Gettysburg

In the summer of 1863, Gettysburg was a market town of about 2,400 people, with a college, a seminary, and a dozen roads that met in its center like spokes on a wheel. That was the problem. Two great armies, moving through the Pennsylvania countryside, were drawn toward those roads the way water runs downhill.

For three days in July, they fought there. When it was over, the town was surrounded by the dead.

More than 7,000 soldiers were killed outright. Thousands more would die of their wounds in the weeks that followed. All told, Union and Confederate casualties — killed, wounded, captured and missing — numbered roughly 51,000, making it the bloodiest battle of the American Civil War. A town of 2,400 was left with more than 20,000 wounded men on its doorsteps, in its churches and barns and parlors. Thousands of horses and mules lay dead in the July heat.

The people of Gettysburg said, for years afterward, that the smell never really went away.

Three Days

On July 1, the advance troops of Robert E. Lee’s Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, invading the North, collided with Union cavalry west of town. The fighting spread. By the end of the day, the Union forces had been driven back through the streets of Gettysburg to a line of hills south of town — Cemetery Hill, Culp’s Hill, and a long ridge called Cemetery Ridge.

On July 2, Lee attacked both ends of the Union line. The fighting raged through a peach orchard, a wheat field, and a jumble of enormous boulders the locals called the Devil’s Den, and up the rocky slopes of a hill called Little Round Top. Regiments were shattered in minutes. The wheat field changed hands again and again until it was carpeted with bodies.

On July 3, Lee gambled everything on a frontal assault against the center of the Union line. About 12,500 Confederate soldiers stepped out of the woods on Seminary Ridge and marched nearly a mile across open fields toward Cemetery Ridge, under massive artillery and rifle fire. It became known as Pickett’s Charge. More than half of the men who made the attack were killed, wounded or captured. Lee’s army retreated south the next day.

It was the turning point of the war.

Jennie

Only one civilian is known to have been killed during the battle.

Mary Virginia Wade — everyone called her Jennie — was twenty years old. On the morning of July 3, she was in her sister’s house on Baltimore Street, near the front lines, kneading dough to bake bread for Union soldiers. A stray bullet passed through two wooden doors and struck her in the back. She died instantly.

The house still stands. It’s a museum now. Visitors report the smell of baking bread in the kitchen, and some say they’ve felt a sudden cold, or a hand on their shoulder, in the room where she died. There is a local legend that unmarried women who put a finger through the bullet hole in the door will be married within a year.

The Man at Devil’s Den

The Devil’s Den is a strange landscape even in daylight: a cluster of huge, rounded granite boulders, piled on top of each other at the foot of Little Round Top, full of crevices and dark gaps. During the battle, Confederate sharpshooters hid among the rocks and fired up at the Union soldiers on the hill above. After the battle, photographers came and took some of the most famous images of the war here, of dead soldiers lying among the stones.

Visitors to Devil’s Den have long told a particular story. They say they’ve met a man among the rocks: barefoot, ragged, with long, unkempt hair, a floppy hat, and a loose shirt, like a Confederate soldier from Texas. He looks at them and says, “What you’re looking for is over there,” pointing toward the Plum Run valley. When they turn to look, then turn back, he’s gone.

Photographers say their cameras malfunction near the Devil’s Den and in a nearby area called the Triangular Field, where Union and Confederate soldiers fought hand to hand. Batteries drain. Shutters freeze. Film comes back blank.

The Elevator

Perhaps the most famous Gettysburg ghost story is set not on the battlefield but at Gettysburg College, then called Pennsylvania College, where the main building was used as a field hospital during and after the battle.

According to a story told and retold since the 1980s, two college administrators were working late one night in Pennsylvania Hall. They got on the elevator to go down to the ground floor. The elevator passed the first floor and kept going, stopping in the basement. The doors opened.

What they saw, they said, was a field hospital from 1863: wounded soldiers lying on the floor, surgeons in bloody aprons, orderlies hurrying among them. One of the orderlies looked up at the administrators, as if to ask for help. They frantically pressed the elevator buttons. The doors closed. When they opened again on the first floor, everything was normal.

I’ve never been able to confirm the names of those administrators, and the story has the shape of a campus legend. But the building really was a hospital. Men really did die there, by the dozens, in terrible pain, under the knife.

The Town After

To understand why Gettysburg is so haunted in the American imagination, you have to understand what the town went through after the armies left.

The wounded were everywhere. Every church, schoolhouse, barn and home became a hospital. Surgeons amputated arms and legs by the thousands; piles of severed limbs stood outside farmhouse windows. The dead were buried hastily in shallow graves wherever they fell — in fields, in gardens, along fences — and the summer rains washed some of them out of the ground. Farmers plowing their fields for years afterward would turn up bones.

In November 1863, the dead Union soldiers were reburied in a new national cemetery on Cemetery Hill. On November 19, at its dedication, President Abraham Lincoln rose and delivered a speech of about 270 words. It took about two minutes. He said that the world would little note nor long remember what was said there, but it could never forget what the soldiers did there.

He was wrong about the first part. The Gettysburg Address became one of the most famous speeches in history. But he was right about the second.

Confederate dead were left in the fields for years. Many were eventually moved to cemeteries in the South in the 1870s. Some were never found.

The Ghosts of the Fields

Today Gettysburg National Military Park covers about six thousand acres, marked by more than 1,300 monuments and markers. Millions of people visit every year. And the town has become one of the most famous haunted places in America.

There are reports of phantom regiments marching across the fields at dusk. Of the sound of drums and gunfire on summer nights. Of reenactors who meet a soldier on the battlefield who compliments them on their authentic uniforms — and hands them real ammunition from 1863 before vanishing. Of the smell of gunpowder and the stench of death drifting over Little Round Top. Of cold spots in the Wheatfield. Of ghostly figures standing guard at the Spangler Farm, the Farnsworth House, the old orphanage on Cemetery Hill.

Some of these stories are clearly modern legends. Many have been popularized by the ghost tours that now fill the streets of Gettysburg every night. But they began with the town itself — with families who lived on that land and saw what it did to people.

The Thing About Gettysburg

Here’s what I think. You don’t need to believe in ghosts to feel something at Gettysburg. You only need to stand at the edge of the field where Pickett’s men marched, and look across that long open stretch toward the stone wall on Cemetery Ridge, and imagine walking it under fire.

Fifty thousand men were killed, maimed, captured or lost here in three days, in a war that tore the country in half. If there is any place in America where the dead might refuse to leave, it is here.