Devil's Den

A barefoot Texan with shoulder-length hair appears to visitors at Devil's Den, points at UT apparel, then vanishes before any camera can catch him.

A woman exploring Devil's Den on her own one afternoon looked up and found a ragged-looking man standing next to her in a floppy hat, with long hair down past his shoulders and no shoes on his feet. He pointed at her chest. She was wearing a University of Texas sweatshirt. "First Texas," he said, apparently recognizing the insignia, and then he was gone. She reported it to the nearest park ranger, who later told a paranormal researcher: "I can't believe she's describing exactly what a Texan looked like at the battle of Gettysburg. She wouldn't have known that as a tourist."

The description she gave matches what the 1st Texas Regiment actually looked like when it charged the boulders at Devil's Den on July 2, 1863. Hood's men came in from the southwest, many of them barefoot from the march up through Maryland, with shoulder-length hair and floppy slouch hats. They took devastating casualties silencing the Union artillery in the Den. And variations of the barefoot Texan have been reported by other visitors for at least forty years, usually by people who didn't know the regimental history when they saw it.

The boulders themselves had an unsettling reputation before a shot was ever fired there. Local Native American accounts, recorded by 19th-century Gettysburg historians, held that the formation was bad ground and a place to avoid. The July 1863 fighting turned it into something worse. The Texas brigade and the 3rd Arkansas took out three of four Union guns, the 124th New York lost its colonel in the rocks, and bodies filled the spaces between boulders so densely that photographer Alexander Gardner, working the field days later, famously dragged a dead Confederate soldier roughly 40 yards to pose him in a sniper's nest for his camera. The photo is one of the most reproduced images of the Civil War. The act of rearranging the corpse is the reason paranormal researchers give for why the spirits of Devil's Den hate cameras.

Cameras, phones, watches, and EMF meters all have documented trouble at the Den. Photos come out blank or heavily blurred. Batteries drain to zero between the parking lot and the rocks. Digital watches stop. A 2018 investigation captured a clear male voice on an EVP recorder saying "Texas." Park rangers have privately told ghost tour guides that they consider the Den the single most active spot on the entire battlefield, which is saying something on a 6,000-acre killing ground.

Visitors describe being pushed. Not hard, not malicious, but a firm nudge at the small of the back, usually when they're climbing the boulders at the top. Some report waves of sharp cold that drop through them in July, then lift a few seconds later. A number of visitors have described a sound like distant volley fire at a moment when the historic reenactments aren't running.

The Texan is the one you come for. He talks, which most battlefield ghosts don't. He interacts with what people are wearing. He vanishes before anyone can aim a camera. Witnesses who had no reason to know what 1st Texas looked like in 1863 keep describing the same barefoot man, which is why paranormal researchers fight over this rock pile the way they fight over almost nothing else in Gettysburg. Park at the lot on Sickles Avenue, climb up into the boulders, and expect your batteries to go dead before you reach the top.