PHANTOM ARMIES OUT OF TIME
Vincent H. Gaddis
Early on the morning of August 19, 1942, Canadian commandoes crossed the English Channel from Britain and landed at several points at and around the French fishing village of Dieppe. The hoped for element of surprise ended when the landing craft of the attackers were spotted by a port signal station and by armed German vessels escorting a tanker. Navigational errors upset the scheduled time-table; landings that should have been made under cover of darkness took place in broad daylight.
The enemy had been alerted and the Allied troops were mown down by a deadly cross-fire from mortars, rifles and machine guns. The beaches were carpeted with corpses. With the exception of the landing at Varengeville, five miles west of Dieppe, where the Canadians stormed the German batteries, destroyed guns and ammunition dumps, and took prisoners, the raid was a disaster. Of a total force of over 4,000 about 2,500 were killed, wounded or captured.
Nine years later two English ladies, Mrs. Dorothy Norton, aged 32, and her sister-in-law Miss Agnes Lawton, accompanied by Mrs. Norton's two young children and a nurse, arrived in Dieppe for a holiday. They found rooms on the second floor of a pleasant house facing the sea at Puys, a hamlet one mile east of Dieppe. During the war the house had been occupied by German officers, and the beach in front of it had been the scene of the most violent fighting. For several days they enjoyed their rest and recreation amid the quiet rural surroundings.
Before dawn on the morning of August 4, 1951, both women were awakened by deafening sounds of battle. To their ears came the rattle of machine guns, the sharp cracks of small-arms fire punctuating the explosions of shells, shouts, cries and words of command. They hurried out onto their balcony overlooking the beach and sea, but at no time did they see anything. Everyone else in the house continued to sleep. The cacophony of combat was theirs alone.
It began at 4:20 am. At 4:50 there was a lull in the bedlam, but it began again louder than before at 5:05. At 5:40 there was another lull, ending at 5:50 when the predominating sounds were the passage of planes overhead and the roar of dive bombers. The din of conflict faded into the distance at 6:20, ending at around 6:50.
Realizing they were having a supernormal experience, the ladies had the presence of mind to take notes. Later it was discovered that their observations coincided with the sequence of events that occurred at Puys during the raid the time of landing, the two periods of comparative quiet when there were pauses in the naval bombardments by off-shore destroyers, and the arrival of forty-eight Royal Air Force Hurricanes.
The ladies wrote separate reports during the next two days and send them to the British Society for Psychical Research. The ladies could have had no foreknowledge of the ebb and flow of the battle since it was still under censorship. The official account of the Dieppe Raid was not published until five months after their experience. All possible explanations other than the supernormal were ruled out. The analogy between the sounds heard by the two women and those of the original raid plus the coincidence of the times eliminates mundane theories.
There was another time and another conflict the American Civil War. The Battle of Cedar Creek in Virginia was a bitter one, especially for the South. On the morning of October 19, 1864, Gen. Philip H. Sheridan's Army of the Shenandoah was camped on hills beside the creek. Sheridan himself was at Winchester on his way back from a conference in Washington. He had no suspicion that a Confederate force led by Gen. Jubal A. Early had been marching day and night, existing on short rations, to deal the Union army a stunning blow.
Early's surprise attack came out of a chilly autumn fog. After one round of musketry, the camp was filled with shouting rebels. The Union soldiers not taken prisoners fled with their own artillery, now in Confederate hands, firing into them from behind. The starved southerners, who had not eaten well for months, ignored their officers and fell upon the abundant food supplies in the storage tents.
But their victory was short-lived. Sheridan woke to the ominous rumble of cannon. He quickly dressed, leaped to the saddle, and raced toward the battle. Thirty minutes later he met his leaderless, disorganized troops moving north in defeat. He successfully rallied his men, turned them around and straightened his lines. As the Union forces advanced, the charging cavalry and infantry broke through the prolonged Confederate line in a dozen places. The rebels were broken up, scattered, flung back up the valley, and the Shenandoah campaigns ended in a triumph won in the shadow of defeat.
Here where the Union exulted in victory and the Confederacy suffered the anguish of disaster, here where men knew the agonies of pain and the shock of sudden death, the effects of violence and emotions linger. From time to time sensitive souls can hear the clash of conflict, the call of bugles, the shouts of men, the whine of shot, and the distant booming of spectral cannon. In a nearby church that was used as a hospital one can occasionally hear the cries and moans of the wounded. Sometimes, faintly, comes the music of a martial band playing, perhaps, a requiem for the shades of comrades long dead.
And along Indiana's old Wabash trail, from Vincennes to Lafayette, there are traditions of a phantom army. It is said that on certain moonlit autumn nights the expedition of Gen. William Henry Harrison marches again to battle at Tippecanoe. At first, dimly, comes the blare of a bugle, the beat of drums, the tramp of marching feet. The sounds grow in volume as the ghostly militia approaches, and one hears the cadence timing the steps and the shouted directions. Then, as the tiles pass on through the quiet night, they face away into the darkness.
These invisible armies from out of the past are not the earthbound spirits of soldiers doomed to eternally re-enact certain events frozen in history. No, they are audio soundtracks caught in the web of timelessness. They and their visual elements can be considered sounds and scenes impressed in the "psychic ethers" at points in space, parts of the great earth memory, the "Akashic Records" of Oriental philosophies.
While it may be assumed that all mundane activities are thus recorded, those emotionally inspired seem far more vivid. Thus a sensitive observer can clairvoyantly witness the re-enactment of a violent occurrence, say, a suicide or a homicide. If a single death can have such an influence, how much greater must be the effects of war, of battles with their mass fears and hates and multiple suffering and death?
Again, one may ask why certain conflicts [15] or scenes are more susceptible to sensitive persons that others? If this is true at Cedar Creek, why not at Gettysburg? If this was true at Dieppe, why not at Asnelles? We may surmise that there are places where, in effect, the veil is more thin. Clairvoyant observers have sometimes noticed that the vision flows and ebbs, clarifies and fades.
But it is possible that the observer himself is a factor, his degree of clairvoyance for example. We can only guess why the two English women heard the raid at Dieppe, although a number of persons have experienced the phenomena at Cedar Creek. Why is Great Britain subject to possibly more hauntings than other countries? Is the borderline between realms more tenuous there; or are the Anglo-Saxon values of ancestry, tradition and culture factors? At any rate Britain possesses an abundance of phantom armies along with its numerous individual ghosts.
Near Glastonbury the spectral footsteps of marching knights and the clanking of their armor can still be heard at night. In Wiltshire at Woodmanton, where Romans and Britons once fought, war horses have been seen galloping along the valley. An old house that formerly stood on the site of the Battle of St. Albans during the 15th century Wars of the Roses resounded to the clash of sword on steel. The building was called, "Battlefield."
The Battle of Edge Hill in 1642 was the first major conflict in the English Civil War. Although more than 4,000 men lost their lives, neither side won a victory. The carnage was so shocking that both sides refused to attack again the following day. Religious fervor was involved: King Charles I was attempting to force Anglican ceremonials on the Scotch and Puritan clergy. And so great were the psychic energies poured forth in this struggle that quite likely no other similar vision in history has been so intense in detail and so vast in scope.
The battle was fought during the afternoon of October 23. Just two months later, on the night of December 24-25 between midnight and 1 p.m., came the first re-enactment. Mysterious noises were heard. Bewildered countrymen, shepherds and some travelers heard the roll of drums approaching from a distance, then closer and closer, shouts and groans. Suddenly over the Warwickshire plain and on the slopes of the downs, in the air above the heads of the frightened witnesses, appeared the battle scene. They saw horses and men maneuvering, the swing of swords and the thrust of lances. They heard the firing of muskets and the discharges of cannons. The scene continued for about three hours, then faded away.
At approximately the same time the following (Christmas) night the vision appeared again. This time there were a large number of observers who had gathered on the plain from the surrounding villages. As the armies fought as ferociously as before, the terrified spectators, believing the battle was being re-enacted by demons, fell to their knees, praying to God for protection.
There was no return of the mammoth apparition during the next five nights, but at midnight of December 31-January 1, 1643, the battle was seen again, this time lasting for four hours with even greater violence and noise. And again the next night (New Years) at the same time. Another week passed with no visitation, then the scene returned on the nights of January 7 and 8.
A report of the visions reached the King at Oxford. In what may be the beginning of psychical research, the King sent three of his top officers and three private gentlemen to conduct an on-the-spot investigation. They were witnesses the nights of January 14 and 15, and so vivid and detailed was the spectacle that the officers recognized among the contestants men they knew had been killed, including Sir Edmund Verney, the King's standard bearer.
There is no record that the vision appeared on January 21 or 22 or thereafter, but it was definitely visible eight times to a large number of witnesses. Obviously we are not dealing here with spirits of the dead since the human images included the surviving soldiers. We appear to be dealing with a recording, comparable to a video TV tape with soundtrack, that when stimulated recreates sight and sound to the consciousness of an observer. Nor would such phenomena as this be a display of the rare gift of clairvoyance since all persons present could see and hear the battle.
The visions appeared on two succeeding nights a week apart, not at the same time as the original battle, but exactly twelve hours before and twelve hours after that time, always beginning about midnight. This brings up the question of cycles, which have been observed in other forms of psychic phenomena. The spectral ship of Northumberland Strait, Canada, appears annually either before or directly after the autumnal equinox, while the Lady Luvibund, another phantom vessel, has re-enacted its doom on England's Goodwin Sands every fifty years on February 13 since 1748.
We do not know why it happens, but it seems there are rhythms or cycles in the actions of natural phenomena from sun spots to economic trends, and from the metabolism of crabs to human emotions. Carl Payne Tobey, the mathematician-astrologer who discovered the prime dendrite (the formula for prime numbers that mathematicians had been seeking since the days of Euclid), has written: "It is a strange met that scientists searching for cycles in nature find cycles in almost anything, even in random numbers. Which implies that they are not random. In other words, there may be no such thing as random. Even that which appears to be random and chaotic may be in accord with some unknown design."
Thus psychic phenomena, too, may be "in accord with some unknown design," some rise and fall, ebb and flow of the cosmos beyond man's understanding. The vaster reality that exists beyond our sensory perceptions is doubtless subject to cosmic influences, causes and effects, and natural laws that we may never know.
Less than two years after Edge Hill, the Battle of Marston Moor was apparently foretold the night before when a troop of horsemen were observed galloping through the sky over Helvellyn. This conflict, too, produced its own restless apparitions. According to a writer in Myth, Man and Magic, the encyclopedia of the supernatural, as recently as 1932 "two motorists were startled to see cloaked men of Civil War vintage near the battlefield."
Many appearances of ghostly armies have no apparent relationship to specific battles, but are like rare glimpses into the Akashic Records; or could they be sightings into realms or dimensions parallel to or interpenetrating our own world? If the clothing worn by the phantom army is of the same period as the spectators, we can consider the possibility of a natural mirage. But when the same visions recur cyclically, this explanation must be ruled out.
For example there are the phantom soldiers observed in 1735, 1737 and 1745 on the steep slopes of Souter Fell in northern England, all three appearances being on the same holiday afternoon (Midsummer Eve). On each occasion a vast army came from the north, passed over the mountain side with its precipices, and disappeared in a niche near the summit. The north and west sides of Souter Fell are sheer 900 feet heights. No marching man could have kept his footing let alone the horsemen and carriages in the procession. On one occasion the soldiers marched five abreast for more than two hours, the vision ending with darkness. At the final appearance there were 26 witnesses, according to Harriet Martineau, the [16] noted English writer of the early 19th century, in her book The English Lakes. Another account appears in Christina Hole's Haunted England.
The observers said the troops occupied a space of half a mile. They were not vaporous or indistinct, but so real that several times on the following days a search of the slopes was made for hoof and footprints. There were some who believed that the apparitions were prophetic of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, but there is little evidence to support this notion.
Catherine Crowe, in her classic The Night Side of Nature (a book first published in 1848 which reveals how little progress has been made in the past century in explaining psychic phenomena), tells of several ghost army visions. Perhaps the most astonishing account was reported by Archibald Bell, a farmer of Inverary, Scotland, as having been witnessed by his father and grandfather about the year 1750. One morning the elder Bell and his son went to the village of Glenshiray to transact some business. On their return home about noon they suddenly observed a vast concourse of men marching toward them. The columns stretched so far into the distance that the rearguard could not be seen.
As it advanced and they walked slowly toward it, the two men noticed that the marchers were carrying a large number of different banners and standards, and were walking six or seven abreast. With them, as was the custom at the time, marched women and children on each side of the road, carrying pots, cans and other cooking utensils. The sun glinted on the muskets and bayonets carried by the soldiers who were clad in scarlet. The elder Bell,who had served in the Rebellion of 1745, assumed that the army had come from Ireland, landed at Cantyre, and was headed south to invade England.
When the vanguard of the army was some 150 yards from them, they noticed a body of about 40 men led by an officer on foot slightly ahead of the other troops. Behind this group rode an officer of Dragoons or so they concluded from the trappings on the horse. He wore a gold laced hat and a blue Hussar cloak. Both father and son said they had observed him so intently that they would recognize him instantly if they ever met.
At this time able-bodied men could be forced into military service and young Bell had no wish to become a soldier. He and his father climbed over an embankment beside the road and hid behind some them bushes a short distance from the dike. Then they looked toward the road.
The road, which a moment before had been thronged with humanity, was deserted! They rubbed their eyes. It was true! There were no men, women, horses or vehicles on the dirt road. And the elder Bell suddenly realized that there had been no clouds of dust when he had seen the armed force. A few minutes after the pair had clambered back over the dike, a neighbor appeared riding a horse from the direction of town. In reply to their inquiry, the neighbor said he hadn't seen a living thing since leaving Glenshiray. There were no footprints in the dust. Archibald Bell said his grandfather believed that the vision was a glimpse into the future, but his father insisted that the uniforms of the soldiers belonged to a past period. He added that both were abstemious men who had drunk nothing stronger than milk that day.
Catherine Crowe tells also of a large visionary army observed in Havarah Park, near Ripley, Surrey, in 1812 by a number of spectators. These soldiers wore white uniforms, but seemed to be instructed by a man in a scarlet one. After performing some marching exercises, they marched in order about a hundred yards from the witnesses and up a hill. Then there appeared another, more numerous body of men in dark uniforms, and they followed the other up the hill without any obvious hostility. Both parties formed the shape of an "L", then disappeared down the other side. In another case it was the barking of dogs and the nervousness of horses that drew the attention of witnesses to a ghostly army.
Over a period of several weeks in 1937 marching sounds were heard near the site of Thunderfield Castle, Surrey. The historical connection may be that the armies of King Harold stopped at the castle on their way to fight William the Conqueror in 1066. There is an old legend of a ghostly army in the neighborhood, but there is a theory that excavations at the castle may have caused the 1937 revival of the retrocognitive phenomenon. Harry Ludlam, in the book The Restless Ghosts of Ladye Place, says that a couple living near the castle site, Mr. and Mrs. F. Godden, have heard the sounds of tramping feet and a voice giving orders on a number of occasions. The sounds seem to come out of the air. One night Mr. Godden swerved his car to avoid striking the figure of a man wearing a red cloak, and the figure vanished. If related to the marching, this has been the only visible manifestation.
Other nearby residents heard the eerie marching during that period. Mr. F. E. Jones, while walking one afternoon to see the Goddens, heard coming toward him the faint, steady tramping of many beet. "Then as the sound became louder," he said, "the atmosphere seemed to become icy cold. The sound became louder until I was in the middle of an invisible company of men. Round me there seemed to be a clink as of metal. Gradually the sound died away. It was not imagination: it was something I cannot explain."
East of Asheville, North Carolina, is a beautiful, strange country, a haunting region of mountains, valleys, dark caves, and mysterious phenomena. Near Morganton is Brown Mountain with its enigmatic lights that appear and vanish and areas elusive as will-o'-the-wisps. There is Shaking Bald Mountain where thunderous rumbling emanate from its rocky heart. And there is Chimney Rock Pass where the highway cuts through a spur of the Blue Ridge. Here it was that a phantom army fought a cavalry battle in the year 1811.
There were five known eye-witnesses, and their sworn accounts attracted a great deal of attention at the time. They testified that for several evenings while sunlight still lingered on the mountain summits, they had observed two bodies of cavalry advance toward each other across the sky. They saw them meet in furious conflict, striking with flashing swords as they maneuvered their mounts, and they heard the sounds of battle followed by groans and shouts of victory as the scene faded into the shadows of dusk.
So much public interest in the report was expressed, that Generals Miller and Walton secured affidavits and a public meeting with the witnesses was held in the nearby town of Rutherfordton. There was some speculation that it was a vision of an encounter between British and Continental cavalries during the War of Independence.
Five years earlier, in July, 1806, in this same area, there had been another vision in the sky, but the figures were not those of soldiers. On the contrary, the spectral beings resembled an angelic host. The apparition came into view late in the afternoon of a warm, sunny day near Chimney Mountain. A number of witnesses watched a crowd of literally hundreds of beings, resembling humans, as they passed through the atmosphere in a long procession. They ranged in size from seemingly tall men to infants, all clad in brilliant white raiment. Rising up into view from the side of the mountain with most of the mountain top visible above them, the figures moved to the north and gathered around Chimney Rock.
When all but a few had reached the rock, several of the glittering white forms rose above the others who then began circling the rock at about the rock's height. A few minutes later the figures that had risen moved to a point about 20 yards from the rock's summit. They were followed by the rest in a procession and at that point one by one they vanished. According to an affidavit signed by the observers, the disappearance left "a solemn and pleasing impression on the mind, accompanied with a diminution of bodily strength." The vision lasted for about an hour.
During the Civil War, at mid afternoon on October 1, 1863, six witnesses a few miles west of Lewisburg, West Virginia, beheld a bewildering sight. They were Moses Dwyer, a farmer, four ladies in his household and a servant girl. It was a hot, cloudless and windless day. Suddenly Dwyer, who was seated on his porch, noticed just above the tree tops on the adjacent hills to the south, an immense number of what appeared to be small white clouds. They were about the size and shape of house doors, tinged on their edges with light green. They passed rapidly through the air in a consistent formation.
After they had passed out of sight, the scene changed from the air above to the earth beneath. In the valley below the farm there appeared thousands of apparent human beings, traveling in the same direction as the clouds, moving rapidly, and marching in order 30 or 40 in depth. They began ascending the almost insurmountable hills on the opposite side of the valley. Their arms, legs and heads could be distinctly seen in motion. Some were large; others were quite small.
Although they seemed to observe military discipline, they did not appear to be soldiers. They all wore white shirts and trousers, and no weapons of any kind were visible. They passed up from the valley, over the hills, disappearing in a direction due north from the farm.
In Frank Moore's book The Civil War in Song and Story, published in 1889, an almost identical vision was seen 14 days later by ten Confederate pickets and by a number of citizens at Runger's Mill, also in Greenbriar County, West Virginia.
Many persons in Virginia and Delaware saw similar ghostly figures as well as soldiers in the heavens during the autumn of 1881. In late September in Virginia the Warrentown Solid South announced that a "number of reliable and responsible people saw an apparition in the heavens at about 10 p.m. of white robed figures which were supposed by those who saw them to be angels." On October 7 the Richmond Dispatch published an account from their Frederickburg correspondent. It stated that "many persons in this community claim to have witnessed a most alarming sight in the heavens just before daybreak. The heavens are said to have been lighted and vast numbers of soldiers appeared, uniformed, armed and drilling."
In Delaware at Wilmington the citizens were "greatly excited" when witnesses said they observed "platoons of angels slowly marching and countermarching to and fro in the clouds, their white robes and helmets glistening in the light."
This same account states that William West, a farmer living near Georgetown, saw "bands of soldiers of great size, equipped in dazzling uniforms, their muskets shimmering in the pale, weird light that seemed to be everywhere, marching with military precision up and down and presenting arms. The vision lasted long enough to be seen by a number of West's neighbors. Many people living near Laurel, many miles away, saw the same extraordinary phenomena; in Talbot County the illusion was seen by numbers."
A story by Arthur Machen is said to have inspired the famed tale of the "Angels of Mons" in World War I. At the moment when German forces were about to overwhelm the British Army during its retreat from Mons in 1914, spectral warriors - English bowmen from the field of Agincourt - intervened and kept the Germans at bay until the main army succeeded in making good its escape.
Despite the Machen story, a number of soldiers gave testimony that they had actually seen a phantom army at that time, or something very like it. Their accounts were published at the time in British newspapers, and in books by Harold Begbie, Ralph Shirley and in Hereward Carrington's Psychical Phenomena and the War. It remains a matter of controversy.
However, a similar report by Capt. C. W. Haywood was published in the English National Message magazine in 1940. The captain said he was an intelligence officer in World War I on the First Army Front. An exceptionally heavy bombardment routed Portuguese troops from their trenches near Bethune, and the British had to retreat to avoid being flanked and destroyed. Bethune was being subjected to intense German fire, when suddenly the shelling lifted to burst on open ground beyond the town bare of trenches, houses and even trees. The British watched in amazement.
Captain Haywood said he made his way to the edge of town when the tiring mysteriously ceased and he discovered that the Germans were rapidly retreating in disorder. He ordered his men to pursue the Germans and bring back prisoners, officers if possible, to find out what had happened. These orders were carried out.
The officers said that as a wind blew away the smoke from the burning houses, they saw a huge body of men clad in white uniforms and mounted on white horses approaching the town from the other side. As this weird cavalry advanced, their figures clearly outlined in the shining sun, the shells exploded in the midst of their ranks, but not a man nor a horse fell. Like a relentless incoming tide through the atmosphere, the white cavalry flowed forward, led by an imposing commander astride a charger and holding high a Crusader sword. Terror stricken, the German troops broke into panic, fled and left the battlefield to the Allies.
Ghostly armies have marched worldwide. In Hawaii as far back as native history goes, there have been from time to time mass materializations of the dead, usually at night. They have consisted of traveling crowds of men, women and children, laughing, singing, scenting the air with perfume of the mountain maile. Usually they were only heard, but sometimes they were visible to the living.
The late Max Freedom Long, Huna authority, tells of an investigator, Dr. John Tanner, who once heard the sounds of invisible feet shuffling along in a procession at night in the Waikiki district near the site of a dead king's summer home. He hurried to the old Royal Palace three miles distant. In a short time the procession arrived, but it turned away short of the palace and stopped upon reaching the royal tombs in the burial ground of the neighboring missionary (Kawaiahao) Church.
But it is the marching armies of Hawaiian warriors and their chiefs, carrying torches and beating drums, that frighten the natives. Anyone caught in their line of march is left dead, so the living, when hearing or seeing the approach of these bands, flee or hide at a safe distance until the marchers have passed.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941. On the night before December 6 two warrior armies marched. The story is told in Paradise of the Pacific magazine, published in Honolulu (Dec., 1943, issue). Were these manifestations auguries of the assault about to begin?
Near the village of Maluhonua, not far [18] from Pearl Harbor, the residents were awakened by the sounds of marching men shortly before midnight. Some went to the doors and looked outside, but they could not see, only hear the grim tramp. It was coming from the heiau (ruins of an ancient temple platform) at the head of the valley, then it passed through the village and outward to the sea.
A scream of mortal agony had been heard during the march in the valley above the settlement. The next morning the lifeless body of one of the young men of the village was found on the trail. There was no mark of violence upon him. Perhaps, said the elder natives, he had been taught in a modern school that the magic of the ancient Kahunas was only superstition, and he had paid with his life for his skepticism. And on this same night at about the same time there had been a similar march in the Lumahai Valley on the island of Kauai. The body of an elderly Japanese man was found in the path of the marchers.
After the Pearl Harbor attack, the Japanese invaded the Philippines. Manila and Cavite were taken Jan. 2, 1942. With the fall of Bataan on April 8 the Japanese occupied all of the mainland. U.S. and Filipino troops made their last stand on the island-fortress of Corregidor guarding Manila Bay. Here, in an elaborate tunnel system, officers and men, nurses and convalescents, lived a mole-like existence.
During April and the first days of May, the besieged garrison was the target of thousands of shells and bombs. The growing number of wounded taxed the facilities of the underground hospital; their suffering was intensified by shortages of anesthetics and other pain-relieving drugs. Supply ships were sunk by shore batteries, and dwindling food supplies reduced rations to a bare subsistence level. Flesh and blood could not long endure this merciless day and night pounding, nor could the island's defenses escape destruction. One by one the pillboxes and gun emplacements were knocked out. The end came on May 6. After five months resistance, Corregidor was surrendered.
Today ghosts walk on the tadpole shaped island with its three devastated square miles. The tunnel walls are crumbling and parts of it have returned to the jungle. Its inhabitants were interviewed by Lester Bell, military writer of the San Diego Union. They consist of a family of government caretakers, a small Filipino Marine detachment, and a group of firewood cutters.
They insist they have heard sounds from out of the past -- the marching of troops, the dragging of chains, the moans of men in pain. They swear they have observed phantom soldiers, unsubstantial but distinct. The Marines say they have nearly rubbed shoulders with the scouts of decades ago while on guard duty. According to the caretakers, a nurse in a Red Cross uniform and a redheaded woman wearing a gown have repeatedly appeared and vanished.
Frightened firewood cutters reported that one evening at dusk they had seen wounded and bleeding men running around near a tunnel entrance. Three nights later Florentino R. Das, supervisor for tourism for Luzon, made an investigation under bright moonlight. He and his wife seemed to hear men in pain. "The sounds seemed to be moving away toward the Malinta Tunnel," he said.
Memories of Corregidor are both bitter with suffering and defeat, and proud with courage and fortitude. As a former Philippine Defense Secretary has said, "It was here in this once-great fortress that the defenders fought almost beyond human endurance. From Bataan and here began the cruel and vicious death marches with agony at its ultimate. Indeed, why shouldn't it be haunted."
References
- Cavendish, Richard. Man, Myth & Magic: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Supernatural. New York: Marshall Cavendish Corp, 1970. Print. <http://amzn.to/1DmOJxm>
- Martineau, Harriet. A Complete Guide to the English Lakes, to Which Are Added an Account of the Flowering Plants, Ferns, and Mosses of the District. Windermere, 1855. Print. [Digital, 2nd ed.: <https://archive.org/details/completeguidetoe1858mart>]
- Hole, Christina. Haunted England: A Survey of English Ghost-Lore. London: B.T. Batsford, 1940. Print. <http://amzn.to/1sAtH5R>
- Crowe, Catherine. The Night Side of Nature, Or, Ghosts and Ghost Seers. London: George Routledge and Sons, 1848. Print. [Digital: <https://archive.org/details/nightsideofnatur01crowiala>]
- Ludlam, Harry. The Restless Ghosts of Ladye Place, and Other True Hauntings. London: Foulsham, 1967. Print. <http://amzn.to/XthGqd>
- Moore, Frank. The Civil War in Song and Story: 1860-1865. New York: P.F. Collier, 1889. Print. [Digital: <https://archive.org/details/civilwarinsonga00moorgoog>]
- Carrington, Hereward. Psychical Phenomena and the War. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1918. Print. <http://amzn.to/YXEOie> [Digital: <https://archive.org/details/psychicalphenome00carriala>]
- Paradise of the Pacific, Vol. 55, No. 12. December 1943. <http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/007130147>