Today Belle Grove, a beautifully restored mansion, is open to the public and the scene of much activity. A few years ago, in the late fall, a gentleman arrived at Belle Grove to pick up his wife, a student in a craft class. He arrived early, and as he had never seen the inside of the mansion, he went in to look around. He wasn’t a Civil War buff and knew nothing of the history of the place other than the fact that a battle had occurred there. As he walked down the hallway, idly glancing into the rooms, he was surprised to see a number of men in Civil War uniforms, both blue and gray, in one of them. He noticed that their attention was focused on a Confederate who lay on a bed.

An overwhelming sense of sadness seemed to emanate from the room, and it was very quiet. No one spoke, but they gazed with grief-stricken faces at an apparently fallen comrade. Thinking he had stumbled into an acting class engaged in a method-acting exercise, the visitor turned and left.

The following week, his curiosity piqued, he sought out the manager of the mansion and asked about the acting class. He hadn’t been able to get the scene out of his mind, and he wanted to find the instructor to congratulate him or her on the skills of the actors who had made such an impression on him. He was surprised to learn that there was no such class. He shrugged it off, concluding that it must have been a group of reenactors. He was from the Midwest and had been warned about those odd fellows who dress up in Civil War uniforms.

About a month later he and his wife were in a bookstore. He spotted a book on the war in the Valley and idly thumbing through it when he suddenly stopped short. His wife rushed to him, afraid that he was suffering a heart attack as he had become deathly pale. He pointed to a picture in the book with a trembling hand and told her, "These are two of the men I saw in the room at Belle Grove that night. This one was lying on the bed, and this one was sitting beside him."

The photos were of Stephen Dodson Ramseur and George Armstrong Custer. The book had opened to an account of Ramseur’s death-the death he had witnessed more than a hundred years after it happened.