September 17, 2013
The Tillie Pierce House in Gettysburg was standing here when the battle occurred in July1-3 1863. Historically the basement hid wounded Union soldiers until the retreat of the South, and this area of town was right on the line which separated the armies. Almost without exception, all of the houses in Gettysburg have some paranormal activity. The number of deaths during those three days was astronomical for the U.S. population. The Tillie Pierce House is highly active. EMF activity came and went during the night, the detectors waking us up, and something knocked over the surveillance monitor screen even though the screen was supported. Unfortunately, none of the surveillance cameras were directed at the surveillance monitor. When I got out of bed and went into the restroom in the early morning hours, I walked into what I thought was a black widow spider's nest. If you have ever run a stick through a black widow's nest, you can hear the strands crackle as they break apart, and that is what I heard, and I felt the spider web against my face! I immediately backed out and reached inside to turn on the light, and there was no spider web. It was the first time I had experienced the spider web effect that other investigators have experienced. It is a type of free-floating electric field.
If you ask the matron who runs the house, she will show you the bullet hole in the hallway where a young man in modern times committed suicide but don't try digging for the bullet. The cops had already dug it out from the basement supports where it landed after exiting the body.
September 18, 2013
The Hoffman Mansion was one of the ghost hunt tours advertised in Gettysburg. While staying at the Tillie Pierce House, we jumped on board. The mansion is an alleged haunted house that was abandoned during construction in modern times, apparently right when they got to the point of installing the appliances. The rumor (as propagated by the ghost tour company) is that there was so much paranormal activity that the workers walked off the job, and no one else would come in to complete the work. The tour company claimed that this mansion was built over an older structure that existed during the civil war and was used as a field hospital. We took our equipment, but the tour also supplied some equipment, such as a FLIR unit which we had never used. So it gave us a chance to try one out. From use, I learned that Forward-Looking Infrared does not see through glass but can detect your reflection, which probably accounts for a lot of the visual sightings reported. We also discovered through public record research that this structure was erected in 1974 and made of materials unavailable during the Civil War.
We got a lot of nasty emails and comments from the tour company asking us to take the review down, but as on-site reporters, good or bad, we never back out of our findings, or lack thereof.