“I could smell his blood”
Suddenly, right before her eyes three long-dead children from a different time appeared. Children that no one else could see. “They were beside the tour guide,” recalls Felicia Rizzo, who was visiting the National Soldiers’ Orphans’ Homestead in Gettysburg. “They looked dirty and were in rags.”
While their image was unsettling, what they communicated to her haunts her still. “They kept saying, ‘Make them stop,’” she says referencing the tour guide who was speaking about the mistreatment of countless children at the orphanage. “’Please make them stop because every time they talk about it, they make us relive it.’”
Rizzo, along with Gettysburg resident Jim Rada, are the co-authors of a new book, Historic Haunts: The Gettysburg National Soldiers’ Orphans’ Homestead. The book not only details the history of the orphanage but its suspected paranormal presence. A topic Rizzo understands quite well. She is a sensitive as are members of her family.
“That’s why I wanted her to help write the book,” says Rada, an established and award-winning historical fiction and non-fiction author. “She is essential to this. I do the history part and with her experience as a sensitive, she can take the paranormal end of it. She just brings insights into it that I doubt I would have.”
Historic Haunts: The Gettysburg National Soldiers’ Orphans’ Homestead is the first in a series by Rada and Rizzo exploring the history of haunted places. This is Rizzo’s first book and Rada’s first on the paranormal. Rizzo, who is the published author of several short stories, says she relied on archives and journals to piece together the paranormal part. “I was able to find things that went clear back to 1800s,” says Rizzo, an elementary teacher and previous Gettysburg resident.
Both Rizzo and Rada have experience leading ghost tours in Gettysburg.
The orphanage, according to Rada and Rizzo, is considered one of the most haunted places in the country. The building where the orphanage was housed was originally built in 1836 with the orphanage opening its doors in 1866.
Visitors, ghost hunters and paranormal investigators have reported the disembodied cries of children, shadowy figures in tattered clothes and the slamming of doors. Rizzo herself experiences a “great sadness” when she steps into the building. “A heaviness,” she says.
But before there was an orphanage there was a soldier who was fatally injured at the Battle of Gettysburg and was found clutching a photo of his three children. This was the last image the soldier, Amos Humiston, saw as he died.
At the time, the story was picked up by newspapers across the country. And a successful effort was made to locate the family, including his three children, Frank, Frederick and Alice Humiston. The story would go on to inspire the creation of a national orphanage in Gettysburg for children whose fathers died in the Civil War.
And in the beginning, it was described as a positive place, with an emphasis on the wellbeing of the children. “But that changed,” says Rada.
That change was brought about by the arrival of Rosa Carmichael, the orphanage’s matron. “It became a house of cruelty,” says Rada of children who were chained in the orphanage’s dungeon-like cellar, starved and beaten.
One little boy, just four or five years old, was shut up in an outhouse as he screamed. “No one knows how long he was there,” says Rada. A young girl was made to stand on a desk in one position “till she had to be lifted down, exhausted and helpless,” Rada and Rizzo write in the book. Still other children were punished by being forced to stand in a barrel of cold water or have their hands tied to a split-rail fence in the backyard and left to bake in the hot sun. Some were shackled to the orphanage’s cellar wall.
According to Rada, local lore says that there was a 13-year-old by the name of Robert Turner who died at the orphanage and was buried on its grounds. He was only discovered deceased because “someone who knew him came looking for him,” says Rada. When asked what happened to him, Carmichael stonewalled, saying that he died as a result of an accident and was “buried somewhere in the back,” says Rada. Turner’s body was later moved to nearby Evergreen Cemetery.
Rada wonders if other children might be buried on the grounds as well. And oddly enough, a few years ago during renovation of the orphanage, which is now a museum, a tiny rib bone was discovered.
Carmichael herself is a mystery. According to Rada, no trace of her can be found prior or after her work as matron of the orphanage. “No one is sure what her maiden name was,” he says. “Or if Rosa Carmichael was even her real name. The only evidence of her existence is her connection to the orphanage.”
Her spirit, however, may still be there, described as the oppressive presence of a woman in black.
Not only did the children have to deal with the horrors of Carmichael, but it is also said they were visited by spirits. “The children were seeing ghosts while they were living in the orphanage,” says Rizzo.
One little boy told of a man who would come sit on his bed at night. According to the boy, the man was no mere shadow on the wall. “I could smell his blood,” the little boy was reported to have said. It is not surprising when one considers that before the building was an orphanage it was a Civil War hospital.
The children went through much among the living and the dead. Today, those that visit the orphanage’s museum sometimes leave toys. “I think these strangers, these people, want to ease the pain of what happened to those kids,” says Rizzo of the gifts.
It may be working. The spirits seem to be drawn to playful objects. Rizzo recalls an encounter she had with a balloon at the orphanage that seemed to have a mind of its own. “A red balloon,” she says. “Not full of helium or anything, just lying on the ground.”
The balloon began to move. “Not random, but intentional,” says Rizzo. “Like something was pushing it. It came right between my feet and then just stopped.” Almost as if a child were engaging her in play.
For Rizzo moments like these are powerful. “These were real people,” she says. “They may be stories to us, but they lived it. They may be long gone, but energy doesn’t die.”
The book can be purchased at this link.
