennie Wade House. The bullet holes in the door sent chills down my spine, especially when I put myself in Jennie’s place, in the kitchen, the heart of the home, baking bread, a comfort food, completely oblivious to her death date, despite the fact that a battle raged in the streets just outside her window.

The house felt old. The lighting was dim and there were many items left on display that I would not have chosen to furnish my own house with, but I did not sense anything that seemed haunted or sinister or paranormal.

I listened to our guide, dressed in period attire and married to his character. A good crowd had turned up, and the house was small, so I sidestepped through cramped spaces and tried not to loiter too long in front of mirrors—where I hoped to get a peek at a face from the past.

We were in a bedroom when I was taking pictures of the nightdress draped over a chair. I was hoping a filmy body might show up, to scare the bejeesus out of me when I would go through the images late one night. The ceiling was slanted, it bore down on us and tightened up the small room even more.

“Oh, I’m sorry. Am I getting in your picture?” a blond woman asked. She was wearing jeans and a hooded sweatshirt. She had been standing in front of me, but I shifted left so I could take my picture and not disturb her.

“Nope. I’m all good, but thank you,” I replied. She moved over anyway. After that brief exchange, I would not notice that she was there or speak to her again for the rest of the tour.

It was a few days after my family and I returned home before I looked at the pictures I had taken. I almost skipped over the one with the nightdress, but I backtracked because it looked like a headless, handless person was wearing it and sitting in midair.

After looking more closely at it and remembering the chair it was draped over, I almost swiped left again. Then I saw the woman I spoke to, politely moved off to one side. Her left arm and part of her back were transparent. My mind flipped through file folders, searching for a logical explanation. This can’t be right. I spoke to her. This has to be a camera malfunction. An overexposure. An underexposure. An optical illusion!

But then I saw the bed. The picture didn’t look burnt or smeared or washed out, like it would with typical camera or film malfunctions. I can see the bed through her body! And then I scratched my head some more, Are those orbs on her right shoulder?

I called my family in to question them. They were terrified by my tone and stared at me with eyes wide open and hands shaking, like when someone would steal the last Ring Ding from the box in the freezer and I would be on a mission to find the culprit. “Does anyone remember me talking to a blond woman in a dark, hooded sweatshirt, upstairs at the Jennie Wade house when we were there?” Slowly, they shook their heads, no and began to back away.

I could read their faces and their minds, Is this a trick question? Will she chase me down if I bolt out of here?

“C’mon guys,” I said, “Think. If I asked you in which episode of The Last Airbender Aang needed to learn fire bending really quickly, you’d not only know the episode name, but also the season and episode number. This is cake compared to that.”

Still, no one confessed to having seen her, and I was forced to let them all go. I was left alone with the one picture I could not have imagined I’d ever possess.

So, what do you think? Was it a camera malfunction? Was she alive? Or was she dead and attached to some family members on my tour? Could the spirits of the Jennie Wade house, maybe even Jennie herself, have leeched away some of this woman's energy for themselves? And if so, why? Was she a baker? A descendant of the family? Or are you all looking at the picture and scratching your own heads because I’m the only one who sees what I just described?