Gettysburg Battlefield

For three days in July 1863, the farms and ridges around the small market town of Gettysburg became the scene of the largest battle ever fought in North America. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, invading the North for the second time, collided with George Meade’s Army of the Potomac on July 1. By the evening of July 3, after the fighting at Little Round Top, the Wheatfield, Devil’s Den, Culp’s Hill and the failed assault known as Pickett’s Charge, Lee’s army had been turned back. Between roughly 46,000 and 51,000 men were killed, wounded, captured or missing; nearly 8,000 died outright.

The aftermath overwhelmed a town of about 2,400 people. Bodies lay in the summer heat until they could be buried where they fell; thousands of horses were burned; churches, barns and the college became hospitals. Twenty-year-old Mary Virginia “Ginnie” Wade – remembered as Jennie – was the only civilian known to have been killed, struck by a stray bullet in her sister’s kitchen. The Union dead were reburied in the new Soldiers’ National Cemetery, dedicated on November 19, 1863, when Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address. Many Confederate dead waited in field graves until the early 1870s, and remains were still being found as late as 1996.

Ghost stories are almost as old as the battle. Mark Nesbitt, a former park ranger and historian who began collecting residents’ accounts, says the earliest he found dates from the night of July 1–2, 1863, when Union troops marching toward the town reported a horseman in Revolutionary-era uniform, whom some took for George Washington. Over the following century, farmers, reenactors, students and visitors added stories of their own: battle sounds where no reenactment was under way, men in period dress who vanish, and the smells of smoke and gunpowder.

Nesbitt’s Ghosts of Gettysburg books, beginning in 1991, and the candlelight walking tour he led in 1994 turned those stories into an industry. By 2010 the Philadelphia Inquirer counted at least eleven ghost-tour operators working the town’s streets, enough for the borough to cap group sizes. Gettysburg National Military Park does not take part: it bars commercial tours of this kind inside its boundaries and closes after dark, so the tours keep to the town itself. For the park, the battlefield is a memorial to real men – and the ghost stories, whatever one makes of them, are told on ground where tens of thousands suffered and died.

Visitors describe musket and cannon fire, drumbeats and cheering with no source, figures in Civil War uniform who disappear, a barefoot, ragged man at Devil’s Den who says “What you’re looking for is over there” and vanishes, cameras that malfunction, touches and tugs on clothing, and smells of pipe smoke, gunpowder and old-fashioned perfume. Tour operators say most reported encounters are sounds rather than sightings.

On the battlefield: Devil’s Den, the Triangular Field, Little Round Top, the Wheatfield, Culp’s Hill and Spangler’s Spring, where a “woman in white” is said to search the meadow. In town: the Jennie Wade House, the Farnsworth House Inn with its bullet-scarred wall, and Pennsylvania Hall at Gettysburg College, a wartime hospital. Many stories cluster at dusk and around the July anniversary.

Mark Nesbitt’s Ghosts of Gettysburg series and his walking tours started a ghost-tour trade with a dozen or so operators. The battlefield and town have appeared on Unsolved Mysteries and many paranormal programmes on the History Channel, A&E and the Travel Channel, and the Farnsworth House Inn hosts nightly ghost talks in its cellar. The park itself focuses on history and remembrance.