National Homestead at Gettysburg

The haunting at the National Homestead at Gettysburg, the brick house at 777 Baltimore Street, is not about soldiers. It's about their children. Visitors report running footsteps, crying in the dark, and small handprints showing up on the basement stone, and every account ties back to one room in the cellar.

The house sits on the north foot of Cemetery Hill, directly across from the battlefield where some 50,000 men fell. In 1866 it opened as a home for children orphaned by that battle. The whole cause grew out of a single photograph: an ambrotype of three children, found clutched in the hand of a dead soldier on the field. He was later identified as Sergeant Amos Humiston of the 154th New York. A Philadelphia physician, Dr. John Bourns, published the image, raised money on it, and built the orphanage. The three Humiston children lived there. Their mother Philinda was the first matron. In June 1867, President Grant visited and posed with the orphans out front.

Then, around late 1870, a woman named Rosa Carmichael took the post. Bourns praised her at first: "As a teacher and disciplinarian, Mrs. Carmichael has few equals." What she actually ran was something else. She built a punishment room in the basement and shackled children to its walls. The documented cruelties are bad enough on their own: a child locked in an outhouse overnight in winter, a girl made to stand on a desk until she had to be lifted down, a teenaged enforcer kept on to beat the others.

A veterans' chapter noticed the children missing from the 1876 Memorial Day parade and started asking. Carmichael was arrested that June for cruelty to a 12-year-old named Georgie Lunden, convicted in November, fined 20 dollars, and ordered out of town. She left and vanished from the records entirely. The orphanage closed the next year, and roughly 80 remaining children were quietly relocated.

Decades later the building became a tourist stop. In 1957 the comedian Cliff Arquette, who played Charley Weaver on Hollywood Squares, bought it and ran it as the Soldiers National Museum, leaning his tours on that basement room. His granddaughter Rosanna Arquette later said he "believed that he was the reincarnation of a Confederate soldier." The museum closed in 2014. Ghost Adventures had already locked down inside it in 2011, spending a night in the basement trying to raise Carmichael's spirit.

No record confirms a single child died here, whatever the tour guides tell you. Official files show no deaths, no missing children, only the rumors that came later. What people report is concentrated in that one cellar room: children's voices, the sound of chains, cold spots, an unseen tug at a visitor's sleeve. The building stands open today as a walking tour, and the part everyone comes back to is the dungeon a grown woman built to hold orphans.