Rebel Spirits Read Online Free PDF Page B

before the candle’s just a waxy puddle and we’re all plunged into what Heathercalls “the dark depths of despair such as some of our resident spirits experience.”
    No one is taking this seriously, although Charlotte looks greener than most of us.
    We trudge up Steinwehr Avenue while Heather talks about the history of Gettysburg in a somber monotone so as not to disturb the spirits. She stops and lays her palm reverently on the ground. “In this very battlefield hundreds of soldiers lay wounded or dead.” We peer into the dark abyss of grass made black by night. “Some hear their piteous moans.”
    What I hear is a car full of kids racing up the pike, horns blaring.
    “Feel the breeze of passing spirits,” Heather drones. “I implore you to engage all your senses. See, hear, smell, taste, touch the mysteries around you.”
    I listen, look, touch the grass, sniff at the air. Nothing.
    Heather holds her lantern up to shoulder height so we can step around the breaks in the cement without stumbling into the gutter, and she leads us ghouls up the road. She has tales for just about every building. After a half hour, we come to Weinbrenner Creek. Suddenly the atmosphere changes and the hair stands up on the back of my neck and my arms. I interrupt Heather’s script: “What happened here?”
    She raises her lantern to highlight my face. Her look’s intense, jarring.
    “By July fourth, which wasn’t yet a national holiday, the Battle had ended. It was not the end of misery in this town, where bodies of men and horses were strewn everywhere. Even more tragic were the wounded who waited for help.”
    “But what happened here ?” I demand again, and Charlotte gives me an elbow to the ribs.
    “Patience. I’m coming to that,” Heather says. “Look down into the creek. Imagine four wounded soldiers writhing in agony. They’re awaiting rescue to a field hospital, too weak, too torn apart, to get there on their own. A driving rain comes. It rains so torrentially that the summer-dry creek fills with flood waters. All four soldiers are washed away, drowned.”
    I gaze down at the tall grass waving in the breeze. A raw, searing grief shakes me to my bones. I rip off the ghoulish glow bracelet and drop it gently into the creek — flowers on a grave.
    “I have to go home, right now,” I whisper to Charlotte. This all feels suddenly too real to me.
    “You can’t do that,” Charlotte hisses. “Next stop’s the cemetery. That’s the best part.” She pats my arm to soothe me, and I’m wondering what on earth just happened. It’s like a sudden storm surged through me, then passed almost as quickly.
    Heather’s lantern dances through the dark, then glows brighter as the moon slides behind a cloud. Heather leads us up the road toward the cemetery. Make that cemeteries , plural. Lucky Gettysburg, always obsessed with death, has two, right next to each other. There’s Evergreen, where, according to Heather, the locals have been burying their dead since 1854. Good to know life and death happened here even before the Battle. And there are still plots available, the sign says. Wow, something to look forward to.
    “Right next door,” Heather tells us, “is the National Soldier’s Cemetery where Lincoln gave his famous Gettysburg Address. But, sad to say, it’s locked at night. Still, it’s our good fortune that Evergreen has no locked gates, so, here we go!”
    A shiver runs through me, which I try to hide from Charlotte. She tugs me through the open gates. Just inside there looms a statue that looks totally black in the dark.
    “This is Elizabeth Thorn.” Heather pours candlelight over the darkened bronze. “She and her husband ran the cemetery during the Civil War, but he was off soldiering in another state and wasn’t a veteran of our local Battle. That left poor Elizabeth to do the work of two, and with a passel of young children, besides.”
    The statue captivates me. What was so special about this woman that