Gary Love

Gettysburg gets called the most haunted place in America. Ghost tours sell out every October. But the real story of why people feel something on that ground is worse than any ghost story. July 1 to 3, 1863. Over 51,000 men killed, wounded, captured or missing in three days. Gettysburg had about 2,400 residents. When the armies marched away, the town was left with thousands of dead men and thousands of dead horses rotting in July heat. 15 year old Tillie Pierce had fled to the Weikert farm south of town because her family thought it would be safer. It became a field hospital. Surgeons set up an amputating bench right under the window where she stood. She later wrote: "I noticed a pile of limbs higher than the fence. It was a ghastly sight!" Elizabeth Thorn, the wife of the cemetery caretaker, came home to find six soldiers had their legs amputated on her family's beds. "They were ruined with blood." Jennie Wade was 20 years old and kneading bread dough in her sister's kitchen on the morning of July 3. A bullet came through two wooden doors and hit her. She died instantly, the only civilian killed directly by the fighting. They buried her in her sister's garden. The next day her mother took the dough Jennie had been kneading and baked 15 loaves of bread for the soldiers. Then came the burials. There wasn't time to do it right. Most men went into trenches as shallow as a foot or two deep, close to where they fell. On July 4 a heavy rain came and started washing the dirt off. A Wisconsin state agent named W. Yates Selleck walked the field that month and reported that "in many instances arms and legs protrude," and that he was shown places where hogs "were actually rooting out the bodies and devouring them." Birds picked at what the rain uncovered. Dogs ran loose. Residents kept their windows shut for weeks because of the smell. A few days after the battle, a girl found a dead Union soldier in a vacant lot at York and Stratton Streets. No papers, no name, nothing on his uniform. Just a small glass photograph of three children clenched in his hand. He had died looking at them. Newspapers ran the story under the headline "Whose Father Was He?" Months later his wife saw it in a church magazine in New York and recognized her kids. His name was Sergeant Amos Humiston, 154th New York. The Union dead were dug up and moved to the new National Cemetery, which Lincoln dedicated that November. The Confederate dead stayed in the farm fields for years. Farmers plowed over them. Starting in 1871, a Gettysburg born anatomy professor named Rufus Weaver spent three summers digging up Confederate soldiers and shipping them south in boxes. 3,320 sets of remains. He wrote that he treated "each bone important and sacred as an integral part of the skeleton" so none would be left behind. But some were. He left 40 bodies in the Peach Orchard. Hundreds more were never found at all. Washed away, plowed under, or lost. Remains have turned up on the battlefield as recently as the 1990s. So when someone tells you they heard footsteps in Devil's Den, or smelled something rotten on a clear night by the Wheatfield, I'm not going to laugh at them. There are still men in that ground nobody ever came back for.