In Brief
Visitors to the Jennie Wade House in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania keep smelling fresh bread in empty rooms. Jennie Wade was kneading dough when a stray bullet came through two closed doors and killed her — the only civilian to die in the battle.
The Full Story
At the Jennie Wade House in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, people keep smelling bread. It rises in empty rooms, warm, with no oven going and no one baking, and the staff and visitors who report it know exactly whose kitchen it's drifting out of.
Mary Virginia "Jennie" Wade was 20 years old, kneading dough early on the morning of July 3, 1863, in her sister Georgia's kitchen. Georgia had given birth days before the battle reached town, and Jennie and their mother had moved into the red brick house at 548 Baltimore Street to help. More than 150 bullets struck the house over three days of fighting. One of them found her.
A stray bullet, usually attributed to a Confederate sharpshooter, passed through the front door, then through the inner parlor door, and struck Jennie below the left shoulder blade. It went through her heart. She died instantly, without making a sound, and she remains the only civilian killed directly by the fighting at Gettysburg.
Her fiancé, a corporal named Jack Skelly, had been mortally wounded weeks earlier at Winchester. He died on July 12, never knowing Jennie was gone. She is said to have had his photograph in her pocket when the bullet found her.
Union soldiers wrapped her body in a quilt and carried it down into the south-side cellar, where it lay until around 1 a.m. on July 4. The day after she died, her mother used the same dough Jennie had been working to bake fifteen loaves of bread for those soldiers. In 1882, the Senate granted that mother a pension, on the grounds that her daughter had died serving the Union cause by baking its bread.
The house is a museum now. People report a young woman in a long dress, footsteps, cold spots, and Jennie's father lingering in the cellar where the soldiers had laid her. Unmarried visitors still press a finger into the bullet hole in the door, a souvenir-shop legend that says it brings a proposal within a year. The hole is stained dark from thousands of fingers. In 2014, the Ghost Hunters team brought their equipment in for an episode called "Orphans of Gettysburg." A monument raised to Jennie in 1900 flies an American flag around the clock, one of only three civilian sites in the country allowed to.
None of the ghosts have a foundation in 1863. The earliest careful account of the house records nothing supernatural at all. As a local history of the battle puts it, the tales "reflect modern tourism's fascination with hauntings." The bread, though, people still smell.
