Though the “official” Gettysburg battlefield, which is now maintained by the National Park Service, lies just outside the town, much of the fighting took place within the confines of the town of Gettysburg itself and the specters of the past still haunt several buildings there.

The ghost of an unidentified solider who paces back and forth in the building’s attic continually haunts Gettysburg’s Cashtown Inn. The spirit became particularly active during the historic structure’s modern restoration. For some unknown reason, from time to time, the spirit will knock on the door to Room 4 in the dead of the night. Pun most certainly intended.

Built in 1910, The Farnsworth House on Baltimore Street was occupied by Confederate sharpshooters during the battle and it is thought by many that their spirits still remain there to this day. The playing of a Jew’s harp, a common instrument for soldiers to carry upon them during the Civil War, can still be heard from the attic when it is verifiably unoccupied. The Farnsworth House is operated as an inn and restaurant today. Staff and visitors alike have reported a multitude of strange phenomenon over the years. Ghostly footsteps echo through the structure, often following behind employees who are going about their work. Guests have reported invisible presences sitting down on the ends of their beds at night and many staff members have been touched or tapped on the shoulder by unseen hands. Two of the restaurant’s waitresses, dressed in period costumes, have had their long aprons yanked forcefully by the spirits. One of the waitresses was at a table of diners at the time. The patrons reported they were all quite shocked to see their server spun around before them by some invisible force. Also, the apparition of a matronly older woman in period dress is sometimes seen throughout the building, although her identity remains a mystery.

In 1863, when the Battle took place, Gettysburg was home to Pennsylvania College, which is known today as Gettysburg College. The Confederate Solders used the original dormitory, known as Pennsylvania Hall, as a lookout post and field hospital during the fighting. General Lee himself was said to employ the view from building’s cupola to survey the battle that raged all around him. Pennsylvania Hall still stands today, and is considered to be one of the more haunted places in the veritable sea of ghostly activity that is Gettysburg. Phantom soldiers are often reported in the cupola of the Hall, sometimes beckoning to passersby on the grounds below. Of course, when the locked cupola room is opened and investigated, there is never anyone there. Two college administrators got the shock of their lives one evening as they went to leave the building for the night. Entering the elevator, they pressed the button for the ground floor. The elevator, however, continued down to the basement level without even stopping at the first floor, and when the doors opened the two college officials saw a scene of utter carnage spread out before them. It appeared as if they were glimpsing back into the past, to when Pennsylvania Hall served as a Confederate field hospital. Injured and dying men lie everywhere, their blood sprayed across the walls, while surgeons amputated limbs and attempted to staunch their gushing wounds. The two witnesses to this ghostly “flashback” said that while the scene was one of panic and desperation there was absolutely no sound at all, like a movie with the volume muted. Just before the two frightened men managed to get the elevator closed again though one of the phantom doctors looked up pleadingly at them as if entreating the two men for aid. Perhaps this was not simply a residual haunting, but one in which the spirits still had some interactive capacity with the world of the living. To date, the incident has yet to repeat itself, but most people working at Pennsylvania Hall today, including the two administrators who bore witness to the haunting, elect to take the stairs.

Of course, the official confines of the Gettysburg Battlefield are no stranger to their share of spectral activity either. Reports of phantom soldiers and horsemen are so frequent here as to become almost commonplace, and even skeptics have become convinced of the presence of the supernatural after spending some time simply walking through the fields and woodlands of Gettysburg.

One particularly interesting ghostly incident, however, actually occurred way back in 1863 during the battle itself! Union reinforcements from the 20th Maine Division were closing in on Gettysburg but at some point became unsure as to which direction they should travel. It is then that hundreds of troops reported seeing a figure on horseback suddenly appear who would show them the way. The men soon realized that the man who they had first assumed to be a Union general was, in fact, the glowing apparition of General George Washington, Father of the Country. As implausible as this tale may seem, so many men were so sure of what they had witnessed that day that the Union Army later launched a formal investigation into the incident at the behest of then Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton.

The Battlefield was also home to several private residences at the time of the battles, many of which still stand and continue to be maintained by the Parks Service today. During the battle, these homes were co-opted for use as field hospitals and shelters by officers and soldiers on both sides of the fray, and many of them still retain the ghostly residue of the traumatic events that occurred within them.

One such residence is The George Weikert House, wherein, much like at the Cashtown Inn, a ghostly presence paces back and forth across the attic boards. There is also a door in this home that refuses to stay shut. One park ranger actually nailed it shut one day only to find it flung wide open again on a subsequent visit.

Another haunted battlefield home is the Hummelbaugh House, where the ghost of Confederate Brigadier General William Barksdale can still be heard screaming for “Water!” Witnesses at the time of Barkdale’s death say that he lie in front of Hummelbaugh House, dying from his wounds and calling for water even while a boy feed him water with a spoon. He had apparently gone mad and acted as if the water bearer was not even there. An interesting footnote to the tale of Barksdale’s death was that when his wife came to retrieve his remains after the war she brought with her the deceased General’s favorite hunting dog. Upon reaching his master’s grave, the dog began to howl and moan and refused to leave the gravesite. Even after Barksdale’s remains were exhumed so that they might be brought back to his home state of Mississippi, the canine remained at the original grave, inconsolably distraught and forlorn. So insistent was the hound to remain at the now empty grave that the widow Barksdale was forced to leave the mourning beast there in Gettysburg when she returned to the South with her late husband’s earthly remains. Attempts to coax the dog away from the grave with food and the promise of a good home proved futile, and the animal eventually perished from starvation on the very spot it had refused to leave. Its spectral howls can still be heard echoing through the night in Gettysburg to this very day.

Rose Farm is another battlefield locale that seems to still serve as a ghostly window into the past. During the Battle of Gettysburg, the farm was used as a field hospital for the wounded and as a burial ground for the dead. After the war, when soldiers on both sides of the conflict were being exhumed from the earth at Rose Farm to be returned to their native soil, one of the daughter’s who lived at Rose Farm went stark raving mad, claiming that rivers of blood were running down the walls of her home. She had lived through the battle itself but apparently its aftermath proved too much for her weakened mental constitution. Was she simply another victim of mental illness, or was some supernatural agency actually to blame? I suppose no one will ever truly know.

The landscape that contains the town of Gettysburg and its surrounding landscape has been ripe with tales of the supernatural since long before the first shot of that fateful battle was ever fired. This was, after all, sacred land of the Native Americans centuries before white men ever set foot on the New World. These were their hunting grounds, their burial grounds and their places of worship. But whether it was the spiritual resonance of the Red Man, or something much older still, it seems as though Gettysburg has always been possessed of an eerie and otherworldly power. At no place does this assertion ring truer than in the plot of land that is unsettlingly named The Devil’s Den.

The Devil’s Den is a parcel of land in Gettysburg with a long history and an intimidating air. A labyrinth of huge boulders litters this sparse and alien terrain and all who venture here feel a presence both unsettling and, dare I say, unholy. Long before the Battle of Gettysburg, strange tales abounded about this piece of land that may, in fact, be the most haunted place on earth. There are some who believe that the boulders of The Devil’s Den were once the building blocks of a huge Native American pyramid, destroyed in some bygone age by an unknown explosive force. Long ago, claim the Native Americans still living in these parts, two warring factions of Native American tribes fought a massive battle here that was known as “The Battle of the Crows”. Indeed, the phantom “war whoops” of long dead Braves can still be heard emanating from the clusters of giant stones here. During the Gettysburg campaign this accursed site acquired even more “bad juju” as it were, as this was the venue of some of the most brutal and unforgiving moments in the entire Civil War. Scores of soldiers on both sides of the war were shot like fish in a barrel by the opposing forces sniping them from the high rocks above. When, at last, the smoke from the three-day battle had cleared, an unparalleled vision of grotesquerie remained at The Devil’s Den, with the bloated corpses of slain soldiers and their gallons upon gallons of spilled blood fiendishly accenting nearly every inch of this American Golgotha. It was leave no stone unsplattered, if you will.

The Devil’s Den is seriously fucking haunted. According to many accounts, if you go there and spend even an hour or so, there is almost no chance that you will not encounter something really spooky. This place has changed the mind of many a skeptic.

While the Devil’s Den is replete with a whole hoary horde of ghosts, the dominant apparition here seems to be that of a long-haired and bearded Confederate soldier who has been seen so many times by so many people that there is absolutely no doubt of this specter’s existence. This particular apparition appears so frequently, in fact, that many tourists have actually tried to take their pictures with the unkempt phantom (who is thought to be the ghost of a Confederate soldier from Texas) believing him to be a Civil War re-enactor. Alas, when the photographs are developed, the man is always absent. Conversely, on other occasions, he, or one of his spectral cohorts, will appear in a photographs in which he or they were not ever seen. Just like ghosts to break balls.

Well it’s late at night, I’m drunk on fine Champagne, and so I must once again bid you adieu, gentle reader. But remember, there is far more out there than meets the eye, and I know that I, for one, can’t wait to set foot in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, quite likely the most haunted place on earth.