Iverson's Pits

Alfred Iverson sent 1,350 men across an open field and watched them die in parade-ground rows. Locals heard moans for decades.

Alfred Iverson Jr. sent 1,350 North Carolinians across an open field on the first morning of Gettysburg. He did not go with them. He did not scout the stone wall where Union troops were lying flat in the grass on the far side. When his men came within eighty yards of the wall, Baxter's Brigade rose up and fired the first volley into them.

Over 800 men went down in minutes. A second volley and a third followed. Survivors later said the North Carolinians fell in almost perfect formation, their bodies lined up in parade-ground rows with their boot heels aligned. When the fight moved on, local farmers buried them where they lay, in shallow pits cut into the shoulder of Oak Ridge. The pits were not deep. For decades after the war, heavy rain would wash out the soil and expose bones.

This is the place called Iverson's Pits. It's on Doubleday Avenue in Gettysburg National Military Park, just north of the Eternal Light Peace Memorial, and it is one of the worst killing grounds on the battlefield.

Iverson survived. He was in the rear, where he had remained through the entire assault, and witnesses reported that when he saw the arranged bodies he believed at first that his men were surrendering. He was removed from brigade command within weeks and eventually sent to Georgia, where he captured Union General George Stoneman in a cavalry raid in 1864. He lived until 1911 and died in Atlanta.

The phantom reports from the pits started almost immediately after the battle. Union burial details recorded hearing moans from the field at night when no wounded men remained. Farmers working the adjacent fields in the 1870s reported seeing ranks of Confederate soldiers marching through the tree line at dusk and disappearing at the fence. A local woman told the Gettysburg Compiler in 1888 that her children refused to cross that section of ridge because of "the men who lie down in the grass."

Modern visitors describe the same thing, in different words. Photographers using long exposures at twilight have captured lines of figures that aren't visible to the naked eye. A group of reenactors camped near the site in 2002 reported being woken around 3 a.m. by what sounded like dozens of men moving through the underbrush. A park ranger quoted in the 2010 book Ghosts of Gettysburg said she no longer walks that stretch of Doubleday Avenue alone once the sun drops below the ridge.

The National Park Service has no official position on the hauntings. Park policy is that you may walk the field during daylight hours. Walking it is a quieter experience than most people expect. The grass has grown back over the pits. Baxter's men stood behind a stone wall that runs along the top of the ridge, and if you climb to it and look back across the slope, you can measure the ground a North Carolinian had to cover before the volleys started. It comes out to roughly eighty yards of open grass, which is about how far a man can run before he remembers he's carrying a rifle.