Hunting ghosts near hallowed scene

GETTYSBURG - Under a full moon, her hoopskirt swishing, Sandy Kime lights her lantern and sets off down the brick-lined sidewalks of this historic town, leading a flock of 16 people.

Then she pauses and begins to roll out her collection of ghost stories.

Standing across from an old-schoolhouse-turned-field-hospital, she recounts the tale of the wounded Confederate officer's emerging from a second-story window and floating down to what was a cemetery across the street.

A little farther along, Kime tells the group how students have witnessed an image of a freezing child known as the Blue Boy, appearing to cling to a dormitory window at Gettysburg College.

At the same time Thursday, other groups of ghost hunters trailed after costumed guides from other tour companies, passing each other, well, like apparitions in the night, in dark alleyways.

The afterlife is big business around here.

Bolstered by an explosion of cable-TV shows, books, and conventions focusing on the paranormal, at least 11 ghost-tour operators are cashing in on what has been called one of the most haunted places in North America.

Such tours operate nightly from about March to November - likely numbering well over a thousand during the peak tourist season - creating crowds and controversy in the town.

The website HauntedAmericaTours.com, which urges people to "ghost-hunt responsibly," features "breaking paranormal news" and the latest information on tours in many cities: Philadelphia, Charleston, New Orleans, Chicago, among them.

Gettysburg, however, stands alone as the site of the bloodiest battle on U.S. soil, which left 7,000 dead over three days. There were piles of limbs in the streets, men dumped in shallow graves, and burning horses. Witnesses reported that the streets and creeks ran red.

Kime underscores those conditions by asking her charges as they sit on the steps of the town library, "What do you think we are sitting and walking on? A graveyard."

Certainly there is no shortage of "disturbed souls" that believers say manifest themselves as ghosts: Union soldiers were buried in shallow graves for months before being given proper burial at the national cemetery here. Confederate soldiers were left to decompose as long as nine years before their bodies were shipped to the South.

The tragedy, combined with an estimated 200 Civil War buildings still standing, makes for great storytelling.

The ghost-tour trade has blossomed as more people seek explanations for the things that go bump in the night, says Mark Nesbitt, founder of Ghosts of Gettysburg and the father of the ghost-tour business here.

He offers a simple reason for the phenomenon: "There is a natural interest by human beings about what happens to us when we die."

Nesbitt, a former National Park Service ranger, led the first ghost tour in 1994, based on notebooks full of stories he gathered from residents.

Since then he has become the J.K. Rowling of the paranormal genre, writing seven books on Gettysburg ghosts alone. Some of his stories have been told on A&E, the History Channel, and the Travel Channel.

In the off-season, Nesbitt hosts public "investigations" at various haunted houses, including his own in the heart of town. Using various sound- and image-monitoring technology, they ghost-hunt.

Nesbitt says he has seen apparitions and heard inexplicable noises, but still counts himself among the skeptics on a quest for ultimate proof that ghosts walk among us.

"Just because you don't believe in ghosts doesn't mean they don't exist," says Nesbitt, who has expanded his business to Fredericksburg, Va., scene of another major Civil War battle.

People on Nesbitt's tours run the gamut from true believers to hard-core skeptics.

Mike Vax, a band leader from Arizona on Kime's tour, says he counts himself among the openly curious.

"Not that I've ever seen a ghost, but there are so many accounts and only a few places around, like the Alamo, where you think, 'My God, the people that died here,' " he says.

Jen Vanderau, who has worked as a guide for Nesbitt, says that as the daughter of a chemistry teacher, she has a "healthy dose of skepticism in my DNA."

But she became a believer in the paranormal along the way. There were too many incidents, including in her childhood home in Gettysburg, to discount the idea entirely, she says.

Regardless of what anyone thinks about ghosts, she says, the stories that Nesbitt and others have collected are worth sharing.

"If we go out and give people a shiver, that's cool," she says.

As the Gettysburg ghost-tour industry has surged in the last 15 years, it has produced more than a little tension between those who contend they are the "true" ghost tours and the newcomers, as well as between tour operators and the borough.

The Borough Council, fed up with complaints from residents about large groups clogging the sidewalks and disrupting traffic, in 2008 voted to enact an ordinance limiting the number of people on a tour to 26.

Now council members - at least one of whom called the tours "a nuisance" - want to increase the $150 permit fees, perhaps figuring that while you can't regulate ghosts, at least you can rein in the living that make a living off them.

Nor does Gettysburg National Military Park embrace the tours, which it bars within its boundaries, along with most other commercial enterprises.

Nesbitt and others contend that the tours bring tax dollars and people to the historic downtown, and provide a family-friendly nighttime activity for battlefield tourists.

What about the inevitable question from those reality-rooted visitors: Will I see a ghost?

"I tell them if I could guarantee that, we'd charge a whole lot more," says Nesbitt's wife, Carol.

For a $9.50 tour ticket, ghost fans will have to take their chances.