Jennie Wade House

Jennie Wade, 20, was the only civilian killed at Gettysburg. A stray bullet found her in the kitchen on July 3, 1863. The floor still has the stain.

Mary Virginia Wade was kneading dough for Union soldiers when the bullet that killed her came through two closed doors and stopped in her heart. She was twenty years old. It was the morning of July 3, 1863. She is the only civilian who died in the Battle of Gettysburg, and the house at 548 Baltimore Street is where it happened.

Her sister Georgia had just given birth on June 26, six days before the battle reached the town. Jennie and their mother had moved into Georgia's house to help with the baby. When the armies collided on July 1, they couldn't leave. The fighting pushed closer and closer through July 2, and the McClellan family did what any civilian family inside a battle does: they stayed low, baked what food they could, and waited.

On the morning of the third day, Jennie was standing in the kitchen preparing bread dough. A Confederate sharpshooter on one of the surrounding hills fired a single round in the general direction of the house. The bullet passed through the first exterior door, traveled through the interior kitchen door, and struck her in the back. It passed through her shoulder and lodged in her heart, where her corset stopped it from exiting. She was dead before she hit the floor.

The house had been taking fire for two days. More than 150 bullets hit it during the battle, and an artillery shell punched through the roof. The roof still has the hole. The floorboard where Jennie fell is still there, still stained with her blood. You can stand on it. The house is a museum now, furnished top to bottom from the 1860s, and the tour walks you through the room where she died about ninety seconds after you come through the door.

The part of her story that people remember longest is the photograph. When her family prepared her body, they found a picture of her fiancé Jack Skelly tucked in her dress pocket. Jack had been wounded a few weeks earlier at the Battle of Winchester in Virginia. He died nine days after Jennie, in a field hospital, never knowing she'd been killed. She died not knowing he'd been shot. They'd been engaged for months.

The hauntings reported at the house tend to circle back to the same few things. Visitors and museum staff describe the smell of baking bread, faintly, in empty rooms. They see a young woman in a long dress walking the upstairs and the surrounding yard. Shadows move across the kitchen in the late afternoon. Footsteps cross the floor above the cellar when nobody's up there. Travel Channel's Most Haunted called the Jennie Wade House the most haunted location in Gettysburg, and both Ghost Adventures and Ghost Lab filmed inside it. The evidence they collected is modest compared to what they pull from places like Eastern State or Hill View, but it's there, and the activity they documented lines up with what visitors describe on ordinary tours.

The Jennie Wade House is one of the quieter hauntings on the Gettysburg list. No screaming, no poltergeist, no cinematic drama. A young woman who baked bread for Union soldiers, killed by a single bullet through two doors on July 3, 1863, with a photograph of her fiancé in her pocket that he never got to see.