Short Stuff: The Devil's Den

The Devil's Den is the sight of one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. Is it haunted? Nope. But still creepy. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck,
There's Jerry A. K. Lucifer the Lightbringer, and this is
short Stuff, the Civil War Death Edition. That's right, and
it is uh, Halloween time. It is October, freak October.
So we're gonna be peppering in some little spooky content

(00:25):
here and there. I'm so psyched. This is one of
my favorite holidays. I think we have this conversation every year,
but let's have it again Christmas and in Halloween. Isn't
Halloween your favorite of all time? Though, I mean they're
both up there, like from October on. I'm pretty I'm
a pretty happy guy. I'm here. I'm so angry the
rest of the year. I know it's kind of freaky.

(00:47):
I'm so angry because we're in approaching mid September and
it's at the high nineties here in Atlanta. Still yeah, well,
I mean that's Atlanta weather. It's weird, weird weather, and
it has been forever. Do you want to talk Confederate
and young and soldier ghosts? Yeah? I don't want to,
but I will um so the Battle of Gettysburg in particular,

(01:09):
Chuck was I guess it was the bloodiest battle of
the entire Civil War, I believe, so maybe the most.
I don't I don't want to say the bloodiest battle
in American history, considering all the other wars we've been in,
but it was a bad one on American soil. I
was certainly, Yeah, yeah, for sure. But over the course
of three days at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania population at the time

(01:30):
about two thousand, so it's actually probably a pretty decent
sized town. Um, the Union troops and the Confederate troops
about a hundred and sixty five thousand troops total, all
gathered there at Gettysburg and said let's fight, and over
three days, something like seven thousand people died, with fifty
one thousand, one d and twelve casualties over three days. Chuck,

(01:51):
I did the math just with death's alone, almost two
people died every minute if you count every minute over
seventy two straight hours. Yeah, it was a blood bath.
And of course because of that, a lot of people
think Gettysburg is super haunted. There was one we're gonna

(02:11):
talk in particular about a place called Devil's Den, which
if you if you are near a computer and not driving,
you should look it up Um. It's a really interesting place,
these huge boulders. It's like a maze of boulders between
a couple of other rocky hills, Big Roundtop and Little Roundtop. Sure,
although it's spelled Little I'd like to call it Little Roundtop.

(02:33):
They didn't get really fancy with the naming. No, it's
a little straightforward, but okay, unless Big Roundtop is actually smaller. Yeah,
like Greenland and Iceland, but Devil's Den is this area
sort of in between them, with these, like I said,
these huge rocks, and because of the unusual sort of
topography of these huge boulders, because you know, you think

(02:54):
about the Civil War is marching through these wide open
fields and kind of shooting at each other. This was
a nightmare scenario for a firefight because you've got boulders everywhere,
you can't see around the corner. It was a really,
really fierce, bloody fight with tons of deaths and casualties. Yeah,
and there was even a place um in between I

(03:16):
think Little Round Top in the Devil's Den that was
the worst of all, called the slaughter pen because so
many people died in between this kind of open Noman's land.
There is a lot of death around Devil's Den, but
to make it even more kind of ghostly and freaky,
like even still today, if you walk through Devil's Den,

(03:37):
it's a little creepy. It's a little unusual, as as
this guy named Mark Nesbit, who is a former park
ranger out at Gettysburg turned paranormial investigator. As he put
it's basically like a giant just dropped huge boulders the
size of houses onto this one spot on the battlefield.
It's really unusual, it's really weird, and it'd be really
easy to hide just around the corner to be a

(03:59):
really if you put yourself in the mindset of this
three day battle, the bloodiest battle in American history, and
American soil going on and you're having to fight around
these boulders. The point is made by people who believe
in such things that this kind of um horrific emotion

(04:20):
endured by this many people collectively at the same time
surely must have lent some sort of imprint to the area.
And that's kind of given this idea that Gettysburg in
the battlefield are one of the most haunted places in America.
That's right. So on day two of Gettysburg, which like
we said, was three days um about Confederate troops attacked

(04:41):
the Union position on Little round Top. But remember Devil's
Den lies between Big Top and Little round Top, so
they had to battle it out at Devil's Den, and
they were led by the Confederate First Texas put a
pin in that very important and major General on bell
Hood was the commander of that unit. And here's what

(05:05):
they did. They took three of the Union's four big
heavy heavy artillery guns down, flushed the troops out from
Devil's Den, and then had sharpshooters just picking these dudes
off on Little round Top. Yeah, it was a big deal.
I mean, the Confederate First Texas UM saved the day
basically by by taking the Devil's Den, which is just

(05:27):
I mean, that's a that was a big deal overall, though,
the Union was was considered to have won the Battle
of Gettysburg because the next day there was Pickett's Charge,
which was a Confederate full frontal assault on the Union troops.
By full frontal assault, they mean that, um, they were
all naked when they charged. But it didn't it did

(05:51):
not work out, and the Union won. That won the
Battle of Gettysburg overall, but taking the Devil's Den was
considered a major Confederate victory in that in that larger
battle they said, don't fire until you see the whites
of their butts. Right. Terrible, but all in all, in
Devil's Den itself, I believe eight hundred Confederate soldiers died

(06:12):
even though they won an eight hundred Union soldiers died.
So in this relatively small area, that is twenty undred
people losing their life. And we'll talk about the ghostly
activity that resulted perhaps right after this. Okay, chuck, So

(06:50):
the Devil's Den was this, this place of massive casualties,
and it's a scary place on its own. It's an
even scarier place if you're fighting somebody to the death.
And then a hundred and fifty years later, it still
remains a very scary place to people who are say
paranormal investigators, ghost unners, or tourists who are into ghosts
and things like that. Yeah, So here's here are a

(07:12):
few of the stories. Uh. Once there was a young
woman who was climbing in these boulders with a friend
and she felt someone grab her ankle that was not
her friend, and She looks down and there's a young
man in a Civil War uniform. She screams for her friend,
looks back down. He's gone. That would be so scary.

(07:35):
Tell us about the helpful hippie, because this is a
good one. It is a good one. So there was
a woman back when Mark Nez bit that the um
Gettysburg park ranger turned paranormal investigator who also he wrote
like a multi volume book series called the Ghosts of Gettysburg. Yeah.
I think he at one point said, you know what,
park rangering, there's not a lot of money in that,

(07:55):
but you know what, there is a lot of money
in ghost tours and write possibly double Yeah, I would
think so. So Um he did uh make the leap
over as so many park rangers due to ghost hunter. Um,
but he was saying that while he was a park
ranger still a Gettysburg A woman came in and this
was years and years ago, who basically said, Hey, I

(08:17):
just saw this guy in the Devil's Den. I was
turned around, I got kind of lost, and then out
of nowhere, this kind of disheveled figure showed up and
pointed off in the distance and said, um, that's the
place you're looking for and then kind of vanished, and
the park rangers said, well, well, what did he look like?

(08:38):
And the lady said, get this, are we taking a break? No,
I was setting you up for the best part. He
already took our break, didn't we. Yeah, all right. He's
wearing a floppy hat, shoulder length hair, he's barefoot and
has ragged clothing. And the park ranger said, is there
a fish concert nearby? And she said, who's ish? And

(09:01):
he said it must have been a Civil War ghost. Yeah,
they they Mark Nusbit said, she basically just described what
a first Texas Confederate soldier would have looked like at
the Battle of Gettysburg. Case closed the end. Ghosts exist, right,
and this one and he was helpful hippie because you know,
he's telling everyone where to go, like, hey, you're lost,
just go over that rock over there, you'll be fine.

(09:22):
But he also looked like a hippie exactly right. So
this is another good one. I think this was about
twenty years after that one. Another woman comes up to Nesbit.
This guy's got a lot of great stories. Well, sure,
he collected him a multi volume series called The Ghost
of Gettysburg. She said she was in the Devil's Den
hiking around and a raggedy man with a floppy hat appeared,

(09:45):
pointed she was a University of Texas graduate I think
had a Texas sweatshirt on at least, and he pointed
at it and said first Texas and disappeared. He went disappeared.
She was like, uh, surely that was a first Texas
Confederate soldier named the helpful Hippie. I think it was. Yep.

(10:07):
She described it in the same way floppy hat, disheveled, barefoot,
rob right, and again he was really into Texas. So
I really feel like we're testing the boundaries of credibility
here at this point. But that doesn't mean that there
are a lot of people that go to Gettysburg every year.

(10:27):
Um who do say. I've had a weird experience there.
I didn't necessarily see anything, but my camera didn't work
on my phone, or my straight up camera didn't work,
you know, the original ones, the straight up camera or
the battery started to fail on my phone. But weirdly,
once I left Devil's Den or the battle or the battlefield,
like my phone sort of working, my camera started working.

(10:48):
It's like it didn't like to work there in that area.
Mark did Mark Nesbit, being the author of a multi
volume series called The Ghost of Gettysburg Um says, I
got it. I know exactly what's going on here. That's right.
Are we taking a break? No, I'm setting you up again.
So he said, there's this famous photo that was taken

(11:10):
at Devil's Den of a falling Confederate soldier, uh lying
at where he was positioned as a sharpshooter but dead,
and he that you can look this picture up. I
looked it up. It's fairly creepy looking. It's very well
known image, but it was found out to be staged. Um,
not that this guy wasn't really dead, but this photographer

(11:32):
apparently dragged around this same dead soldier two different spots
for different photo ops, and this was one of the
places he dragged him. So Nesbit's idea here is this
whole cameras won't work thing is revenge against the photographer. Yeah.
From being he was basically like Jude Law and Road
to Perdition or something. I don't remember that movie well

(11:55):
enough to get that reference. He was a crime scene photographer.
He murdered people. Oh um, pictures of him yeah, he's
a he's a bad guy. Um, I don't think this
guy murdered anybody, but surely dragging a body around it's
just bad karma, I would think so. But um so,
I guess that's about it. There's plenty of ghosts there.

(12:15):
You can walk around Double's Den yourself and figure out
if you have camera problems, or if you have problems
with your phone, or if you see the helpful hippie
or somebody grabs your ankle, give it a shot. All
you have to do is go to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. True.
And for the record, we should point out the American
Battlefield Trust, which is in charge of preserving that historic site, says,

(12:36):
by the way, no such thing as ghosts, right, no
such things. Because they said, um, I love this quote,
we gotta read it real quick. Okay, okay, they said that, Um,
by all means, believe what you want to believe. But
please know that if water gets on a camera lens,
it's water, not a ghostly orb. If sunshines into the
camera lens, it's called sunlight, not an energy sphere. They

(13:00):
dropped their microphone, that's right, locked off. Well, we're dropping
our microphone too. You can read a pretty interesting little
article on how stuff Works about this and in the meantime,
we'll see you around Short Stuff Say Audios. Stuff you
Should Know is a production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.

(13:20):
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