Culp's sisters said they wandered the corpse-strewn hillside looking for the crooked tree and their sibling's grave. Whether they found their brothers or not is still argued. They claimed they never found him; the officer said his description of the site was unmistakably accurate. There are theories:

First, the girls were telling the truth. A battlefield is a horrible place after the fighting. Perhaps Culp's mortal remains are now part and parcel of the clay upon which he played and romped and hid with his sisters as a boy in Gettysburg. Now, once again, he hides…forever.

Second, that they found his body and carried him, under cover of darkness, to the citizens' cemetery, and there, like ghouls, buried him secretly, so that no neighbors, filled with the rancor of war, could object to the burial, in their cemetery, of a native son-turned-traitor.

Finally, that the girls, exhausted from their ghastly burden, imposed upon their uncle, living just a stone's throw from where Wesley was killed, to allow them to bury him where no one would disturb him - in the dirt-floored cellar of the Culp farmhouse.

Perhaps this last resting-place was not suitable for the young man whose homecoming was hideously marred by sleep's counterfeit; perhaps he himself is eternally haunted and damned by the message that went undelivered; perhaps, somewhere, in the weird world beyond, three friends still seek forever one another and an answer to the unanswerable…

While working for the National Park Service, I was on night patrol one mild fall evening and heard a call come over the radio to hurry to the Culp House to intercept and intruder.

The superintendent of the park lived there at the time. I was just a block or so from the house. I was there within thirty seconds of first hearing the call.

The superintendent was already out the back door as I jumped from the patrol car. "Go around back," he said. "We just heard him go to the upstairs window. He's probably crawling down right now."

I ran around back and shined the flashlight up to the window, into the large yard, back to the house and up to the second-floor window again. No one. I trotted out to the yard to get a better view and stop anyone trying to run into the fields behind the house. Still, not a sign of anyone emerging from the house.

The superintendent came out into the yard. "Did you see him?" he asked.

"No one came out of the house."

"He must have. We heard him run across the floor to the window just as I told you to look for him."

"No one came out."

He took the flashlight from me and shined it across the fields beyond the fence that bordered the back yard. "He couldn't have gotten out of there in that short amount of time," he said.

By then the superintendent's wife and three daughters had emerged from the house, along with an off-duty park ranger who had been visiting. They had just checked the upstairs and there was no one hiding there. The other ranger was strangely silent.

"What did you hear?" I asked the superintendent.

"It must have been one of the girl's boyfriends playing a prank," he said.

"It sounded like someone running back and forth through the second floor."

"It was really loud," one of the girls said.

"You could hear his feet running across the ceiling," said another.

The ranger still said nothing.

"I'm sure it was one of the girl's friends," said the superintendent, still denying what was becoming obvious by now. My eyes kept checking the back yard. "You know how kids are."

Later, the ranger who had been there told me how loud the footsteps had been and how no one could have emerged through the second floor window, leapt to the ground, and scampered beyond the yard and out of sight into the field between the time the footsteps stopped and the time I was out back. "He had to still in the house," he said. "But he wasn't."

But perhaps he was still in the house. Perhaps the intruder never left the house because he couldn't. Perhaps he still is in the house, buried just a few inches below the cellar floor, with that mysterious undelivered message haunting him, forever through the ages….