Little Round Top

Gettysburg's bayonet charge hill, where a phantom Union soldier handed real Civil War cartridges to a 1993 film crew and vanished off the call sheet.

During the filming of the 1993 movie Gettysburg, a crew member on Little Round Top was approached by a man dressed as a Union soldier who pressed a handful of musket rounds into his palm and walked off. The crew member pocketed them, figuring he'd use them later. When he pulled them out to show another reenactor, the rounds turned out to be authentic Civil War-era cartridges, unfired, in pristine condition. Nobody on the production could identify the soldier. He wasn't on the call sheet.

The story gets told enough that the details have calcified. The reenactor community treats it as folklore now, which means someone might have invented it and someone might have lived it. Both can be true.

Little Round Top earned the attention. On July 2, 1863, Colonel Joshua Chamberlain and the 20th Maine held the extreme left flank of the Union line on this hill. When they ran out of ammunition, Chamberlain ordered a bayonet charge down the slope and into the advancing 15th Alabama. The charge worked. Historians have argued for 160 years about whether it saved the Union line, but the men who fought there had no such distance. They just knew what the hill smelled like afterward.

The casualty numbers were brutal for the ground involved: 565 Union dead and wounded, 1,185 Confederate, packed into a few acres of boulders and scrub oak. The 20th Maine monument stands where Chamberlain ordered the charge. Below it, down in the saddle between Little and Big Round Top, is Devil's Den, where Union sharpshooters picked off Confederates from behind the boulders until Confederates picked off them.

Visitors describe the same cluster of experiences at the summit. Gunfire with no source, usually in the morning before the crowds come up. The smell of black powder on windless days. A feeling, and this comes up often enough to note, of calm along the Union positions at the crest and something closer to dread down on Big Round Top to the south. Whether that's real or just what the rangers have trained you to expect, the same handful of visitors write it up the same way in forum posts year after year.

Devil's Den is where the stories get stranger. Photographers have complained since the 1970s about cameras failing in specific spots among the boulders, often where Alexander Gardner's famous photograph of a dead Confederate sharpshooter was staged in 1863. The sharpshooter wasn't really killed there; Gardner dragged the body 40 yards for a better composition. Visitors who know the history often say Devil's Den feels wrong specifically because of that, as if the body remembers being moved.

Park rangers don't promote the ghost stories. They don't have to. Little Round Top is among the most-visited spots in Gettysburg National Military Park, and enough visitors have logged enough strange experiences over the decades that the folklore writes itself. The rangers just point to the monuments, the field of fire, the casualty counts. The rest fills in on its own.

The best time to be up there is right before dawn in early July, when the temperature matches what the men fought in. The boulders are cold. The trees don't move. You can see the 20th Maine line from the 15th Alabama line, and you understand, for about thirty seconds, how terrifyingly close they were.