Haunted History: Shadowy Figures at the Proprietary House

Ah, another day, another ghost hunt!

Last night, I finally got a chance to meet up with my friend who sent me these two ghostly images from the Gettysburg battlefield a few weeks ago, Tommy Zilinski, a fifteen year old Civil War reenactor from Bridgewater. While we are pretty much able to prove that one of them is a tree, the other image still holds up as a legitimate possibility. Regardless of what you see there, I invited him and his friends to come with me on a ghost hunt at my normal stomping grounds at the Proprietary House. He came with his mother and his friend Jack, who brought his mother as well, and she would end up taking two of the best pictures I have ever seen of a potential spirit inside the house. The funny this is, I had just finished telling them that I had personally never captured anything in an image there, but usually get decent EVP recordings on my digital camera and tape recorder. Sure enough, within minutes, Terry Perhach snapped these two shots, which show some kind of shadowy figure, in a different location each time. This is the first image, which you can see a large shadow on the right side of the doorway:

The shadow here does not have a clear and defined shape, but what was so strange is that just seconds before she knelt down and took this picture, I saw a shadow move in the hallway out of the corner of my eye. I did not even have the chance to say anything, when Terry, with a surprised tone in her voice, said that something was wrong with her image. To fully explain the scenario, we were in the basement servant’s quarters, with her camera aimed into the Tea Room across the hallway. Her lens was on zoom, meaning that it is showing past the doorway of the room we were actually in. Our shadows were visible on the walls of the doorway of the quarters, but not the Tea Room. From where we were standing, after close examination after this and the next picture were taken, it would have been physically impossible for our shadows to have reached so far as to appear on the wall across the hallway. This next picture, though, shows a pretty clear image of what looks like a human figure, that has now changed position:

This almost looks like a headless apparition, as you can see shoulders, a body, and where someone’s arms would be resting if they were standing at attention. The outline then continues down a little bit to the floor, which would be the legs. Once again, there was no way for this image to appear, and she snapped several more pictures from the same spot, and this shadow would never appear again in any form. There have been many reports, including instances that I have actually witnessed myself, of shadows moving in the hallway. Their other location is the staircase leading up to the attic, and according to a psychic at the house last year, one of the figure’s names is Byron (take that for what it’s worth). As for my pictures, many of them yielded orbs, which many paranormal researchers are still on the fence about. Are they the spectral remnants of a spirit manifestation, or just dust in the air or on the lens? We will never be sure, but one thing is definite, they never appear in two straight pictures. Between the four of us last night, we had three cameras, and every time someone got an orb, the others would take pictures of the same spot and it could never be repeated. This was one of mine:

Like I have said earlier and many times over on this blog, I am not trying to sell you anything. You either believe in spirits or you do not. However, unless someone can provide me with a clear explanation for those two shadow figures, then I will go with my gut and say that we captured something paranormal. For the people I brought with me last night, it was their first time on a real ghost hunt (Tommy’s pictures from Gettysburg were an accident), and they are very lucky to have witnessed as much as they did. I have conducted all-nighters at this same house for ten hours or more that have yielded not even so much as a knock on the wall. Terry’s son Jack, who was also with us, felt something touch his hair as we were walking up the steps of the staircase, and while Terry and I were outside taking pictures, the group inside heard footsteps. This would constitute a very active [and ultra-rare] night at the Proprietary House. Ghosts are not parlor tricks—if it was so easy to capture them, we would have pictures like this every time.

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