Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, is a haunted town. It makes sense: The town has 350 years of triumphs and tragedies in its past. Besides the infamous battle that ravaged the town and surrounding farmland and included one civilian death, Gettysburg was home to a stop on the Underground Railroad and an orphanage run by a woman with a penchant for torturing her charges. Northwest of the town center is my alma mater, Gettysburg College, which is frequently present on “10 Most Haunted Colleges” lists. The college was founded in 1832, and one of its buildings served as a signal corps station and hospital during the battle for both Confederate and Union soldiers. With over 180 years of history, it certainly has earned its fair share of ghost stories.
Stevens Hall, now a stately Neoclassical dorm, was erected in 1868 as a preparatory school for girls. In the 1870s, a few girls from the school befriended a boy from town. One day, in the dead of winter, the boy escaped his abusive home (ostensibly, the aforementioned orphanage) and found refuge in the girls’ room on the second floor. That snowy night, the headmistress came around to the rooms to check on the girls before bed. As she approached the room with the boy, the girls hurriedly hid the boy on the ledge outside their window. The headmistress took her time talking to the young women, and she did not leave the room until nearly an hour later. The girls threw the window open to look for the boy, but all that was left were small footprints in the snow on the ledge. They ran outside to see if he had fallen, but the boy was nowhere to be found. To this day, sightings of a boy in the window, blue in the face as if frozen, are common among female residents of Stevens Hall.
While chilling, this story is not true. I don’t mean “not true” in the “ghosts don’t exist” way. I mean “not true” in the “this story was made up in a creative writing class at the college and was appropriated into a Ghosts of Gettysburg book by a famous paranormal author whose name rhymes with Smark Schnesbitt” way. I know. I was disappointed, too.
I am a sucker for any “Ghosts of [Enter City Name Here]” books. I collected them as a child, and I, in fact, had four of the Ghosts of Gettysburg series. As I entered my freshman year at the college, I knew the story of Blue Boy. I knew the story of the girl who jumped from the tower of Glatfelter Hall. Her lover broke their suicide pact, and now she tries to lure men up the winding stairs to push them off. I knew about the two professors who descended into the basement of Penn Hall one night to find a fully functioning Civil War hospital when the elevator doors opened. I knew about the sentry who paces the cupola of the same building. I knew about “The General,” who was always saved a seat at every performance at Brua Hall. And I was excited and determined to see or talk to someone that had seen these spirits.
Much to my chagrin, I quickly learned that many of these stories were made up by students or theater professors and had little, if any, recorded experiences to back them up. This isn’t to say that we didn’t have our share of paranormal experiences, though. Oddly, however, the majority of them happened in a freshman dorm.
“I’m pretty sure Rice Hall was some sort of portal,” my friend A said when I tried to source some stories for this piece. Indeed, the majority of occurrences seemed to happen on the second and third floors of the dorm. Late one night my friend R woke up in his room on the third floor to go to the bathroom. When he got back into bed, something was pulling on the edge of his blanket near his knee. “I said, ‘Go away!’ out loud, and it stopped,” he told me, but he could never shake the uneasiness he felt at night.
V saw a man in a top hat who would appear as a reflection in her second floor window when she sat at her desk. “He’s not scary,” she would tell me. “He’s just there.” When A’s roommate was away, the spirit of a young girl would stand by my friend’s bed at night and brush her hair.
Then there was the shadow in the second floor girls’ bathroom. Occasionally, when alone in the bathroom, a shadow would pass from the mirrors across the wall into the last shower stall—gently moving the curtain as it passed. The one time I saw the shadow remains my only encounter with the paranormal.
Yet no one has ever been especially impressed or frightened by these particular stories. These spirits didn’t have tragic backstories, or even names. There was no history to scour through to discover their identities. And besides, who would want to? They didn’t pull pranks or lure men to their death. They just were.
We are drawn toward stories of ghosts who interact with their own pasts as well as our present. We like ghosts who try to avenge their deaths or continue the noble pursuits they had in life: a basement full of Civil War doctors who still struggle to save the lives of wounded soldiers, a beautiful young girl who attempts to lure college boys to their deaths, a frozen figure in a window. These stories are more exciting, to be sure. But why are we less curious about the quieter spirits? It is, I believe, because we are afraid to face our own afterlife. It is to assuage our fears that we will not be left to the mundane tasks that we performed in life: Eternally pacing the hall, brushing our hair.
[Image via Wikimedia Commons]
Tags: gettysburg, ghosts, hair, history, laura jarrett, the civil war
Hey, fellow Bullet! I never heard of anyone having a ghostly experience at Gettysburg (1997-2001) and I lived in some pretty decrepit places during my time there.
My friends would just casually mention things as they saw/experienced them to me, but it was limited to a few places, and Rice had the majority. I also recall a few of the off-campus housing buildings and some of the frats having their own ghosts (Sig Nu, at least), but I didn’t really hear any of their stories.
Sigma Nu had ghosts alright (usually in the form of alums who came back for parties and tried to hit on the first year women).
Rice. *shudder*
Finally! Great read, Laura.
I wish I knew local ghost stories – the only one I can think of is barely local, there’s an old mining town south of Golden(?) that’s abandoned, story was a mine collapsed and all the dead workers haunt the place.
Thanks! I was kind of looking forward to sending that e-mail full of frowny faces, though.
http://www.botanicgardens.org/events/special-even…
Argh, if only I were going to Denver next month!
Ooh this is great! Being doomed to a repetitive, dull task would actually be a pretty effective form of hell though.
There are no new ghosts because all wrongfully dead people work in data entry now.
More ghost stories, please! I find that the mundane ghosts are often the scariest – they just stand there. WHY.
There were a lot of ghost stories from my all-girls Catholic college. One dorm was haunted by a ghost that we called “Mary” (very unoriginal, IMO). Some of my friends had strange happenings, but I never did and I’m insanely jealous. My favorite dinner party question is, “Have you ever seen a ghost?”
All of our ghosts here in Alexandria are of the dull and harmless variety
Lamest story ever: A few weeks ago, I got really depressed that I wasn’t haunted as a child, so I blamed my mom for giving me a ghost-free childhood.
My only paranormal experience is this: when I was in middle school, my friend E lived in one of the oldest houses in town. One day I was sitting on her couch staring outside, waiting for her. When she came downstairs I found myself telling her a story about an angry looking guy in a red shirt with his sleeves rolled up, coveralls and carrying a rake or hoe. He looked mean. Not just angry, but frightening. Here’s the thing – I didn’t actually see him. I was making up the story as I went along, which wasn’t completely unusual for me at that age. E turned pale though, grabbed me and dragged me upstairs, yelling for her brother, who was about 4 years older than us. She demanded that he tell me about what he saw walking up their stairs towards the bedrooms. He described the exact same guy, down to the rake (or hoe, I don’t know the difference.)
I don’t know if that counts as paranormal really, but that’s what I have. Total truth, my hand to gods.
I’ve told this story like 30 times before on the Hairpin, but my only ghost story is that I woke up one night in an old inn in MA, and there was the figure of a woman (or her torso, at least) standing at the foot of my bed, until she glided to the door and disappeared. My cousin, who was sharing the room, said there was a green haze around my bed earlier in the night, prior to my seeing the woman. Same cousin has had experiences mostly of (seeming) communication through dreams, like relatives who have died tell her where to find something in the house that everyone had been looking for, etc.
One thing I like is in my new job working for libraries in the south of England, most of the people I work with take ghosts for granted, like, “oh yeah, there are lots of ghosties here. Smugglers on the coast and battles, you know. There was a ghost in the old library building too”. Ain’t no thing here! Supposedly, the ghost of the Black Prince used to haunt one of the libraries I work in, because there was a French siege across the road in the village green, and BP was said to walk around the grounds looking for his kidnapped army. Unfortunately for the sake of having a royal ghost in the library, he was apparently exorcised by the local vicar in 1996, haha. Darn it.
To editors: MORE GHOSTIES PLEASE!
Yes please! GHOSTIES FOR TOASTIES!
My friend met a paranormal investigator at our local bar, and I’m sooo tempted to find him and make him take me out on an investigation. Then I could report back!
When I was little, my room had this huge walk-in closet, long but very narrow, with a trapdoor to the attic crawl space in the ceiling. It was one of the major storage spaces in the house, so it was always a little spooky, filled with strange boxes of forgotten things. When the winds were strong, it sounded like someone was moaning or crying in the crawl space. Naturally, I was sure it was haunted. The ghost was nice though – sometimes I’d find things, like a little stuffed animal, too worn to be new but too new to be a family keepsake, that hadn’t been there before and I thought it was a present from the ghost.
I was also convinced for a long time that I could sense really haunted places – if I was somewhere rumored to be haunted, my nose would start to itch like I had to sneeze, and my eyes would well up.
On a more-real note, when one of my friends died in high school, a few people said they saw her, like a brief goodbye. I was skeptical, and then I had this series of dreams, over three nights, where she came and visited me to explain what happened and finally say goodbye and that she was going – and then the dreams stopped. They were some of the most vivid and realistic dreams I’ve ever had (and she never once morphed into someone else, which always happens in my dreams). I don’t really believe it was her, but I’m also not 100% convinced it wasn’t, you know?
My aunt died really suddenly seven years ago, about three months after I’d gotten married – she made my wedding dress, and was just generally a pillar of strength for our family. She shows up in my dreams every once in a while, just to chat and catch up. Any time I get sad that she’s not here to, say, see me as a mom, I remember that at least once a year she pops in and hears about how my daughter is doing.
The dreams, like yours, are incredibly vivid and clear, and are never exciting or dramatic. We’re usually just sitting around, drinking tea and talking. Whatever the “actual explanation” is, it comforts me and makes me feel like we’re still connected.
My favorite college ghost story, which I heard at my school but I doubt is original to there: someone died in a fire in a dorm and when it was rebuilt the floor was higher up, so the ghost appears to be cut off at the knees.
And my sister’s dorm has a secret staircase (well, secret if you do not live in the dorm) and is also haunted by a girl and her soldier-boy lover from either the Revolutionary or the Civil War. Good times!
is your sister a smithie, by any chance??