Pry House Field Hospital Museum

Firefighters watched a woman in period dress stand at a second-floor window of this Antietam battlefield house while the floor beneath her had already collapsed during a 1976 fire. The Pry House served as McClellan's headquarters and a field hospital where General Israel Richardson died in November 1862, and his wife Frances is the leading candidate for the ghost that keeps appearing in that same second-floor window.

Firefighters watched a woman in period dress stand at a second-floor window while the floor beneath her had already collapsed. It was 1976, the Pry House was burning, and nobody could have been standing in that room.

The Pry House sits on the Antietam battlefield in Keedysville, Maryland, about a mile from the main park. Philip Pry built the two-story brick farmhouse in 1844. On September 16, 1862, Union General George McClellan commandeered it as his headquarters, and it became the nerve center for the bloodiest single day in American history. McClellan watched the battle from the front porch while his medical director, Major Jonathan Letterman, turned the rest of the house into a field hospital.

Brigadier General Israel B. Richardson took a bullet during the fighting and was carried to the Pry House for treatment. His wound was serious but not expected to kill him. Frances Richardson, his wife, traveled from Washington to nurse him back to health. She stayed in that second-floor room with him for weeks while he seemed to improve. Then he developed pneumonia. General Richardson died in that room on November 3, 1862. President Lincoln had visited the house just weeks earlier, in October, to meet with McClellan and check on the wounded.

The ghost stories center on Frances Richardson. That 1976 fire is the headline: firefighters and witnesses saw a woman in 19th-century clothing standing calmly at the second-floor window of the room where the general died. When crews got inside, they found the floor had caved in. No living person could have been there.

Restoration contractors saw her too. Years later, workers spotted the same woman in the same window during renovation work. They went upstairs to investigate. The floor was still missing.

Staff have their own stories. An executive director opened all the doors on a warm day, and they slammed shut one by one, front to back, in sequence. When he reopened them, they slammed again in reverse order. A staff member named Garrett heard loud banging from the front of the house followed by an hour of pacing sounds on the porch, then two voices having a conversation, one male and one female.

During an overnight program, a director named April woke at 1:30 a.m. to the sound of someone pacing the front porch and a metallic scratching noise. "I realized that the key was turning in the lock," she said.

The barn has its own activity. Staff have reported lights turning on after the house was locked and alarmed for the night. Singing comes from the barn when it should be empty. Voices carry from the outbuildings with no one around.

The National Museum of Civil War Medicine operates the Pry House today. The exhibits include a recreated operating theater and panels about Jonathan Letterman's revolutionary triage system, which he developed here and which became the model for modern battlefield medicine. The museum sits at 18906 Shepherdstown Pike, separate from the main Antietam visitor center.

Frances Richardson waited in that room for weeks, watching her husband recover and then watching him die. Whoever that woman is in the second-floor window, she picked the right spot.