In Brief
The Slaughter Pen, a boulder-choked gorge on the Gettysburg battlefield, got its name the literal way in July 1863. Visitors today report apparitions and voices among the rocks, and a ragged figure who points and then vanishes.
The Full Story
At the Slaughter Pen on the Gettysburg battlefield, people walking the boulders report a man who shouldn't be there. He is barefoot, disheveled, dressed in ragged clothes. The story goes that he steps toward visitors, tells them "What you're looking for is over there," and is gone before they can answer. Others on the same ground report apparitions among the rocks and disembodied voices with no one speaking. The National Park Service keeps the place open and unfenced, the stone at the foot of Big Round Top left exactly where it has always been, which is part of why people keep coming to stand among it after dark.
The name is not a metaphor. The Slaughter Pen is a low, boulder-strewn gorge along Plum Run, wedged between Devil's Den and the wooded slopes of the Round Tops. Late in the afternoon of July 2, 1863, the second day of the battle, Longstreet's Confederates attacked the Union line in that close, rocky pocket. So many men were killed packed into the gorge that the ground earned its name by the end of the day. The 40th New York and the 6th New Jersey fought from near the Pen to cover a retreat after Devil's Den was lost, forcing Benning's Georgians back toward the rocks. The boulders nearby were a natural fortress, and once the Den was taken the men inside it turned it into a nest of sharpshooters, picking off Union soldiers on the slope above.
Within days, photographers Timothy O'Sullivan and Alexander Gardner came through and made an image of the Confederate dead lying among the boulders. They titled it "Slaughter pen, foot of Round Top, Gettysburg." It is the photograph on this page.
The area's most-retold legend comes from a film shoot. During the 1993 production of *Gettysburg*, the way Mark Nesbitt tells it in his *Ghosts of Gettysburg* books, reenactors resting nearby were approached by a grizzled man in a scorched Union uniform who reeked of sulfur. He talked about how furious the fighting had been and passed around spare rounds before drifting off. The extras took him for one of their own, until they showed the rounds to the prop master, who said they hadn't come from him. The ammunition was judged to be genuine period musket rounds, and nobody could place the man.
He never gave a name. Neither does the figure in the rocks, the one who points you somewhere and leaves.
