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WWI Battlefield Ghosts

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minordrag

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If, as is generally accepted, a ghost is a some combination of intense emotion, unfinished business, and ignorance of death--abetted by some sort of psychogeography--shouldn't the abandoned trenches of the Western Front be rife with spooks?

American Civil War battlefields are replete with haunts; Gettysburg ghost stories are legion. I've heard similar tales from Culloden (sp?) in Scotland. What's strange to me is the dearth of ghosts from WWI engagements.

The Angels of Mons story has been judged apocryphal. But what about the blood-soaked fields of Flanders, the chalkpits of Loos, and Verdun? Does anyone have any tales of phantom sap lines, machine gun nests, or apparitions in gas masks?
 
You've asked the $64,000 question, why are some places NOT haunted when they should be?
Although I have another question for you. How many people are out on those battlefields in the wee hours? I'm not trying to say no one has been out there since WWI, I'm admitting my ignorance of WWI battlefields. Civil War battle fields are patrolled in the US, and the things the rangers saw while patrolling after dark, along with the things that Re-enactors witness when they're camping at the sites, were what started bringing the stories out in number as you would expect.
Someone also asked me once why aren't plane crash sites haunted. I found out several years later that many are. It just seems, especially in the states, that it takes a while for the stories to get around.
 
I do know that Gettysburg (the town and the battlefield) is a very popular tourist destination, not least now because of it's haunted reputation! Apparently, the spooks are about day and night. One tale recounts a group of re-enactors being approached by the apparition of a Union sargeant in the middle of the afternoon, who said something to the effect that "it's been a hard day."
 
Oh yes. One I've heard had a group bumping into a very young looking soldier in the small hours before dawn. He talked with them for a few, seeming VERY deep in his charecter, then gave them a small amount of his ammunition, having noticed they had none. (They weren't going to be using any (blanks) for a few days, so they weren't carrying any.) Later it was found that the ammunition he gave them was real, civil war issue. They never figured out who he was.
 
I've heard that story, and it seems destined for the "too good to be true" file. If there is "proof" of the encounter--live, 140-year-old ammunition in perfect shape, certainly it would have been submitted for examination.

Nonetheless, Civil War ghost stories are so numerous that at least some form of haunting cannot be discounted. Why not WWI? The scale of slaughter then made every previous endeavor shrink to insignificance.

I hope that I just haven't heard any stories, as opposed to there being none.
 
I wish I could answer, I've only got a further question to pose myself: considering practically every house in Britain - I stress Britain because we have a longer known history than the USA - must have a corpse nearby or a history of emotion, turmoil etc, when does a site become too old to be haunted? For instance, why are there never ghostly sightings of Picts or Jutes or Norsemen or Romans? There's a Roman castle near me but never any reports of centurions!
 
Absolutely. Plus there was a lot of real hand to hand combat. Horrific. There have to be some stories floating around, maybe they haven't all been collected into one book so they're spread out.
BTW, the ammo from the young soldier. I saw the story on a special on the Discovery Channel on Civil War Ghosts. The only other theory was that this kid had gotten it out of a museum somewhere. It was old, corroded.
Have you heard of Ol' Green Eyes? He's considered by some to be a legend, but he's still seen, even by the rangers.
 
I can't find the thread, but there was much discussion of a Paleothic spook (furskins, club/spear) that furiously rode a horse beside a roadway. There was likewise a siting of a Roman patrol in the last century--cut off at the knees because the floor was higher than in their time.

Those who are better informed please chime in. Meantime, I'm going for the "most posts in your own thread" award.

:D
 
Hayzee,
Sometimes ghosts are reported less and less until they finally seem to be gone wherever they go. But there was a sighting of a Roman soldier, in London. In a sewer. A worker who had gone down (alone) to check out a trouble spot watched a roman soldier walk by him, apparently still walking guard duty. It was surmised that the reason the ghost was in the sewer was because he was walking on the level where the road was in his time.
Anne Bolyne and Lady Jane Grey are still around I hear.
 
if you've ever been out to the WW1 battlefields you'll notice that there are enough ghosts there without actually having to 'see' anything, the atmosphere is tremendous in it's sadness, and deeply moving. The locals know of the physical ghosts, vehicle noises, lights in the woods, shouts, screams, but just being there is enough without all that, the whole place is haunting. If anyone ever has a chance to go out there, take it, i'm not in to WW1 but went to keep a mate company and it's pretty vast what you see...









...and the beer's cheap in Belgium ;)
 
Well, if ghosts are caused by sudden/violent/nasty deaths, why aren't the streets of London, Dresden, etc. full of ghosts from World War 2?
 
who said they are? 'Some' ghosts occur in these circumstances, sure, doesn't mean that one is created after every sudden/violent/nasty death
 
Once while travelling around Europe I got an instant migraine when we crossed the border while taking a shortcut through Germany. For the whole journey (and brief stop for lunch) I felt uncomfortable. Later I discovered that the area had witnessed some fierce fighting during the second world war.

Mayby the ghosts of some mass-deaths are just to vast for a simple haunting; I wonder what the ghosts of the WTC will be like?
 
Mayby the ghosts of some mass-deaths are just to vast for a simple haunting; I wonder what the ghosts of the WTC will be like?
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They're planning on rebuilding on the same site. I haven't heard even a whisper about supernatural vibes from the site, just how it still impacts on an emotional level. It's still too early.
 
I visited some of the major battlefields (Flanders, Ypres etc) on a school trip a couple of years ago. Most of the time, the atmosphere wasn't very solemn (surprisingly enough), so there wasn't really much "atmosphere". I reckon any atmosphere people feel there is created by the company they're with, the weather and their preconceptions. The one unpleasant thing I do remember was the awful stench in some of the cemeteries - apparently the smell of rotting flesh (?!).

Also, the nice Belgian hostel people had made us packed lunches containing some very dodgy boiled eggs. Someone asked the teacher if we could go into the cemetery and have an egg fight... said teacher was not amused at all for some reason... ;)

As for Roman battlefield ghosts, I was under the impression that there were quite a few - having read many accounts of roman armies marching in front of cars at night and so on.
 
Phill James said:
who said they are? 'Some' ghosts occur in these circumstances, sure, doesn't mean that one is created after every sudden/violent/nasty death
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Well, put it this way, they're notably absent from the aforementioned places. But this thread's theme seems to suggest that such paranormal events are imprinted in any given area by the historical events.
 
It's just that there seem to be no hard & fast rules with ghosts. We don't know why some people who die sudden & violent don't become ghosts and some who pass peacefully in their beds hang about for years. A couple people have said that the WWI battlefields are haunted, and, naturally, it depends on who is doing the looking. Some of us don't see them, even though we really want to.
 
Upthread there was mention of a ghostly Bronze age horseman - I think that I've found a mention of it on the FT websitehere. To quote from the above source:

"‘Time-warp’ road phantoms include Civil War soldiers, highwaymen, and World War II airmen, but occasionally they come from more remote times. Respected prehistorian RCC Clay was crossing Bottlebush Down, in Dorset, an area strewn with earthworks, during the winter of 1927–28. A horseman was riding on the Downs in the same direction. Slowing his car, Clay saw that the horseman’s legs were bare and that he wore a long, loose cloak. The horseman turned his face towards Clay and waved a weapon threateningly above his head. Clay realised he was looking at a prehistoric man. Horse and rider abruptly disappeared. Shepherds who used Bottlebush Down had seen a similar spectral figure there. What is interesting is that the prehistoric phantom clearly saw Clay."

I've know that I have a far longer version of the account in a book somewhere, but (looks helplessly around room at bookshelves stacked to capacity almost ceiling high) I'm not sure quite WHERE.

There's also a fairly well-known story of a phantom Roman army being seen marching across a hillside in the Lake District and a beach on the island of Iona in the Western Isles of Scotland is supposed to be haunted by the ghosts of monks who were slaughtered there by Viking raiders.

I remember reading in a book about hauntings that the author believed that ghosts 'faded' over time. He gave as an example the haunting of one stately home in England where accounts from the 18th century spoke of a "green lady", those from the 19th of a "white lady", or of simply the sound of rustling skirts, footsteps, etc. and those from the 20th simply of auditory phenomena or the opening and closing of doors. His suggestion was that, just like a recording on audio/video tape, continued 'playback' leads to a degradation of the recording - presumably until the recording/haunting disappears entirely.
 
Regarding why some events, such as World War I, don't create ghosts while others do, to some extent it might be a question of reporting. I live in Scotland and I can't recall offhand hearing any accounts from France or Belgium about ghosts associated with that conflict. However, it could be that such reports appear regularly in Continental local or national press and simply aren't picked-up by the British newspapers.

If there are any members of this board who do live in mainland Europe perhaps you could confirm whether or not there are any such reports over there :?: I would certainly be fascinated to hear of any.

Alternatively, we could try theorising :) If we were to accept (for the sake of argument) that the stone-tape theory is correct - then for every traumatic occurance that takes place to be recorded we would have to further theorise that the stone-tape (whatever it may be) has infinite 'recording capacity'. What if, instead, there is only a certain amount of information that a given stone-tape can record.

Therefore, the deaths of millions of men in relatively confined areas of country at the Somme, Flanders, Ypres, etc. often over a very short period of time might be simply too much for the stone-tape to record.

To continue with the analogy to a tape recorder it could be like trying to record three hours of music on a 90 minute tape – this though would suggest that there would be that ’90 minutes’ of ghosts.

Alternatively, could it be that the sheer ‘volume’ of recordable events overwhelms the ‘tape’ (like a microphone being unable to cope with an extraordinary volume – just recording distortion). This could possibly account for any lack of ghosts from WWI, the London Blitz, etc.

Having just read all the above – I’m just reflecting that building a theory upon a theory is less than a great idea :oops: – but rather than deleting it all I’ll just allow it to stand. You can tear it all apart at your leisure. :D
 
Calgacus03, you could be righht about masacres etc overloading whatever it is that causes us to see/hear/feel ghosts, this could be why when many people describle battlefield they feel is a heavy oppresive feeling as you put it "like distortion" I know thete are acouple of places in Gettysburg where I either wanted to pass out oor throw up because of the atmosphere.
 
Hayzee Comet~ said:
I wish I could answer, I've only got a further question to pose myself: considering practically every house in Britain - I stress Britain because we have a longer known history than the USA - must have a corpse nearby or a history of emotion, turmoil etc, when does a site become too old to be haunted? For instance, why are there never ghostly sightings of Picts or Jutes or Norsemen or Romans? There's a Roman castle near me but never any reports of centurions!
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Ok, I know this post is a bit old .. but.... in the Picts/Jutes/Norsemen or Roman times, very little of Britian was occupied. I know that 100 years ago, every house I've lived in was farmland. People tended to live for generations in the same place.
 
NilesCalder said:
"Mayby the ghosts of some mass-deaths are just to vast for a simple haunting; I wonder what the ghosts of the WTC will be like?"
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Might it not be that some mass deaths are too vast to NEED ghosts? The WTC dead were neither unmourned nor forgotten. The same is true of those killed at Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Interestingly, though, there seems to have been considerable psychic phenomena associated with the crash of Flight 93 in Pennsylvania the same day as the WTC holocaust. Some accounts are supposed to have been personally collected by the county coroner/medical examiner, who is said to be a Fortean.

And in any case, it does not neccessarily seem to be the number of deaths which causes hauntings. The loss of tens of thousands of soldiers in a battle may not produce noticeable aparitions, while the loss of six or eight people in a falling elevator may result in an office building or a hospital running hot and cold ghosts.
 
Or Try It This Way

Or try it this way - any soldier entering into a theater of battle realizes that his life is on the line and that he has a chance of dying. In fact, any soldier who enlists or is drafted into the military gains a sense of his own mortality (very often for the first time), even if he never sees combat.

Bur people DON'T board elevators expecting to die.
 
ttaarraass said:
"The one unpleasant thing I do remember was the awful stench in some of the cemeteries - apparently the smell of rotting flesh (?!)."

That's weird in itself, since the bodies should have been entirely skeletonized before the 1920s were out. Unless the bodies were EXCEPTIONALLY corpulent - but you're not going to have that with young combat men. And even then the bodies should have been skeletonized long before the 1990s.

What it sounds like is a really bad problem with a contaminated water table (sewage and the like) rising to within a few inches of the surface. We've had that problem with a few cemeteries here in the United States.
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minordrag said:
"If, as is generally accepted, a ghost is a some combination of intense emotion, unfinished business, and ignorance of death...."

But that's the ONE thing the fighting men on both sides were NOT ignorant of - DEATH. They lived, wrote letters home, ate and slept right next to their dead and badly decaying comrades. They knew full well that their own deaths might be just more statistics and that those odiferous friends with whom they shared their muddy home could well be them in a few more days or weeks.
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I can't help feeling it would be a lot easier to "see a ghost" in a deserted field, miles from anywhere, than in the middle of New York.
 
I would go down the same road as CALGACUS03 on this
maybe the sheer amount of death was so huge that it could take the stone/water tape a hell of a long time to process it. I know quite a few people who have went to the battle fields and cemeterys of WWI and WWII and every single one of them admitted to the feeling of sadness and they all cried.
Strangley the WWI cemeterys seem to have had a more powerfull effect.
 
BIg_Slim said:
"Strangley the WWI cemeterys seem to have had a more powerfull effect."
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I understand that the First World War had a much higher fatality rate, per capita, than the Second, due to both more primitive medical care and cannon-fodder infantry tactics. ("You boys run directly into that massed machine gun fire, for Kaiser/King and Country.")

In one Great War battle alone the British Isles are supposed to have lost more men than the entire British Empire during World War Two!

(I don't remember the name of the battle - but it lasted for approximately two weeks. Might this have been the Battle of the Marne?)

And the Second World War didn't wipe out an entire generation of young British men, including the cream of the literary elite, as did the First.

P. S. For what it's worth, historians tend to view the First World War as much more historically important than the Second.
 
Not related to the Great War as such - but I visited Normandy about 15 years ago and found the atmosphere to be very eerie, considering the many lives that the beach claimed. Not sure of any hauntings in the area though, as I was a mere school kid at the time.
 
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