A family trip to Gettysburg resulted in the sighting of what appeared to be two ghosts walking behind a set of memorial cannons at the site. Gettysburg was the home to the biggest civil war battle in the US in 1863 in which more than 10,000 people died and more than 50,000 soldiers were wounded from both sides, the Union and Confederate troops.
Naturally, the sighting of two apparent spirits sparked theories they were the lost souls of two fallen soldiers.
The person who spotted the ghosts, 46-year-old Greg Yuelling, told The Sun: “We just went there as tourists, to learn more about the history of the Civil War and see the old battleground, where the Gettysburg Address was given and all that stuff.
“We were driving along one night and we started hearing noises, I heard things to the left and my uncle heard things to the right, and there was a fog, but the fog was weird, it was only in one patch not dispersed.
“Then we saw these shapes moving in the darkness, they were the size of humans, one of them ran right through the cannon.”
However, the New Jersey Paranormal Research Organization has reviewed footage and believes there is a more plausible explanation for the sighting.
The team said the ‘ghosts’ are actually more likely water droplets trickling down the screen
They wrote on their Facebook page: “It appears there’s what appears to be a water droplet on the windshield, and a streak of water it left behind as it rolled down the window.
“If you watch the black dot towards the bottom of the shot, it moves perfectly in relation to the movement of the entity and movement of the camera together.
“If you use the dot as a point of reference, you’ll see the streak easily.
“Why does this happen? The fact that the windshield/streak is so much closer to the camera than the monuments and cannons in the background, it appears to move independently of the background.
“However, it’s just a result of the distances of all the points of reference. It’s an illusion.
“The entities are actually just the light being distorted by the streak on the windshield as the background elements move into the streak.
“The reason most people are seeing a ‘ghost’ is because they already know about the history of Gettysburg, and our brains will automatically try to make something familiar out of a visual anomaly. In this case, a dead civil war soldier because that’s what we expect.”