Pennsylvania Hall

Two administrators' elevator opened onto a 1863 field hospital. A cupola figure aims rifles at the quad. Old Dorm held real amputees in July 1863.

Two Gettysburg College administrators got in the elevator at Pennsylvania Hall on a normal workday, pressed the button for the basement, and the doors opened on 1863. The version that gets told, sourced originally to Mark Nesbitt's Ghosts of Gettysburg, is that the basement they stepped into was no longer a basement. It was a field hospital. Blood on the floor. Wounded soldiers everywhere. A pile of amputated limbs in the corner. Doctors in bloodied aprons and nurses rushing between cots, and every single one of them turned and looked up at the two women in the elevator at the same moment. The administrators jammed the Door Close button until the doors shut, rode back up to the first floor, and returned with campus security. The basement was empty.

Neither administrator was ever named. The story has been retold on campus for decades without dates or corroborating witnesses, and that's worth saying up front. It's legend. But the building it happened in is real, and so is what happened there in July 1863.

Pennsylvania Hall went up in 1837 as Gettysburg College's first dormitory, "Old Dorm," and during the three-day battle that swept across the campus in early July 1863, it was commandeered as a hospital for wounded soldiers from both sides of the line. Surgeons operated without anesthesia in hallways, classrooms, and stairwells. The treatment of choice for bullet wounds to a limb was amputation. Windows were thrown open to vent the smell. Staff tossed severed arms and legs out those windows, where they piled up in the grass below until burial details got to them.

The cupola on top of the hall was used as a Confederate observation post after the Union line pulled back on July 1. Some accounts put Robert E. Lee himself up there at some point during the next day. The Lee attribution is disputed and probably apocryphal. The cupola's use as a Confederate lookout is not.

The cupola is also where the second well-known campus ghost story lives. Students over the years have reported seeing a figure in the tower at night, sometimes gesturing as if trying to get someone's attention, sometimes aiming a rifle down at the quad. One student a few years back called up to the tower figure and watched him vanish on the spot. Campus security went up and found the cupola dark and empty.

Inside the building, staff and students describe footsteps on empty floors, doors that shut on their own, and, once in a while, the smell of something coppery and wrong on the stairwell that leads to the basement. Students living in Pennsylvania Hall don't always know the history going in. A lot of them learn quickly from older students, or from the nights they wake up at 3 a.m. because somebody is pacing their floor and nobody is actually there.

Pennsylvania Hall still holds classes and administrative offices today. Gettysburg College is matter-of-fact about the haunting: the elevator story is in tour guide training materials, and the building shows up on every campus ghost walk. The college doesn't pretend the elevator story is verified, and it doesn't pretend the amputated limbs piled under the windows in July 1863 didn't happen either. One of those facts is better documented than the other, and both sit inside the same building.