American Sergeant Carl Longo parked his jeep at the bottom of a hill up which a cobblestoned street ran through the village of Panni, in southern Italy. When he started walking up the incline, crowds began to line either side of the street, shouting, “Bravo! Bravo!”
It seemed to the GI that he had seen it all before. And, indeed he had. Fourteen years earlier, he had moved from his hometown of Panni to Barrington, Rhode Island, where he played third base for a town baseball team called the Barrington Townies.
A few weeks earlier, Sergeant Longo had landed in Italy with the Fifth Army. Now, by chance, he had returned home. Since nearly everyone in Panni was a cousin of someone else in town, Longo presumed that those doing the cheering were relatives of his. It was November 1943.
Still on foot, the American headed for the house in which he had lived for many years, thinking that it might have been destroyed in the war. Much to his amazement, the homestead was standing – and it looked precisely as it had when he had departed as a boy in 1930.
It was merely a two-room house, and the large hole over the front door was still there, an opening designed to let fresh air in and smoke out. It succeeded in doing neither. The same picture was hanging over the bed, and the small, old fireplace was laboring to produce a few degrees of heat. Peppers were hanging from the ceiling, just as he had remembered.
Later, Sergeant Longo regaled his GI comrades with the story of his Panni homecoming. “The only thing different about the house was the pig who lived with us in the corner of the room – it was a different pig!”
Source:
Breuer, William B. “Strange Encounters.” Unexplained Mysteries of World War II. New York: J. Wiley, 1997. 210. Print.
Original Source Listed:
Ralph G. Martin, ed. The GI War, p. 116.
Further Reading:
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