Gettysburg, Ghosts & The Civil War | Haunted With National Park After Dark

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Very spooky. Hi. Hello. I'm going to be very quick here because we have a very exciting collab that is about to play for you. It is with Danielle and Cassie from National Park After Dark. We recorded this so long ago. I think it was like May and it's finally coming out and you finally get to hear it. We love Danielle and Cassie so much so we hope you enjoy this spooky episode of Haunted with National Park After Dark and go check out our other part, part one, part two, I don't know how it works. You can listen in any order, but if you want to hear the other part, go over to National Park After Dark's feed anywhere you

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listen to podcasts and we're over there as well. Enjoy. Like we said in our

Shared interests and fears

intro, we have Danielle and Cassie here from National Park After Dark and we're so excited. Because I feel like we know each other and we have so much in common. Yeah. Beyond beyond just how many technical difficulties we have. So we're really excited to have you here. You guys are New England locals, too, for the most part. Yeah. Well, yeah, born and raised New Englanders, all of us. Is New Jersey New Jersey's technically not New England. You're the Northeast. Well, we'll expand it out and say Northeast. You count. We'll let you in. Thank you. You're in the club. I can sit. I can sit with you guys. Okay. But this is very exciting for us to be with you guys because we've obviously been listening I think I honestly think we have started listening to you guys we might be in your like first listeners. Oh, no, you heard our audio in the first episode. the same. See, nothing's very similar. We don't judge anyone. We started 6

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years ago. Yeah. Yeah. Well, in the past few years I feel like the topics that Sabrina and I keep coming back to that terrify us the most is what happens outside, which like when you think of ghost stories you often think of like the hauntings that happen in your own home. But we're like the scariest thing to us is like what creatures and what things lurk when you're just walking on a nature trail or you're like I'm going to be healthy today. I'm not I'm going to go for a hike and those are the things that just really freak us out and that's like your entire podcast. Yeah. I mean, we've also covered we love aliens, like abductions. I love aliens, I'll say speak for myself. Corinne, you love Bigfoot. There's so many we're drawn to stories of the outdoors. I'm not drawn to the outdoors because of all of these stories, but anyway, we're we're huge fans. That's what that's our big spiel. Yes, thank you. Thank you. I feel like a lot of the reason that so many people are interested in the outdoors and have this sort of whether it's a love or fear or

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interest is because it's this like primal feeling that the outdoors gives gives everyone and whether or not you're comfortable or uncomfortable or interested and want to become more comfortable, like that's what our whole podcast is about is even though we share some like pretty creepy and scary stories sometimes, like hopefully we both hope that it makes people want to go outdoors more and gives a love a greater love and appreciation for it. Okay, what is your I'm sure it's going

Scariest and favorite places

to be hard to pick, but of all of the research you've done, what is your what is the one you're the most scared of and then what is a place that you are like absolutely in love with? Oh god. one that I am most scared of, for sure, and that is the one that we covered The Night of the Grizzlies. That is the scariest story I think that we've covered and it was a story that happened in Glacier National Park and it's a true story where two different bear attacks

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grizzly bear attacks happened in the same night and multiple people were mauled and killed and it all led up because of things that were happening within the park where people weren't being bear safe and the whole ordeal ended up leading to the National Park Service and people regarding grizzly bears in a whole different light because at one point people were like, oh, they're fussy cute bears, it's fine. And obviously now we don't think that we're afraid, but I read the book The Night of the Grizzlies for it and the author goes into some really big details of what happened that night and what happened to the people who were mauled and those images just stay in my brain now for whenever I'm in grizzly territory. It's like, oof. Yeah, she definitely scarred the nation with that story with the retelling with that retelling of the story and speaking of that, we are going to be in grizzly territory. We are camping for

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combined 4 weeks in Banff, Alaska Jasper, everywhere for yeah, most of the summer. Yeah. Is this part of the trips that you guys host? Yeah. Yeah. Yep. All of July we'll be in Alaska and then in August we'll be in Banff. Oh my god. Okay, well, that's going to be stunning. Yeah. It's going to be great and we're really excited. It's just both of us being from New England and now living in Colorado and Vermont, obviously we we've visited grizzly country and we've you know, gone to different parks and wild spaces that have grizzlies, but we have never spent that much time on the ground in grizzly territory before. You know, in Colorado and Vermont we don't have them. So it's just going to be interesting to say the least. But the one thing I think in being afraid of them and having heard that story and read that story, you guys are going to

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be so overprepared. You have the respect for the nature, yes. Yeah. Yeah, there will not be a even a tiny crumb of food around me. spray, there will not be anything. I will be being extra safe. I'm I mean, I'm I'm mostly excited and I have slept and camped in grizzly territory before and it was okay. I have had a grizzly bear walk right next to my tent before though, also, so while I was while it woke me up, so I guess I wasn't sleeping the whole time, but So I've I've had it happen. It's it's scary, but mostly excited. So how do you feel

Wildlife encounters

about that video that just came out this past week of that woman who's taking selfies next to the bison in Yellowstone? Oh my god. I mean, honestly, that's something that like especially our algorithm comes up with videos like that all of the time and it's so frustratingly common

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and it's not okay and I just don't understand how like people haven't gotten the message yet, but 'tis the season. I mean, the summertime is when National Park Service is visited the most and unfortunately that also shows correlates with a rise in irresponsible behavior with wildlife and we will be seeing more and more of that over the next few months, unfortunately, and it's ultimately the the animal that usually pays the price, so. That's true. Yeah, it's very sad. Yeah. I feel like the weird thing where people and I was just I went to South Africa over like the holidays and did a safari and I feel like you look at this beautiful animal that you've seen in photos and stuff before like elephants. I love elephants. And you look at them and there's like this desire inside of you to be like they I'm connected to them and like they they see my soul and we'll bond, let me approach them and then it's like, well, no, they're animals but like fight or

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flight and survival is their main instinct and a lot of times that means that they're going to attack you if you're coming towards them. Which what happened to us because we're animals, too, and where did we where did all of our fight or flight drop off because I feel like half the time we don't have it anymore? Well, cuz we're top of the food chain. Yeah, I think it's natural selection also like you know, I just let that ride out. But yeah, have you seen that meme? It's like my toxic trait is thinking that I could walk up to a lion and it would sense my soul and I could pet it. Yeah. It's like so true. Like, you know, we all I think have that desire of Yeah. feeling connected to whatever, you know, you for elephants or whatever and it's just like but then your brain kicks in, you know, and for some people that part doesn't connect. You know, I really think Disney movies made this a thing

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for us though cuz if you look back at like every Disney movie, they're like singing with birds and they're flying and landing on them and they're petting raccoons and they're like in the forest wandering with all the beings and we're like, Tarzan, Jungle Book Yeah. Tarzan, Jungle Book, yeah. It's like I could be raised by gorillas. I

An unusual pet encounter

have a story for you that's from where you're from because it was I'm pretty sure it was it was either in I'm like completely forgetting of my own family's life, but it was either in New Hampshire or Maine. I had a great aunt and uncle who they lived for the majority of the year on this one little tiny island and there were like two or three houses on this island and they would only communicate with each other through a landline that only hooked to the other people's homes. Like you couldn't call out from the landline. And they were there. That's kind of cute. It's very very cute. It's like the bean cans on a string. Yeah, and if you wanted to go to shore you would have to

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get in a boat and make a big effort to go there. So anyway, they were there in the winter. I think they majority of the time wouldn't spend winter there, but there was one winter where they were there and they look out and they're like, "Oh my god, someone abandoned their dog here in the dead of winter." They were like this poor husky, this poor German Shepherd. They let the dog in, the dog is with them for months and then when it's finally time for them to make a voyage to the mainland, they bring their dog in which has been living with them for months now into the vet and the vet is like, "This is a wolf. This is a wolf, a wild wolf." They kept that wolf until the wolf died. I met that wolf when I was like 11 years old and it scared the [ __ ] out of me cuz they're like, "Oh come How big was it?" Wolf size. It was huge. And its eyes look at you and like all the hair on the back of your neck stands up. I don't know how they didn't have that instinct, but me as a child I was like, "Do not pet that dog." Okay, so do not try this

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at home, kids. That's a one-time anomaly. That is very interesting to me especially since I worked with wolves for a long time. Um and being it from New Hampshire and Maine area, we haven't had wild wolves in many, many, many years. So that could have been like a Like a hybrid? From Canada. Can you say someone who came down from Canada? Yeah, or it could have been a wolf hybrid. Somebody let their wolf hybrid out, didn't want it anymore and it wound up with your family. Yeah, I mean that would make sense because I can't imagine it would domesticate that much as like a full-bred wolf, but I don't know enough about wolves. So maybe it did, maybe it was a little anomaly. Well, there's a story we're going off the rails, but I'll just say. unhinged There's a There's a very famous book called a wolf called Romeo and it's based in Alaska, but it is a story of a

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wild wolf that had a very uncharacteristic affinity towards humans and domestic dogs. Um it's a really sad ending. So if people want to like if you want to ruin your life real quick, you can definitely read that book, but it reminds me of like the personality of that animal that you just described. So it happens, you know, it's not like unheard of, it's just super rare. But what an experience to have? We're not talking about like wild animals at all for once for our episode

Gettysburg paranormal history

which is very interesting. Um there's like We're talking about very little bit war Yeah, war. wild humans Yeah. wild humans Yes. And this is a topic that Karin and I have wanted to cover for a really, really long time. So we were so excited that this crossover worked out where we can do because it is such a big topic that it's like, "Oh, how do you cover it in just one episode?" And now we don't have to,

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we can do it in two which is great. And I feel like this is the perfect topic for us to do to go to Gettysburg because it's a mixture of the paranormal, it's a national park, there's tons of history and we I mean there's so many directions that you can go with this that to put it into two episodes is so perfect. Yeah, I agree. Well, and it already feels like it's a three-parter because you had an episode previously that where you covered kind of the the gruesome medical side Oh my gosh. of Gettysburg which I almost fainted listening to that episode. All the amputations. Yeah. I'm super into the medical aspect of I love Victorian medicine and like just the the [ __ ] honestly that was Victorian medicine and the Civil War was really a a big turning point for different aspects of that. So what better place to cover that topic than Gettysburg because it was so

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brutal. So we're really excited to come back to this park to cover stories that we didn't even touch upon in our first episode and then obviously having you guys come on and talk about the paranormal because that's something we haven't spoken about at all in regards to This is like one of the most haunted places in America for obviously a good reason. So we're I am so stoked to hear what you guys have to share. So I'm actually in Pennsylvania at my mom's house and she lives in Washington Crossing which is, you know, big Revolutionary War place where Washington crossed the Delaware. Like I literally walk past the Delaware River where he crossed it yesterday. Um and I was I So I'm 2 and 1/2 hours away from Gettysburg and I was like I texted Karin and I was like, "Do I go? Book a hotel and record from there?" But then we already have so many technical difficulties that we're like I was like, "I don't think so." Because yeah, spirits are notorious for [ __ ]

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with equipment and I feel like you're going to There's no way the recording's actually going to work if you go there. Yeah, especially while you're talking about them, too. Yeah. That's That's asking for it. be cool to like use I have this EVP app that Karin and I are like, "Oh, maybe it doesn't work." But then we had a live show and it for sure worked. So it would have been cool to use, but you know, maybe I'll go visit on my own time and report back. That would be cool. Yeah, after this after this you like have to, I feel is close enough. I feel like the Revolutionary War, Pennsylvania, I'm tangentially there. Yes, you definitely are. You're the closest out of all of us, so it counts.

Gettysburg battlefield overview

Well, let's jump into Gettysburg on that note. I mean we have so many things to talk about and for us for all of our podcasts and for our episodes for anyone listening who hasn't listened before is we like to talk about the park itself and talk about the area to start off with and then we like to go into the stories. And you guys covered this on

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episode 131, right? That of your show in the past in a different way. Just for people who like if they want more information. Yes. Yeah, so we dove into Getty I'm going to believe you with episode 131 because I don't know. But yeah, we did. So I covered Gettysburg in regards to the medical aspects of like injury sustained during the war and how amputations worked at that point in time and just kind of like the field hospitals and just kind of the carnage that was Gettysburg during that time. So for this episode we'll do another brief overview of the park and then we each have a different story like totally separate. So you'll get kind of like a two-for-one deal. Amazing. Okay. Well, going into Gettysburg, it's Gettysburg National Military Park and it is a site for the National Park Service and how you're saying you're in Pennsylvania, it is located in rural Gettysburg,

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Pennsylvania just 5 miles north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Gettysburg National Military Park preserves the site of one of the most consequential and bloody battles of American history. It was given National Park designation in 1895 followed by an addition to the National Register of Historic Places in 1966. Over the years the size of the park has steadily grown as more sites have been added, but as of right now it covers roughly 6,000 acres and features 1,300 monuments and nearly 150 historic buildings. As it is located just 50 miles north of Baltimore, the park is a day drive for millions of people including you, Sabrina. And um and so it has become a place that so many people can visit and the entire town and surrounding area preserves battlefields, taverns, historic inns, underground railroad sites, cemeteries,

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and more. While most of the parks we cover are playgrounds for outdoor enthusiasts, this park is definitely one that's for history buffs. The park's museum and visitor center houses a collection consisting of approximately 1.2 million artifacts, manuscripts, and works of art that document the Battle of Gettysburg, the American Civil War, and the development of the National Park itself. The park also preserves most of Gettysburg's battlefield along with many of the battle's support areas such as buildings that were used during the battles like homes and farms during field hospitals which Danielle touched a lot upon in our episode on our feed as well as locations that were not directly used during the battle, but in its aftermath. There is all There's also a sort of buffer zone around the park called Gettysburg National Historic District which is a district of historic properties, structures, and buildings numbering over a thousand. The district

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was added to the National Register of Historic Places in March of 1975 and covers a larger area than the National Park itself. What basically I'm trying to say with all of this information I'm throwing at you is that this is one of the most haunted places in America and we are going there today.

Women soldiers in the war

The amount of paranormal stories and things that come out of this, I'm sure you guys know because you both researched all of this which we'll get into on our on our feed, but for today we have two very different not paranormal stories just going into the history of it and I have actually decided to go into a topic that I hadn't really heard about before with Gettysburg and that is the women who were fighting in the Yeah. you mentioned you're were to do that, I looked up I think they're recorded maybe let's see. I wrote this down. There were quite a few women in the Civil War in general. I think it was

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400 to 750 or something like that who are said to have fought in disguise, which I think is so badass. But you never hear about that. Like when did we ever learn that in history class? We didn't. No. the first time I'm hearing about it. of. Right? It's so interesting and a lot of that I think it's for several reasons and one is women weren't allowed to fight in the war, so a lot of this was kind of lost in history because as you said fighting in disguise, these women were fighting as men in these battles. But when you really look into the history and when I was looking into it, there are so many occurrences where women were discovered where women were discovered either during their time there or afterwards where after the Civil War is over they're like, "Hey, by the way, I'm a woman. I know everyone gets a pension when we're done with this. Can I get my half now?" And they're like, "Hold on. You're a woman?"

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Wait a second. That's like It's like Mulan. Yeah, it is like Mulan. Yeah. Real life Mulan. I'm concerned. Do they get their pension? Like this is the part that I want them to be rewarded for their work. You know, it kind of went In some cases, yes, but for the majority of it, a lot of women weren't recognized, which is also part of why it is such a forgotten part of history today. Classic. I'm so excited to learn more. I Even when I was doing my research about Gettysburg for our first episode on it, I didn't see a word of this. Like a breath of mention of this in all of the sources that I was reading. So I am just like they were more of like women were nurses and assistants and you know, things like that. Which is obviously vital, but this is a completely different thing. Yeah. I'm pretty sure the Civil War is the most researched, well documented, or like

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there are more texts about the Civil War than any other war in history. And so the fact that women are hardly mentioned, I think is uh is a very sad fact. It is. And kind of like what Danielle was saying, a lot of it were these women who were found to be fighting. They're like, "Oh, you can't you can't be a soldier. Here, be a nurse." And they would shove women over to be the nurses and then they never really got much recognition because it was just it was the women taking care of the soldiers in the aftermath and I feel like kind of women fell into this category of they're just nurses. They're just taking care of the important people of the war. Where in reality, the women were doing a lot and women had a lot of opinions about what was going on and there were a lot of things happening where women wanted to be in the war and they were. And before I dive super into

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those stories, I just wanted to give a brief overview of what the Battle of Gettysburg was because I know we all learned about it in history, but I think for most of it us unless we're super interested in history, this was so long ago that we're like I know what it was. It was really bad. What else? Yeah, I definitely visited cuz I grew up in New Jersey, so I definitely went for like a school trip and I couldn't you know, I couldn't tell you until I doing all this research. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's kind of forgotten. It's thrown into oh, we live here. We're American. We learn this. And then we throw it in the back of our brains and we know it exists, but forget. So I just wanted to go over just very briefly what it was because the Battle of Gettysburg was a major turning point in the Civil War. It and the Civil War was a war that was being fought between the Southern and Northern states, which were the Confederacy and the Union. The war was fought over long-standing disagreements about how the country was

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being run in politics, economically and of course the main reason of the country uh going into this war was because they were trying to fight the abolishment of slavery. During the Battle of Gettysburg, over 50,000 people died in a 3-day period. The battle raged from July 1st to July 3rd, 1863. Ultimately, Major General George Meade's Union Army defeated Confederate Robert E. Lee's forces, which prevented the Confederate Army from invading the North. And ultimately, as we know today, the Union won the Civil War. But the Battle of Gettysburg has been such a huge staple of that war because 50,000 people died in 3 days. So many people. That's so many. So many people. And listening to your previous episode, I I know that so many of them died in the most like brutally gruesome way, too. Horrific. It was horrific. Civil War, it was like 2% of the

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population died. It was a what? Like I think for every person who died by wounds in battle, it was two died by disease. Like there's just so much happening. happening and there's a lot of death and yeah. And I think I have um the statistic in my portion, but overall between like direct casualties in war and then that disease and just people dying from their injuries later on, in total it was about 750,000 people who died as a result of the Civil War, which is just insane. Like the the sheer numbers is just it's really difficult to wrap your mind around. But back to women. Sorry. Well, it is when you go into Gettysburg, too. Gettysburg isn't that large of an area and if you think about 50,000 people dying in one area in 3 days, it's mayhem. It's crazy. No wonder it's so haunted. Yeah, no

More tales of female soldiers

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wonder why it's so haunted and it's so scary today and I would never walk around at night. I'm scared of the paranormal. I I drag Cassie to all the I like learning about it. I like knowing about it, but I don't want to physically know about it when I'm there. It's ironic that we're all together because Sabrina and I are afraid of going into the woods and that's where you guys are most comfortable. So You'll have to hold our hands on a hike and we'll hold your hands bringing you into haunted places. There you go. We'll do a little mixture of both. We'll go somewhere haunted and somewhere outdoorsy. Perfect. Now none of none of us can be at ease. We'll all just be terrified the whole time. Yeah. Danielle likes to add the additional comfort of I'm a little claustrophobic, so she usually takes me to a cave somewhere, too. She's like, "This This cave is haunted and it's really small. Let's go." Well, Corinne has wanted to be in

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Corinne has made it clear to me that wherever we go, I have to go first so that she can save herself and you know, I get it. I mean, it's a survival tactic that I I respect. And she's very up front about it. At least you're honest. Yeah. I mean, you accept it, Sabrina. You're like, "Let's go." I'm like, "Hold on." I'm like, "I'd rather die in a cool way." Yeah. Yeah. That's a different story later, I guess. I give it a beat, observe the terrain, the area and Sabrina's just jumps straight forward. That's like the equivalent of hiking on a trail of the person who goes first has to get rid of all the cobwebs and the spiders and the trail on the way there. Yeah. And the the trick to that is have a big stick in your hand and wave it up and down in front of you. Yeah. Brilliant. Yeah. But but getting into the women of Gettysburg, women were there and they

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fought in disguise as men because they were not allowed to join the war. And not only did they join the war, but a lot of them lost their lives. It is believed that in the Civil War, there were hundreds of women who were dressed as men. They engaged in battles and they were both part of the Confederate side and the Union side. In Gettysburg, even though with all of these numbers, there have only been five documented women to have fought in battle. It is important to remember that during the Civil War, not only were people fighting for the abolishment of slavery, but women were not considered equal at this time. At this time, women could not vote, they couldn't own their own property, they didn't have the right to divorce a man. They didn't have the right to work for equal pay or even really work much at all except for I think they were allowed to do office or secretarial duties. Like seamstress. Yeah. Exactly. You could be a nurse, you could be a seamstress, nothing that wasn't

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deemed like a proper woman essentially. The history of women in the Civil War has mostly been lost to time and lack of historical records, but for this episode, I found a book which I love to find books because they are so detailed in the history of it. And this one was

Documenting women soldiers

called They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the American Civil War. Hell yeah, I love that. Isn't that a great title? Oh my god, can I just This is such a funny side note, but the demon thing. So where I live, apparently the high school like around here, their um what is it? Mascot. Like what they're called, mascot or like the teams they're the demons. Oh. I didn't know that when I first moved here and I was walking around town and some guy, random guy, just comes right up to my face and is like, "Are you a demon?"

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And period. Like I was like, "Oh, what?" That's amazing. And he was just like, he just stared at me. Like no follow-up, nothing and I was like, "What?" And he's like, "Like a demon, do you fight for the Are you a demon? Are you fight for the" And he like motioned over to like a soccer field or like a football field. I'm like, "I'm 32." So no, I don't go to this high school. I mean, it's a compliment. okay." Once you figured out what he was asking. I was just like, it was just the weirdest [ __ ] I was just like, "Uh no." And he's like, "Okay, bye." I'm like, "What was the follow-up going to be to that?" Like It was the weirdest like if it was a pickup attempt, it was so odd. And also, I hope not cuz you were a child, he thought. Well, yeah, how old was he? Uh he was like an adult age, you know, like definitely in his 30s or 40s. Okay. Yeah, it was just weird all around, but anyway, so when I see demon,

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that's like the only thing Oh my god. Okay, anyway, go on. Well, this book that I found, They Fought Like Demons, that's so funny. They asked to be fought for them. They fought like demons women in in the American Civil War. They did ex- They did extensive research and they referred to women in the Civil War as the best kept historical secret of the Civil War. Get it, girls. Yeah, they discovered in their book evidence of 250 women soldiers, but believe that number to be astronomically higher because again, historical records and things. In their research, they found all but three of those women to be white. Because of lack of documentation, they were only able to find three black women who were soldiers, but the authors of this book write that they think that this number was significantly higher, mostly because they had such a high reason to be there. And the lack of historical records, but also the

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abolishment of slavery and everything that was going in on that time, they also had more of a reason to stay hidden as well. So they think that the history for that has just very much been lost. Many of the women were discovered only after the Civil War ended and some were discovered while the war was going on. And I have a couple examples of that happening. In August 1861, an 18-year-old enlisted for a term of 3 years into the 17th Ohio Infantry as Private Frank Deming. But on May 18th, 1862, he was dismissed from the military with a certificate of disability that cited the soldier as {quote} {unquote} "incapable of performing duties of a soldier because of congenital peculiarity which should have prevented her admission into the army being female." {end quote} That is the longest way to say

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that she was a girl. She was a girl. I know, like um female peculiarity, congenital like Wow, okay. I know, it's so funny. It makes me wonder like were these being published places and they were just trying to confuse people enough to not encourage more women to come forward or something like that? Like it is just such a bizarre way to go about saying she's a woman. This is a historical record of what they worded for her dismissal. So Okay. That's from Yeah. Interesting, okay. Interesting. Yeah. They had the audacity to write this on paper, that's pretty much. And she has been officially documented and dismissed because of her {quote} {unquote} disability of being a female. It was listed as a disability for being female. It's like I have no words. Just a massive eye roll, that's it.

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I know. It's not surprising to us at this point, but it's still just like yeah, what the hell? A disability

More examples of female soldiers

to be a female, okay. Another example was Maggie Simpson who was a soldier and Confederate sympathizer in Shenandoah Valley when she was discovered as female in fall of 1864. Immediately, she was jailed at Harpers Ferry where she was referred to as {quote} {unquote} a questionable character in a soldier's uniform. Upon further inspection, the marshal declared that she was very unattractive for her sex and sent her to a city jail in Baltimore for 30 days. Not because she was a Confederate, but because she was a woman in a soldier's uniform. But like I the words aren't coming out of my mouth because Are we all angry? Yes. Yes. I'm like shocked. I'm just shocked that like the audacity that honestly men have had for so long. Like to be to even write that the the fact that we have the

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information that that guy thought that that woman was ugly is absurd. Like that has no bearing on anything like what does that have to lend to any sort of? It's just so crazy. Right, but they thought that this was important context. Yes, these words are accepted. Let's mark them down for everyone to hear forever. Ridiculous. Right. And put aside the like fact, whatever like the fighting, you know, the reasons for fighting, wouldn't you want more people fighting with you and like on your side? Like I mean, I'm just being she was on the Confederate side, right? They were significantly they had significantly fewer soldiers than the Union. So it's like I don't know. You think they didn't take what they could get, right? Not if you're a disabled woman, apparently. Or unattractive, apparently. Yeah. But let's also let's remember what the Confederates were

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fighting for, too, and that might also help us realize why they were making poor choices here. So Yeah, but it was the Union, too. I also the Union did not allow women either. And there are a lot of stories where women are referred to as if they were attractive and it was written down where it'd be like, "It's surprising she was a very attractive female." And instead of arresting them, they would send them home in dresses instead of a soldier's uniform. They would say, "Hey, put them in appropriate attire and send them home in dresses." Vomit. Yuck. And I love how it's like straight to jail. Like she just doesn't go to jail. Straight to jail. Straight to jail. Straight to jail. If you're pretty, you get sent you get dressed up like a little doll and sent home. We just did an episode about um Athens Asylum in Ohio, which is was a mental institution. And just like the way and even still to this day like there's so much degradation against people like we don't

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understand or whatever, but just the amount of people that they would send to asylums because either they didn't understand them or like they had menstruation problems or whatever it was and it's just like it's so upset It's so frustrating. Yeah, I mean, I feel like everyone listening agrees with us, so I'm just speaking to the choir, but Yeah, everyone's like, "Yes, tell us." Everyone likes it though. We're like, "Yeah, it's crazy, preach." And for we were talking about this recently actually, Danielle and I. We were looking I bought this book about just like learning about women's health and like your menstrual flow and like your cycles and whatever and I was looking at it. I was like, "Isn't it crazy that I'm 31 years old and I'm reading a book because no one ever taught us like about being a woman? It's always been like this shameful thing that's thrown in the corner." And then you look at history like this and it's like, "Oh, this is where it's coming from." We're still trying to bounce back from this oppression and this thought of women

38:00

that have been dating back hundreds of years. Absolutely. Since like the beginning of time. Yeah, beginning of time, yeah. Yeah. For Gettysburg, some of the women, even after they were caught pretending to be male soldiers and dismissed from the military, they did continue to try and fight. They're like, "Hey, you caught me, but I'm just going to join another another force." An example of this was Union soldier

Female soldiers in combat

Frank Martin was discovered as female when she was wounded in battle in Tennessee in 1862. She then joined a cavalry in Michigan where she was discovered again by a person she had grown up with while she was in Louisville, Kentucky and she was kicked out shortly after. A year and a half later, she was discovered again as a soldier with another woman. After being jailed, a follow-up order was given that read {quote} {unquote} "The two women sent to you will be provided with wearing apparel befitting

39:00

their sex and sent to their respective homes." Once again. Once again. Yes, back at it again. It does make me wonder though, the women's experience being in that because like did those two women did they join together or were they just like, "Oh, I see you, you see me. Like we can kind of stick together here." Like I'm just curious how many women were kind of like a wink and nod, I see you. How many men were oblivious around them? And how many people just stayed quiet and did know? are so intelligent. I I bet they knew each other. Yeah, that's what I was thinking, but then I was like, I don't want to like discredit the entire male population, but in my mind I'm thinking it was probably all the women being like, I see you and the guy is just like, "Whoa, whoa, you know, like classic she's the man sort of situation." Well, it's really funny that you say that because women were actually so commonly found to be a soldiers that it was common practice for men to be on the lookout for them. Oh.

40:00

Which makes it even worse. So, this wasn't this wasn't like a obscure like rare This was very common happening often. Wow. And I have a couple of examples of this, too. Mary Smith was discovered after soldiers became suspicious because she was able to sew and because of the way she washed dishes. So, men were like critiquing and looking at people like, "This guy can sew and he knows how to wash dishes. This is suspicious." I do wonder how many times though they thought a man like a an actual man was a woman because of things like that. Like how many pointing fingers happened? Right. Especially because it was happening so often. I'm not a woman. I'm just not adept when it comes to washing things. Like sorry, I don't leave crumbs and curd behind. Yeah. like it's like we got bigger fish to fry

41:00

here. And like we're fighting a actual war and like actually dying. Why are we focused on the way that somebody washes a dish and like calling out someone because of their their gender sex like and their gender. Like it's just yeah. I don't know. Just I'm sure 200 years from now people are going to look back at today and critique things that ways of thinking and things that we've done. So, it's you know, but just we have come so far in some ways even though sometimes it feels like we haven't. And this just is like looking back it's just like, oh my god. Like we got bigger things to worry about like It's empowering to to hear these stories because these women knew that it was a risk and they continued to do it which I think is awesome. And it reminds me of I'm so fascinated with women in like World War I and World War II who operated as spies and used the fact that men were like, "Oh, you're just a silly little housewife." to their

42:00

advantage to then like get secrets and pass them back and forth or escort people like you know, across borders which I just think is very admirable and inspiring. It's funny that you say that because I pulled it up because it's right next to me, but I'm super into World War II and just everything that was happening there and I have a ton of books about the Holocaust and things like that and I have a book right next to me that I've been I haven't read it yet, but I'm meaning to and it's The Sisters of Auschwitz, the true story of two Jewish sisters' resistance in the heart of Nazi territory. And it is about like two women who are doing this underground thing where they were saving people, they were helping spying on things and they were two women in that situation and it just reminded me of that. to see if it's on Libby. Let's see. Adding this. Amazing. Well, for many other women some were discovered because of their mannerisms or just men being really

43:00

suspicious, but many other women were only discovered after suffering injuries while they were in battle. Some were discovered because they were going into labor and needing medical attention. So, there were women that were fighting in these battles who were pregnant actively 9 months pregnant and were only discovered because they were giving birth. Wow. And then other women were only discovered after they died and then they later retrieved their bodies. Wow. During this time many people both men and women suffered and died from malaria, pneumonia, typhoid, and smallpox as well. So, it wasn't just battles and dying in battle, but it was also these diseases that they were finding women.

Confederate women soldiers

Still many of these women who were getting these illnesses never sought medical attention because of one, the horrendous conditions of health care facilities that Danielle taught us about. But also because if they went to

44:00

the doctors and the doctors found out they were female, the doctors would report them and they would get kicked out of the military. So, women who were suffering from all of these things whether it was disease a pregnancy is I say suffering, but actively going into labor or whatever or if they had a disease, they wouldn't seek medical attention because they didn't want to get kicked out of the military. And part of this was because soldiers did get paid and this was a way for women to make a living as well. Of the five women who are known to have fought in Gettysburg, two of them were Union soldiers and three were Confederate. Union soldier Mary Seisgol originally served in the Civil War as a nurse which was not uncommon in the war, but later she decided to join her husband in in the New York regiment and she fought by his side in the Battle of Gettysburg. Okay, see I love that because he was like all in. I mean he was on board. Like let's do this. That's cool. They're

45:00

both on the same side. They're both fighting for the same cause and it's like, yeah, get in here. You're badass. Let's fight next to each other. And she did. The other Union soldier injured during battle was a teenage girl. She was she worked as a drummer boy in the Civil War and the job of a drummer boy was to play the drums on the battlefield, but the beats were coded in signals. They had 26 different beat patterns which told soldiers to do things like meet, attack, or retreat and it was used because the drums were heard throughout battle, but yelling, you couldn't call someone on the phone during the Civil War anything like that. So, their means of communication were these drums and this was her role and she ended up injured and discovered that she was a woman. Wow. That is a really cool job to take on. It is. And you just know that people are still hearing those drums. I would

46:00

bet money on it that Oh, yeah. late at night on a spooky foggy night they'll hear the beating of the drums. Well, now when people hear that instead of thinking a man's playing them it might be a woman who's playing it. There you go. The known three Confederate women soldiers were injured more severely than the Union soldiers and this was because as we saw the Confederacy did a lot worse in this battle. So, they found the women to be in a lot more severe condition in these cases. One woman was shot in the leg before she was captured by Union soldiers and brought to a US military hospital in Chester, Pennsylvania. Her leg was so severe that surgeons amputated her leg in order to save her life. And instead of jailing her, they felt bad for her and sent her back down south to her family. In a dress? Probably, honestly. The two other Confederate women soldiers died during Pickett's Charge. Pickett's Charge was an assault during Gettysburg

47:00

that General Robert E. Lee ordered against the Union on the last day of battle of on the last day of the battle. The day That day over 12,500 people advanced over open fields for 3/4 of a mile under heavy Union artillery and rifle fire. It was a major fail on the Confederate side and was a direct reason for the end of the Battle of Gettysburg because the Confederate side lost over 50% of their soldiers that day. And I'm pretty sure when Lee made that order on the last day, the like other general was like, "We don't have enough men. Like we cannot continue." And he was like, It's like, don't do this. my order." And then sure enough, they did. Yeah. Sure enough. So many people died including these two women and that was how they were discovered. And one of them actually didn't die right away. One of them was severely injured that day and was unable to move from the open

48:00

field and she was just left there while a Union soldier guarded the that field overnight. And she lay there all night screaming in agony. Oh. Yeah. And the guard no one helped her. Oh. That makes me sick to think about. Yeah. And because she was on the Confederate side, no one helped her and the guard later actually talks about the incident and he recalled it as the most awful sound he had ever heard. See, Sabrina and I have been telling ghost stories on our podcast for 6 years and I will say I don't get nightmares nearly as much about paranormal things as I do from stories like this where I'm like I see something online or I hear something about someone being in such anguish and in this like horrible place where they feel so out of control and so abandoned and that's what haunts me. That's truly what what keeps me up at night. So, I feel so horrible for this

Mariah Lewis story

49:00

poor person. Have you guys seen the movie All Quiet on the Western Front? Yes. So, there's a moment in that which this just reminds I and I feel like in all wars, but like when it comes down to it in moments like this when it's human to human and you see the anguish of another human and it's like no one wants to die. No one wants to lose their life and it's just like for a split second there's humanity and then it's just gone. Mhm. I know. It's hard especially because like a lot of especially in this war obviously there were strong opposing feelings of like what this war was being fought about, but on the other side of that token, there was a lot of people who did not want to be fighting. You know, like they did not want to be in direct conflict, they didn't want to be in war, and yet they were forced into this position. And if it comes down to a situation like that, that you're looking

50:00

at a fellow, you know, essentially what we would view now as a fellow American, and you're just like in these final moments, it's there are stories obviously of humanity coming through, but a large part of the Civil War is there's such like bitter opposing hatred for one another that I feel like it's that common, you know. Yeah. A lot of pain, a lot of anguish. That's what Gettysburg That's why it's so haunted today is because of all of this that happened there. For the last women that they did discover there, they found that she was killed instantly while they were crossing the field, but she was later found by a Union burial detail, and that was when they discovered that she was a woman. There's also another woman that I wanted to talk about for this, and she is not distinctively known for fighting at Gettysburg, but it is said that she was there, and her name was Mariah Lewis.

51:00

She was an escaped enslaved woman, and at the age of 17, she joined the Union Cavalry as a white man named Private George Harris. Her skin was light enough that she disguised herself as a darkly tanned white man when she joined the 8th New York Cavalry. She was never discovered actually during her years in the military. She remained for a long time to her peers even after the Civil War as a white man because she enjoyed the freedom that she had as one, and she didn't want to be a woman, she didn't want to be a black because she got so many just free. She could do whatever she wanted. Yeah, as a white man, you still can. Yeah, exactly. She's like, "If you guys

Hidden identities post-war

are going to believe me, I'm just going to live my life like this." And it wasn't until she became friends with an abolitionist family in New York when she finally confessed that she was a woman. She was a woman several years later, and after that, there's very little known about her life after that. That is

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concerning. I know, that's right. That's what I thought, too. Yeah. that, too. I mean, okay, this is like tan This is like a tangent and has nothing really to do with the war or this specifically, but it's like sometimes really hard for me to like ground myself when I think about how many humans there are, and that someone like that can have an importance in history, and whereas most people don't have an importance in history, and then all of a sudden, poof, they like their story disappears. Like it That to me is just really hard to grasp that there's so many people, and we all really just don't matter. Well, that's Okay, so let's hear it. I just um Last night, I just watched for the first time uh the Disney movie Coco. Oh. Oh, did you cry the first time? I loved Coco. Yeah, and like just the

53:00

whole I mean, obviously I loved it just because of like how they tied um you know, afterlife beliefs and all of that, but like how they conveyed when someone forgets about like the last living person forgets about you, how you kind of disappear like even in the um on the other side. And it was just like yeah, it's kind of like when the last person says your name for the last time or shares your story for the last time, you're kind of lost to history. It's kind of that same sentiment, and I just I That's why I think I love history so much is because it keeps people like this alive for so long, um and why it's important to talk about it. And again, I never I always had an interest in history, but in school like your mind is on so many other things that like you're like, "I could care less about this. Like, what am I doing, you know, after school?" Um but I don't know, it's just like all these stories like all of these women that is just led such incredible lives,

54:00

and to think that we don't know even a fraction of it because of who documented history and who deemed some stories worth telling and remembering versus others. It's like it's insane the amount of things that we don't know about a lot of important people. Okay, so this is a call to action. Everyone start writing things about your life and storing pieces of paper in random places, and eventually someone will find it. I think we do that, and it's called podcasting. I think we're we're already putting a lot of our lives out there. That's true. Yeah, that's true. Our voices will be out there for until Spotify and Apple shut down. Yeah, people a thousand years from now are going to be like, "My god, this generation it was so oversaturated. We need We know way too much about these people." That's true.

55:00

Well, going into some more history that was found later on for women is after a lot of this in the Civil War, many women left the military and continued their lives as men in secret. In 1896, a hermit farmer named Otto Schaffer, who had fought in the Civil War, died after their home was struck by lightning. It was only discovered that Otto was a

Forgotten stories of women

woman when the coroners arrived. Not even her neighbors knew. Wow. And to this day, no one knows what her female identity ever was. Oh, I love that. A mystery. She did it right. That's brilliant. Yeah, and she lived her life out, and and I imagine I I mean, I think it's brilliant and it's amazing. She obviously got away with it, but it must have been so lonely. Yeah, to have to pretend you were someone you weren't the whole time, and she is referred to as a hermit, so I'm assuming she lived alone. Yeah. But maybe that was by choice. Yeah, true. But I feel

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like she had to have been hiding herself. And I also just think about what the human psyche and like what we can do to ourselves mentally, and how much we can torture ourselves, and I wonder how much of her previous identity she just lost entirely. Like, did she even really remember herself from before? Because there's all those studies of people that are in isolation and solitude, people who go through torture and just different things, and you do convince you It's like memories, right? Like it We're the least reliable narrators for events because we change things. Our memories are not reliable. And I am curious about what she experienced, like how much of her past she remembers or remembered. That's a good point. Yeah, especially after going through such traumatic events, too, as the Civil War was, a lot of times you trauma block a lot of things, and who knows the type of person she came out of the

57:00

military as, but whoever it was, she decided to hide from civilization, which it was a time where women were really treated very, very poorly, and she decided to just get away from it all. This is why I wish I could time travel. Just to see. Just to go back and talk to these people. Be like, "I know. Don't worry, I'm from the future, and I know. What's your story? I won't tell anyone." to 2023. I won't tell anyone on my podcast. I know you don't know what a podcast is yet, but Well, we could promise that none of their neighbors or family would ever know because whoever Whoever does tell lives far in the future. Pinky promise. Yeah. Yeah. Was that a thing back then? No, definitely not. Well, after the Civil War, some women after revealing themselves were able to collect pensions for their duties. Others did not. Some moved on to marry and have children, but many to this day have never been recognized as soldiers,

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and many of them remain forgotten, a forgotten part of our history. And even many of the female soldiers who died during the Civil War remain unknown because a lot of them who were discovered afterwards, it was covered up because they didn't want people to know that women were fighting there, and they were buried as men. So to this day, the number of females who and women who were in the the military in the Civil War era, we just will never know. But the book that I mentioned before, They Fought Like Demons, has a ton of history of so many small clips of women, and it's interesting because it seems like it's hard to find a detailed history on any of them, but there's small clips of many different women who fought within the Civil War. We'll link it to in our or put it in our description for people who want to read it. Awesome.

Origins of common phrases

Yeah. Well, thanks for sharing that. That was awesome.

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Yeah, that was my my tidbit from Gettysburg. If you haven't heard that story before. I feel like very few people have heard that version or that story, so that's awesome. I want to call it forgotten history, but it feels like it just wasn't even history that was known, too. It was like hidden hidden history, I guess. Best kept secret on purpose. Also, I had to Google where pinky promise came from, and it's disturbing, of course, cuz all these things are. Oh, boy. Oh, now we need to know. Okay, it says, "Consider the pinky promise, this seemingly innocuous children's pact has a dark past. It is said to have been used by the Japanese mafia who would cut off the pinky finger of a person who broke their word. Oh, so if you wanted to keep your pinky, you kept your word. Oh. of like that. That is much darker. But makes sense. took a turn. Yeah, that makes sense. The rule is straightforward. Just keep your promise and you won't lose your pinky. Yeah. Yeah. Easy enough? Well, I mean, there I love like learning the origin of

1:00:00

things that you just say for granted. It's like, do you ever stop and think about where that came from? You know, and it just has this like like the ring around the Rosie song. Like as kids. And it's always as kids that you say this and you're like so blissfully unaware. There's a TikToker and I'm I'm forgetting her username right now, but this is her entire channel. Her entire feed is is her playing the two people, one person like singing something or like using a a common like term or phrase that we use and then going, "Ooh, do you actually know what that means or where that comes from?" And it's so fascinating. etymology or is etymology where a word comes from? You think that's where a word comes from? Well, Danielle, like how you covered you know, Victorian medieval type of medicine, the phrase blow smoke up a blow smoke up your ass is from a medical procedure. They would literally blow smoke up someone's butt and I think it was for

1:01:00

There was like drowning was one if you had like water in your lungs and there were a bunch of different reasons that they used it. Very interesting. Wrong hole, but okay. I don't think it worked. Yeah, probably not. Um, very interesting. Yeah, there's a another book. It's called The Butchering Art and it's about Victorian medicine and all the different like mechanisms and kind of like things that you we kind of look at and cringe at now, but um were prevalent back then. Um but I'm going to take us like on a completely different journey. Like a wildly different journey.

Civil War death and mourning

Um and obviously we know that Gettysburg was the site of the largest and deadliest battle of the Civil War that Cassie just described. And obviously there's a national park designated to protect that area. But for my portion of the story today, I'm going to bring us a little bit beyond Gettysburg. We're going to talk about Gettysburg a little bit, but largely

1:02:00

we're going to talk about the aftermath of the Civil War as a whole and Gettysburg battles like Gettysburg. I'm going to talk about how the war changed the way that our country dealt with and viewed death. Oh, lovely. Fascinating. We like it. My favorite. So, as we kind of talked about, 750,000 people in all died as a result of the Civil War. At the time, that equated to about two to two and a half percent of the total population of the country. And obviously it helps to put that into modern day perspectives to kind of wrap your mind around that. So, today that would be the equivalent of of about 7 million people dying in the US over four years. Which is just insanity. And because of this extreme high level of loss, there was an equally high level of suffering. Of course, back in the 19th century people were not accustomed to death, but

1:03:00

our country was collectively mourning in a completely unprecedented way. Prior to the Civil War, which began in 1861 for those of us who need a little bit of a refresher, there was a pretty widespread belief of the right or proper way to die. This fundamental idea of the good death was largely a religiously based one and it was founded around a few different pillars. So, there are different aspects to this quote unquote good death and it kind of constituted like the person would preferably die at home. They would be conscious of the situation, like aware that they were currently dying. They knew that the end was near so that they can reconcile with those that they needed to, kind of like squash any old beefs. They would express their last wishes and they would be surrounded by people who loved them and who they loved back. like given the time, this is a lot to

1:04:00

ask. It is a lot of different factors that are usually not all coming together. Um yeah, I agree. But just like for the way that they lived their life in a largely religious way, like all of those things were preferable for, you know, entering the afterlife as a good Yeah, yeah. You're good here. of someone who's dying. Like, I'm dying, but I also need to apologize and talk to every person in my entire life right now. And Yeah, like everyone come over. the ways that you are dying. Like back in the I mean, even today, there's no way to know when you're going to die. It you're lucky if you die of old age and you know, you are able to like set all your orders or put all your ducks in a row. Affairs in order. Affairs in order. Yeah, there you go. Words. Um where's that come from? I don't know. But yeah, so it's just I think um I understand it, but probably very difficult to do. Yeah, it was like the gold standard. Like if you could do it, great. This is like preferable.

1:05:00

But throughout the Civil War, death entered America in a scale and way like the people had never seen before. Because of the crazy number of deaths, almost everyone was affected in one way or another, losing a friend, a husband, a brother, sibling, etc. And not only did hundreds of thousand hundreds of thousands of people lose their lives, there were hundreds of thousands more living with mourning and loss all at once throughout the country. This avalanche of death that ripped through our country also posed challenges that there were no real answers for, which threw people and institutions for a pretty big loop that they, namely the government, were not prepared or ready for at all. And as a result of this, there were new solutions that needed to be formulated and it completely changed the death game and our relationship with it in America. And it's so so difficult to imagine right now, but before the Civil War in our country, there were no national

1:06:00

cemeteries, no streamlined process for identifying the dead or notifying next of kin. There was no aid or support given to the families of deceased veterans, no federal relief organizations, no ambulance corps, no federal hospitals or federal programs to bury the dead. Like we had nothing in order at all. The first thing that comes to mind, the first thing of all the things that just shocked me of what you just said, is that they had no formally way of letting people know that their loved ones had passed. Mhm. Nope, not at all. And to imagine how many people were dying at this point and how and I'll get into it a little more, um but it is wild. The thing that struck me the most out of that, if you had to pick one, was the aid given to the veterans' families, which is just so wildly different today, obviously. Um and there's obviously this

1:07:00

war shifted a lot of that and we'll get into those different facets. But again, like we said, there's always a book and there is a book that I referenced. Um it's called This Republic of Suffering: Death in the American Civil War by Drew Faust. And there's actually a documentary called Death in the Civil War that's based on this book if you want to like watch it. And that's what I watched and I have the book as well that I referenced for this episode. So, if you're into that, you can watch it on Amazon, buy the book. Um

The 'good death' concept

but first we're going to talk about the actual act of dying and how our ideas of what constituted that good death, how they kind of got flipped on their head. So, on the other side of this good death, obviously someone died. So, there's a corpse left behind and there's mourning friends and family that are left to transport this person to their final resting place of importance, whatever they deem that to be. While cultures throughout the world and throughout time have adapted their own variations to this process, essentially

1:08:00

it's the same. It's been the same for thousands of years, no matter who you are. Someone dies, you want to put them to rest in a loving way. But all of that changed with the Civil War. At the time, dying in the afterlife and what in turn that meant about life and living was a huge part of the culture of American culture. Being a good person and leading a good life extended to the way that they died as well. But with this war, that good death that we talked about, all of those elements were out the window, especially during the first years of the war because each battle came as a new and bigger surprise with the sheer amount of people who were dying either in combat in combat or the the disease and injuries that we kind of talked about before. There was no systematic structure to gather the dead, identify them or get them home. At the time, there were box cars that were crammed to transport both the limit the living and the dead at the same

1:09:00

time, piled one on top of another. Bodies were laying all over battlefields, throughout campsites as people died of their wounds and as a result of different injuries and disease. And several years earlier in a totally different war, Florence Nightingale, who I actually recall learning about as a child, she was a British nurse and she took notice of this same type of deal, The constant sickness, the disease, the horrible standards that the military had at the time. And if you look up the founder of the US Sanitation Commission, you'll see a man's name. But just like with Florence, the commission that ultimately was created to raise these standards to the same levels and standards of care that the US Union Army had in towards the end of the war, that was largely thanks to women. The first organized relief to the Union wounded and dead. They were taking notice of

1:10:00

this and being like, "Hey, we should probably do something about this." And they were a big driving force to the standards of care that the army saw later in the war. Yeah, I mean I just think about, I mean, how bloody these wars were. And like how Cassie you said that one Union soldier was kind of standing guard over the battlefield and not helping these wounded soldiers. So there's just being left out. And then when they have the chance, they're kind of probably being buried in like mass graves and there isn't any attentiveness cuz it's like, "Hey, we have another battle that we have to go fight over here." Yeah. And the other part that I found interesting through this research is, which I didn't really realize before, is that when the Civil War first started to take hold, Americans didn't really think it was going to be as significant or as severe or as as dire as it ended up being. So we were

1:11:00

totally like unprepared to how bad it was going to be. So it was kind of like they were always playing catch-up with like every new battle that was getting worse and worse and worse. They were like, "Oh [ __ ] like this is going to be really bad and we're kind of in it for a longer haul than we originally anticipated." So that also played a part in a lot of this catch-up that was happening with the dead and dying

Lack of soldier identification

soldiers. And with horrific injuries, dying young and suddenly, which are all not Yeah. They were often alone. They had no one to speak their last words to. They had none of their loved ones surrounding them. That shook this good death belief to the core. To help with this, soldiers were innovative. They would make pacts with their tentmates, friends, and fellow soldiers and nurses that they happen to be around to contact their families in the event of their deaths. They would help They would have them write their final letters, like their last words and final

1:12:00

wishes, to pass along to their family to kind of fulfill that final words and reconciliation piece of the good death. As soldiers were far from family and close friends, they also improvised. Photography was relatively new in the US at the time and there are real There are so many reports of soldiers surrounding themselves with pictures of their loved ones whether they were dying in the fields or in their tents from all these little photo frames that they would keep on their person and in their uniform. So they were with their loved ones. And they were creating this kind of like deathbed essentially alone wherever they may be. Writing about the deaths to strangers of people's sons and husbands and friends, their tentmates or fellow soldiers were giving details of these people's final moments and sending them home to their families and they would take any final

1:13:00

belongings, like little wristwatch or pocket watches or some of those photos, and send them home when that was able. Like if you even knew. I mean a lot of people had no idea who the person they were fighting alongside was, let alone where they lived. When did dog tags become a thing? Not until after the Civil War. Was it because of the Civil War? Yes. Got you. So I'll I kind of touch on it a little bit later, but yeah, there was no way of identifying and there's also a section in the book that it was like in some circumstances there were IDs, but it was sold through private company like it wasn't issued by the government. Like you could go buy from somebody who made tags. Like it's like, "Okay, this is my name and this." There was no like uniform standard identification, which is also wild to think about. you wonder that the government wasn't doing anything like that. And it also makes you wonder how many people were misidentified. Tons, which we'll also get into. Or not identified at all.

1:14:00

Right. Geez. Wow. So suddenly strangers were

Unburied dead and photography

taking on the intensely personal tasks of death and final wishes and like the most intimate details of somebody's life. When the reality of how serious this war was becoming and how likely it was that they were likely not going to make it out alive, some soldiers would preemptively write final letters prior to going into a battle or a significant altercation just in case they didn't make it out alive just to kind of, you know, prepare ahead of time. When soldiers did fall in battle, shockingly, the both the federal government and the Confederate government had no responsibility towards the bodies of soldiers lost. They had no hand or sense of any sort of obligation to ID or return the bodies of their soldiers to their families. So it's their soldiers, their war, not their problem. Correct.

1:15:00

Okay. When the war first began, commanding officers in both armies were given orders for, {quote} "decent interment for the fallen when situations permitted." But as the war went on, those situations dwindled as the war became more and more overwhelming. So basically it was like, "Hey, if you can bury them like you probably should, but like only if we have time." And that didn't last very long. Almost a year and a half into the war, there were still no regular burial details. So nobody responsible for going out after a war was or a battle was done to collect and bury the dead. So they were just left strewn about. There were no grave registration units. So no one accurately marking the graves of people. There was no ambulance corps to go throughout the battlefields to collect the injured, like the woman that we talked about earlier, or the dead from

1:16:00

the battlefields. Soldiers were taking notice of this and they were getting really scared and worried because they were like, "Okay All right, so I see what happens if I were to die. So what is going to happen to me? So would I be left to just rot? Am I going to be forgotten about?" Some people, many thousands of people were just trampled, just like totally run over. They were left to be eaten by animals for months. Some of them were thrown down wells or buried in mass unmarked graves. well? Yeah. Like drinking water well? Which then think about the repercussions of that. Yeah. Yeah. And it a lot of this does get into like Union versus Confederate and kind of like the kind of like final [ __ ] yous essentially. So say in Gettysburg, for example, the Union won that. But so there was thousands of dead Confederates. So they

1:17:00

would, which I'm going to get into a little bit also, but they would take care of their Union dead. But for the Confederates, they're like, "Who cares about you?" And they would literally just like discard them, throw them wherever, like just didn't care. So it was kind of like And in the South it was the same thing. If there was a Confederate victory, they would do that to the Union soldiers. I'm curious if there's anyone who had family, like if there's a single family who had children who fought on both sides, you know, depending on where they lived. Yes, there's so many stories of like brothers who fought on opposite sides and like died in the same battle but on opposite sides. It's awful how much a torment. Yeah. Yeah. Just thinking about like people's I mean, obviously we know how horrible it is and it's awful to to hear and think about so many people just like not being respected and having these brutal deaths and never really receiving peace, which is probably why it's so haunted there.

1:18:00

But at the same time it makes me curious like how many people were conflicted and and had mentally were waffling between their beliefs because they're seeing what happens on both sides and it's personally affecting them. Yeah. Mhm. Exactly. And these soldiers, of course, saw what was happening day-to-day unfolding. And of course, the civilians that were in close proximity to whatever battle was happening saw as well. But in 1862, that changed. Following the bloodiest battle of the war, photojournalist Matthew Brady and a team walked through the aftermath of a particular battle and took pictures.

Civilian experiences of death

Two months later, it became an exhibit in New York called The Dead of Antietam and for the first time, a large-scale public view in the wake of this mass devastation was put on display for everyone to see and people were

1:19:00

absolutely horrified at what they saw. And Antietam, while Gettysburg had the most casualties of the Civil War, Antietam was like the bloodiest in a single day. So those photos must be geez. And this documentary, I will say like So obviously I skimmed through the book for this episode, but I also watched the documentary. I found it on Amazon. And it's just chock-full of pictures of the Civil War that I have never seen before and they're brutal. And um just to see like you know, it's intensely personal to see like we can look at that now and be like, "Oh my god, that's horrific." But these are people we have no personal connection with that was from hundreds of years ago. Imagine seeing a modern day war and people that could be your loved ones in that way and just totally discarded and not cared for. It's just like it's a shock that I feel like a lot

1:20:00

of us can't really sympathize with in the same way. So it just totally I think it was when Kobe with the um helicopter accident and like his death, they posted like journalists posted photos of the bodies and his wife sued cuz it's like how I think she won that one, too. Yeah, and she won. Yeah. I mean, even with COVID, there's all those aerial shots with drone footage going over a funeral homes where there were people just like stacked in the back because the funeral homes were overrun. And this is just like such a small-scale version of what was probably displayed in these photos. Yeah, and this is also like you know people's faces ripped off, limbs ripped off, they're cut in half, they're losing limbs, they're actively still alive but yet dying. It's just like it's a lot. It's a lot.

Post-war corpse collection

So confronting the horror of this sheer amount of carnage and the brutal way in which these soldiers were dying was, you

1:21:00

know, one thing. But on the other side of that coin was, okay, so now we have a lot of dead people and loved ones and family members, but how can we locate them? Like what what is the procedure here? And there was none. So finding individual loved ones among this you know, mass amount of area and in mass graves or among the thousands of dead scattered throughout literally the entire country through the countryside, the woods, wherever they were. It was nearly impossible. And rarely was there concrete knowledge of what happened to their loved ones in their final moments or where they were located. So you may have an idea of like what regiment they were in and you can pinpoint like that area, but to actually find them once you're there is a completely different thing. Records regarding statistics of missing soldiers were routinely kept by the military, but the emphasis was placed on the number and not the individual

1:22:00

person. Meaning there was no attempt to notify the surviving family. Just they would be like, "Okay, we lost 3,200 people today." But the names weren't But they didn't know who to notify. I mean, that's the craziest thing about war to me is that you're fighting for the humans that are living in this place and then the humans who are doing that fighting for the other humans are disregarded and just like not treated like they're humans. Right. And that this whole thing left soldiers often either hastily buried at, you know, best case or just unidentified and left to rot in other situations. And because there was no official government responsibility on either side to do any of this, civilian groups, largely made up of grieving loved ones, took up that slack and did something about it. So newspapers with information that they gathered from different military reports or any info that they

1:23:00

can kind of get their hands on, they would publish lists of casualties after every battle in the local newspaper to identify and let people know who allegedly perished in that battle. So you people you would literally have to pick up the newspaper and scan the list and just hope you didn't see the name of someone you loved. And to add to the chaos, like we kind of mentioned, this was the time before dog tags. So the reports were not accurate all of the time. So sometimes the names that were listed as a casualty, the person would actually be alive and well and vice versa. And so it was there's just like so much mass confusion and you couldn't really take anything, you know, at face value initially and you know, just like to think that you're you didn't see the name of your loved one and you like breathe a sigh of relief, but actually they are dead or vice versa. It's just it's a lot. Yeah, and to find out in a newspaper just in

1:24:00

general. I mean in contrast to that, I found out what class I was in in elementary school in the newspaper. Like that's how my name was listed. And this is people who are dying, Yeah. so it's so that's It's just wildly different. It's so impersonal to find out that your loved one died. And like today like you in movies and you know, you're lucky if you know this knowledge through a movie and not through personal experience, but you're notified personally. Like you see like the classic knock on the door from like a fellow police officer or law enforcement or military personnel. Like it's just so so it's such a departure of what it used to be like. And due to this confusion, aside from just purely wanting to have their loved one's body so that they can bury them with dignity and love, people were insistent on having the bodies of their loved ones returned to them as kind of like a form of proof. You know, it's like, "Okay, well, if you

1:25:00

say they're dead, like show me them then. Like I want to see them." And this proved to be yet another issue because if someone died 500 miles away, lay deceased in a field for days until someone happened to come collect them. And a lot of times these battles were being done in the South in the middle of the blistering heat, the decomposition that was occurring, it was really hard to positively ID somebody.

The rise of embalming

So this kind of ushered in the popularization of embalming. Because before embalming was not a really really big thing. Um but embalming tents started popping up all over on the sides of battlefields. There was advertisements for them like on the sides of battlefields like, "Come get embalmed here, you know?" And um they were then transported on cars, you know, like box cars and things like that. And that also led to um the like refrigerated box cars, which

1:26:00

before was not also a big thing. So embalming really became popular and more mainstream after the Civil War. Wow. I mean, this is so fast Speaking of like figuring out where terms, phrases come from, like learning this much about death is really really fascinating because we just understand it the way that we've seen it now and like didn't I had no idea where all of the like embalming and identification of soldiers came from and like yeah, it's very fascinating. Yeah, and like obviously, I mean, embalming has been a practice that's been utilized in different cultures for thousands of years. I mean, Cassie and I went to Egypt, you know, a few months ago and learned all about, you know, how the Egyptians did it and all of that, but like for Americans, like it wasn't really it wasn't honestly very necessary, you know? Like we didn't have the same belief systems as ancient Egyptians and when someone died, if they died the good death, they would die at home, you'd view them for a few days and then you

1:27:00

would bury them. Like there was no need to embalm them. But for identification purposes, Just learning about all of this, too, it's there's so many new jobs that are popping up, too, during this period of time because of the need for people to participate in the war or participate in the aftermath of what the war has created. And so again, I keep asking like, "What did these people experience?" And it's kind of like what Sabrina was saying where we're like, "Could we just time travel back and ask them what they experienced?" But I'm just thinking like, "My god, when all of this ended, what happened like what did people do?" You know, cuz there's probably so many people that were completely reliant and like left everything behind and their lives were devastated and they just spent two years embalming people. And now, where are they? Well, now it's like it's still working because in America you get you get embalmed. I mean, I you know, not to be like super super morbid or personal, but when my dad passed away, he wanted to be cremated

1:28:00

and he was, but to my surprise and shock, he was first embalmed for a viewing. Oh, really? And that did not compute in my mind. Like I just didn't understand why that but it's just like the American way. Like you know what I mean? It's just it's such a mainstream thing now and we could get I could go off on this because I love learning about um death practices in different cultures and America is very very unique in their way of like you embalm, you put in a concrete block and you bury them and like, you know, a lot of other cultures are not like that. Um but it's interesting to see the origin story of embalming and how it kind of came to be. But this luxury of embalming was not

Identifying missing soldiers

afforded to everyone, um let alone receiving any remains of a loved one. The US Sanitary Commission stepped up

1:29:00

again in response to the demand for information regarding the wounded and the dead. Like not everyone could receive a body, so they at the very least needed to know for sure what was going on. And people wrote in begging for information on their sons, husbands, fathers, etc. Begging to know if they were wounded and if so, how badly and where were they. And if they were dead, they begged for someone to just at least confirm it so that they could stop being racked with all of this anxiety and turmoil. The commission created a directory to give people access to this information by sending volunteers out into the field to get this information. Volunteers were working in the field would make a point to seek out and speak to the worst case scenario of wounded soldiers and what they would do is they would write their name on a piece of paper and pin it to their uniforms in hopes that further down the line someone would be able to identify them and get that information to the the directory. Because again, a

1:30:00

time before name tags and dog tags and things like that. About half of the estimated 700 750,000 dead were never identified. So, can you even imagine what that did to the surviving families? So many unanswered questions, so many people held on hope and couldn't emotionally resolve this loss without a final word or whatever happened to them or where they their physical remains are. And in the case of Dr. Henry Bowditch of Boston, he found closure with what happened to his son luckily, but he couldn't fully accept it. In 1863, he received a telegram from his nephew. In it, his nephew explained that Henry's son Nathaniel had been shot in the jaw and wounded in the abdomen while serving in Potomac and that he should come down quickly. So, when Henry got off the train in Washington, he was notified that during his travels his son had actually died. And the father was

1:31:00

shocked because he was a physician and he didn't believe that the wounds that were described in that telegram were of a fatal nature. He was devastated and overcome with grief. He was able to get his son embalmed, transported back to Massachusetts for burial, but he felt called to do more. Initially, his son's wounds were non-life threatening and he believed that if his son had received help and aid sooner that his life could have been saved because it turns out the son was kind of laying wounded in the battlefield for a while before he was gotten to. So, because of this experience, he became an avid advocate for an ambulance service in the army and he basically called out the government. He was like, "You have an obligation to those people who lay down their lives for their country." And largely in part to his efforts and pleas and the effort that garnered this huge movement, an ambulance corps for the military was finally created.

1:32:00

that someone has to beg for that. You know, you would think that being a soldier in the military, that would just come as a no. Like, yeah, of course, you're fighting for our country, you're fighting for our cause. If something happens to you, we're going to try and take care of you. Not like, "Hey, maybe you should take care of your soldiers when they're wounded." It's just it's crazy to me that that had to be something that he had to beg to be implemented. So, this was one man's way of honoring the life of his son, but not everyone did something as profound. They just simply wanted to honor their person by giving them a proper burial, which isn't a big ask.

Gettysburg burial efforts

And that's pretty fair. Yeah. Yep. In the Battle of Gettysburg, obviously like Cassie said, there were thousands of people who died and there were 22,000 people additionally who were wounded and the town at the time only had 400 inhabitants. So, there are thousands and thousands of It was just totally overwhelmed is what I'm trying to say. And in the

1:33:00

days that followed the Battle of Gettysburg, Union soldiers and citizens of the town were tasked with burying the dead. And like I said before, Union soldiers were given the best burial afforded that could be done given the circumstances. And Confederate soldiers were buried in trenches, mass graves with, you know, 100 to 100 men in a single grave or just left out to the elements to de- to decay and be forgotten about. And the citizens of Gettysburg, the people who actually lived there, they had to they covered their faces with peppermint oil for months after the battle because the stench of decay was so bad. I can only imagine. It's like they're just trying to live their lives and there's just dead bodies everywhere and they can't escape even the smell. It's just like so awful to think about. Well, that's the thing that even today they use like us like Yeah, you stuff it up your nose. Texts now do

1:34:00

like Vicks Vapor Rub like here just to Yeah. Cassie and I have done that. Mhm. Where? In the medical We worked as vet techs for a while. Was this recent? Okay. Yeah, and it was stinky. Or sometimes you could do like essential oils or something like just a rub you'd put in your medical mask or something just to help. Jeez. Mhm. In the months following the battle, Gettysburg was the location of one of the greatest collective efforts of honoring the dead in the history of the United States. Initially, land was purchased adjacent to hospitals to dispose of dead bodies, but after the war, one of five federal military cemeteries was created during the Civil War for the dead of the battle. 17 acres in the town of Gettysburg was purchased and taken over by the government for the interment of Union soldiers and in 1863, it was dedicated as the Soldiers' National Cemetery where Lincoln gave the infamous Gettysburg Address, which at the time I didn't know

1:35:00

it was still an open cemetery like they were actively still burying people during that famous um speech and that speech, the Lincoln um the Gettysburg Address was was instrumental in changing the government's attitude towards the dead and the soldiers who gave the life their lives for the country. So, it really was kind of like a turning point of how the United States uh dealt with things, but there were still problems. I mean, it wasn't all

Gettysburg Address impact

smooth sailing especially because there was still this division between um the north and the south. that was still during the war. Like, the war was still going on. Yeah. Yeah, that was still during the war and like I said, that was like that cemetery has Union soldier That was for Union soldiers even though soldiers from both sides lost their lives there. Do you know where the Confederate soldiers went or are they still like buried in unmarked graves? going to get Yeah, I'll get to that.

1:36:00

Cuz this again, this is something I just like I don't know if it was glazed over in school or just omitted completely. I just don't recall really learning Yeah. you learn the facts like this is how many people died and this is who won and like that's it. True. They make it the most boring Not to be like but it's so boring. They're like, "Memorize this and write this down." and it's just like weird facts over and over with no context or really a big story behind it. These stories are the ones like when I first decided to cover Gettysburg for our show, I was a little I wasn't hesitant, I wouldn't say hesitant, but I was kind of like curious to see how people would respond because you think of Gettysburg you immediately flash to the Civil War and you're like, "Ugh, like school history, blah." But, it's so fascinating and if like schools would just implement like little tidbits like the stories of the women in disguise and

1:37:00

these little nuances that like clearly are related to the war like history historical fact. This is Yeah, exactly. Corinne this. I think I mean, I told you a million things at your wedding, but I don't know if you remember, but I decided that I want to add to our list of like business ideas where we go to a college and like for a semester teach a class that's history told through ghosts, hauntings. That's so cool. That would be so fun. Wouldn't that be really cool? class would fill up like crazy. That would be so fun. Well, that's the thing. It's like education can, you know, be so much more than how it is taught and I mean, at least when we were in school. And I will say we haven't been in high school in a really long time. Things may be very different. But, our our personal experience then is it just wasn't as and I think the schools are implementing more things. I mean, we get messages from teachers all

1:38:00

the time that are like, "Hey, I used your your episode in class." which I think is really, really cool. So, I think people are getting more creative than it was in our time Well, also as a like a middle schooler, I I didn't have like an appreciation for a lot of things that I do now. Like, I think that also just comes with age a little bit. So, yeah, it's hard. I agree. It's a really good point cuz I can remember being in history class and also not paying attention. I was writing notes, you know, folding gel pens, practicing how to fold them in cool ways and passing them under the desk. So, maybe there's just a lot that I really wasn't paying attention to as well.

Aftermath of the conflict

By April of 1865, the war was over and the country was pretty dark with mourning men and women. In the following years, bones were scattered everywhere throughout battlefields and despite the headway that had been made towards the end of the war with kind of getting our

1:39:00

our ducks in a row and kind of getting different systems in place to take care of these things, by the end of the war still, quote, no official party in the north or south existed for locating, identifying, reburying, and honoring the hundreds of thousands of men I'm going to put insert and women who had died in the conflict or for comforting the even vast army of widows and orphans left in its wake. Oh, yeah. The orphans, that's so sad. Mhm. Tens of thousands of unidentified soldiers left unburied, their now mostly skeletal remains because this is now years later were strewn across not only the battlefields hastily interred or just laying out there, but everywhere. And there was a lot of that especially in the south cuz they had more limited resources compared to the union in the north. And this was unacceptable for the mourners of the entire country.

1:40:00

Yet another woman stepped up to the plate to do something about that. In 1865, Clara Barton established the missing soldiers office to help desperate family members locate their deceased loved ones. And with the help of others, she provided info of about 22,000 soldiers who otherwise would have remained completely unknown. 22,000? She's also the founder of the American Red Cross. Oh my gosh. What a woman. Yeah. And it's so funny that like Clara Barton comes up right now because I I don't know if it's it was like some Facebook page or like historical account that I follow on Instagram and I I ended up watching the YouTube video, but this office, the office of missing soldiers also disappeared to history and someone was like renovating the building and like getting ready to turn it into like some sort of office building or complex or apartment and they uncovered like a letter like tucked in the rafters and

1:41:00

then they like start kind of going through the the building and they find that this was the location of the office of missing soldiers and now it's protected See, hide things hide things in buildings. Hide things everywhere. Put things in the walls. Yeah, it's really interesting. Wow. And it's crazy that like something this significant and helped so many people was lost. Right. You know what I mean? It's like that should have been just like preserved, but I guess not. odd when it's something that affects so many people, too. It's not It's like It feels public, right? Like there should be so many people that carry that story forward and to rely on basically a piece of paper found during construction or like within a wall that then starts to expose the truth. Like that's How did it not get carried along at least at least like orally throughout history? It speaks to like our attention spans and a little bit of our like narcissistic qualities as a human race, right? Like Oh, that's no longer important. Let's onto the next thing. Mhm. La-di-la.

1:42:00

Yeah, moving on. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And although this was a huge feat, I mean over 22,000 people and people identified and their families helped is big. There were still thousands and thousands more people stretched over thousands of miles of battlefield. So, she formally petitioned the government to formally coordinate action and accounting of the dead, which they finally ended up doing. And that's a whole 'nother story, but it's because of her like she's like, "Okay, I privately did this with like a group of volunteers and civilians and people who care, but like this shouldn't be something that is solely on our shoulders, so please help do something." And they did. They They eventually did. And that was a whole 'nother thing. And it was a tremendous undertaking because the dead were so they were It's just not a contained area. Like this is stretching from the northern states to the south, you know, this is thousands of miles worth of

1:43:00

terrain to cover. And locals were actually, especially in the south they refused to eat the wild hogs that were around that they used to use as a source of food because they had been feeding off of corpses for so long. going to say that cuz pigs eat everything. Mhm. So gross. Yeah. And the dead lay not just in battlefields, they were everywhere. They were in people's yards, in their apple orchards, in like I said, in wells, on the side of the road, in pits. Like they were just strewn everywhere. So, it was a huge undertaking to try and number one, locate them, but number two, identify them, and especially when

National cemetery history

they're in mass graves people were exhuming, you know, they weren't just picking them up. They were like exhuming mass graves worth worth of people, sorting through them, trying to identify them, and get them home. In the summer and fall of 1866, um that time frame consisted of corpse

1:44:00

collection and location efforts. And these reinterment efforts, transferring the bodies to national cemeteries, totally transformed the way that we bury and take care of the dead today. Because in today in today's day and age, the United States spends a hundred million dollars every single year just trying to recover people presumed dead or missing in action from World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. Still. Yeah. So, comparatively, this is a huge effort compared to the non-existent effort that happened in the Civil War. Today, you know, we treat veterans and their families thankfully so much differently. The whole we will never forget and the honor and respect that we give to veterans and their families is an integral part of our country and obviously we give them the utmost respect for men and women who gave the ultimate sacrifice, but that was just not a thing back then. Like you were

1:45:00

just cast aside and forgotten about. The national reburial initiative was the largest and most elaborate government program at that point in the history of our country. When the reinterment program was completed in 1871, 303,536 Union soldiers had been buried in 74 national cemeteries and 54% of the dead had been identified. 140,000 Union soldiers were never identified, but they were taken and given proper burials. They were just marked in unidentified graves. And the Confederate dead were not a part of this government initiative. Even when like we were like when the Confederacy and the Union was reconnected as the Americas like This is after the war. Still? Oh, wow. Yeah, this is after the war is done. That's like a final FU. Exactly. And people were outraged, especially in south, obviously. Like all of this care and love

1:46:00

posthumously was not given to the Confederates and their loved ones. So, once again, women of the south took it upon themselves to form organizations through private donations for the repair of thousands of haphazard Confederate graves or, you know, this basically the same thing that the government did for the Union soldiers, they were doing on their own. They stepped up and put together this initiative. And just without the government organization, backing, budget, they just kind of it was like a grassroots operation. And despite all those challenges, they were successful and the various women's organizations that were responsible for that initiative had nearly 3,000 Confederate remains from Gettysburg alone transported for proper burial in Richmond.

Memorial Day origins

The Civil War changed so many things in America regarding how we view this good

1:47:00

death, how we respond to death, and how we mourn it. It also resulted in one of the most celebrated holidays in America and that is Memorial Day. Originally known as Decoration Day, it originated in the years following the Civil War and became an official holiday as far as like a official federal holiday in 19 71. The details regarding how the tradition actually originated, like the actual true origin story, that's kind of murky, lost to history. There's a lot of different variations of the story. But one of the most um accepted, widely accepted, and earliest records of Memorial Day was organized by a group of formally enslaved people in Charleston, South Carolina. And that story is really, really cool, too. I won't get into it, but essentially a group of formally enslaved people in South Carolina, there was a abandoned racehorse track that was used as like a prison for Union soldiers and

1:48:00

there was a lot of people who died down there, both Confederate and Union. And they gave their respect to no anyone, no matter who they were fighting for, what side they were on, for proper remembrance and burial. And there's a big thing about that down there. Wow. See, this could be like a five-parter or even more. Seriously. Yeah, I know. In the late 1860s, Americans would observe the day by visiting cemeteries or memorials, placing flowers on gravestones, spending time decorating their graves of their loved ones, and just spending time with them. Not far off from how we commemorate the day today. You know, we celebrate with family and remember those that we've lost. So much has So much has changed since the Civil War in the 1800s, but death is still death and it unifies us all. And that is all I have for death in the Civil War. Wow. Wow. I feel like I've

Conclusion and reflections

just learned so much. Yeah. Yes. I just

1:49:00

learned that women are the underlying heroes of the Civil War. Absolutely. it? The TLDR of it? the too long don't read. episode TLDR Women rule. It is That's right. All of this is just so wild though. Just to understand This is It's just This is the perfect example of of when people say that history informs the present and understanding all of the things that we just never even think about and the things that are a part of our normal life. And that only 150 200 years ago, this huge tragic event is what spawned what we know now. Yeah. Yeah. Mhm. My mind is reeling. Yeah. I also am just so curious how many bodies are still like undiscovered. And And I guess it goes to even like this coalition that's now trying to relocate bodies from like Vietnam and World War and all of that. It's like how do they

1:50:00

find and track down these bodies? Because I mean, I'm even thinking like I'm Like I said, I'm on land that was part of the Revolutionary War and so many people lived and died here that like I don't know. It's possible there are bodies from the Revolutionary War just around here. Even in Boston, Boston Common is thought to be one of the largest unmarked graves. There's I think there's evidence of or or record written record that suggests there's like maybe a a thousand people and then a lot of historians and people believe that number is so much greater. So people that are just visiting Boston are walking through this giant park and just like la la la drinking their lemonade from the lemonade stand and wandering on the Freedom Trail and there are could be thousands of unmarked dead bodies forgotten beneath them. Crazy to think about. I will say as far as your question regarding um at least the information I

1:51:00

learned about the Civil War is a lot of people got the information of like yeah, how do you locate these people other than just stumbling across like okay, clearly there are bodies here, let's take them. Um a lot of people who survived the war would write in and in the documentary it shows like examples of these letters and people would draw maps of like an apple orchard and be like go left here the third row, the second tree in, I buried my friend, this is his name and they draw a handwritten map and send it in. give me chills. yeah, and it's just like it's hard to wrap your mind around again like how many people don't have that information. You know, there's no information and it's just I would venture to guess there's a fair amount of people who were hastily buried or just reclaimed by the elements and there's just no record of their location until someone happens to stumble upon it during a construction

1:52:00

or later down the road or whatever. So Yeah. Yeah, so and I will say that most of our episodes on our main feed are not as historical based and like factual based and like information like this. So it is fun to kind of delve deeper into that. So thank you for the opportunity to do that. coming on. Yeah, thank you for having us. so stoked for the paranormal side now. Like okay, now for the facts. Uh let's get into some spooky stuff. Okay, now we know all the scary stuff that happened here. Now we know all about the ghosts. Yeah. Okay, well part two will be on your feed or I guess part one, however people want to listen to it. Um will be on your feed where we talk about the ghosts. Yeah, I guess there's not really an order you have to listen to these in. No. No. I guess not, but it does provide context like it does so much. is super helpful. Yeah. Yeah, like I understand now why there's so much anguish in this area. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. All right, well thank you for having us on.

1:53:00

you want to say our goodbye with us? Sure. Can I do Can I do my best? Yeah, yeah, do your best. We will see you on the other side. I think that's the best one yet. Woohoo! Very spooky.