The Slaughter Pen

A sulfur-smelling reenactor once handed a family real 1863 musket balls. Over 2,600 men died in this 200-yard pocket at Gettysburg on July 2.

A reenactor approached a family touring the Slaughter Pen at dusk and handed one of the kids a small cloth bag of musket balls. He smelled strongly of sulfur. He didn't say much. When the family got back to their car and looked at what was inside, the lead balls weren't replicas. They were authentic 1863 rounds, unfired, the patina right. No reenactment had been scheduled. Nobody at the park could identify the man from the description.

That single encounter is one of the oldest and most-retold ghost stories at Gettysburg, and the Slaughter Pen is where this kind of thing accumulates. More than 2,600 men died on this 200-yard stretch of ground at the foot of Big Round Top on July 2, 1863, in a space the size of a couple of football fields. The name isn't metaphor. After the fighting, witnesses wrote that you could not see the grass for the bodies.

The geography is the whole story. The Slaughter Pen sits in a low pocket wedged between Devil's Den and Little Round Top, with the open ground between them called the Valley of Death. Confederate regiments from Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, and Georgia charged across that valley under Union artillery fire from the ridge above. There was no cover until you reached the boulders, and the boulders were already being swept by canister and sharpshooter fire. The Confederates who made it to the rocks were ambushed where they crouched, most of them never returning fire.

Visitors who come back from the Pen after sundown describe the same short list. Voices calling out from inside the boulders. A feeling of being watched from the ridge above. Cameras that will not focus. Batteries that die in minutes. A heavy sadness that settles on the walk back to the car and takes a while to shake.

The paranormal reports started immediately. Union soldiers posted to guard duty among the rocks on the night of July 2, hours after the fighting stopped, recorded uneasy accounts during their watch. Whatever is here didn't need decades to build. It was already in the boulders when the smoke cleared.

The NPS keeps the site open and unfenced. In daylight, you can walk the ground and see where men would try to hide. The boulders are larger than they look in photographs. You can also see why hiding did not work.

The kid in the musket-ball story, as the version is usually told, is now a grown man in his sixties somewhere in central Pennsylvania, and the rounds he was handed that evening at the edge of the Pen have been in a drawer in his house ever since, still unfired, still the right patina for 1863.