General Lee's Headquarters

The Thompson House served as both the headquarters of Confederate General Robert E. Lee and witnessed some of the bloodiest scenes of the Battle of Gettysburg. It was here that Lee and his staff planned the fateful Pickett's Charge. The building has operated as a museum since 1921.

General Lee's Headquarters, also known as the Mary Thompson House, is a stone house built in 1833 on Seminary Ridge, west of Gettysburg on the Chambersburg Pike. During the Civil War, the property was co-owned by Congressman Thaddeus Stevens and 69-year-old widow Mary Thompson. On the evening of July 1, 1863, Robert E. Lee arrived and established his headquarters here, where he conferred with Generals Longstreet, Ewell, Stuart, and other officers to plan the battle over the next few days.

The proximity to heavy fighting meant wounded soldiers from both armies were brought to Mary's house. She remained throughout the battle, caring for the wounded and using all her clothes and bedding as bandages, wrapping the dead in carpets. By battle's end, Mary was left with little more than an empty stone house—her linens used for bandages, her carpets buried with the dead, and her fences taken for firewood.

One of the most disturbing hauntings comes from the barn across the street. Lee's aides gathered dead soldiers to clean the area before the general arrived, and with little time to bury them all, some bodies were unceremoniously piled in a small, cold stone room in the lower part of the barn. One body on the bottom of the pile was not quite dead. For several days, he lay under the oozing, decomposing mass of humanity, unable to free himself, slowly going mad. He was finally found but died shortly afterward.

His angry spirit is blamed for explosive poltergeist activity experienced by a couple living in a house built on the barn's foundation. The haunting would not cease until a priest was called to cleanse the house. The mark of a cross within a circle left by the priest on the cellar door remains visible to this day.

When the property housed Larson's Motel, sleeping tourists were awakened multiple times by obviously military noises just outside their rooms—phantom sounds of an army that departed over 160 years ago.

In 2015, the Civil War Trust acquired the property and restored it to its 1863 appearance. An interpretive walking trail opened in October 2016.