Soldiers National Museum

A Civil War orphanage ran a dungeon in its basement in the 1870s. Visitors still hear running footsteps and see small handprints on the stone walls.

The Soldiers National Museum closed its doors in November 2014, but nobody in Gettysburg talks about it in the past tense. The building is still there on Baltimore Street, and the reason it will always show up on haunted tours has nothing to do with the Civil War exhibits it used to house. It has to do with what was done in the basement after the war ended.

The National Homestead at Gettysburg opened in October 1866 as a sanctuary for children whose fathers had been killed in the battle. The founder, Dr. John F. Bourns, had built a national reputation by identifying Sergeant Amos Humiston through an ambrotype of three children found clutched in Humiston's dead hand on the field. Frank, Frederick, and Alice Humiston eventually moved into the Homestead. Ulysses S. Grant visited in June 1867 and posed for a photograph with the children. At its start, the place was about as close to a national act of grace as the country produced after the war.

Then Rosa J. Carmichael took over.

For roughly a decade in the 1870s, Carmichael ran the orphanage as something closer to a private prison. She built a dungeon in the basement, shackled children to the walls as punishment, and used physical discipline at length and in front of witnesses. She was eventually prosecuted for cruelty. The children she mistreated were the sons and daughters of Union soldiers killed in the battle across the street. More than a century later, nobody in Gettysburg has figured out how to tell the story of this building without starting in the basement.

The building passed through a series of lives after the Homestead closed. Cliff Arquette, better known as the comic actor Charley Weaver, bought it and ran it as the Soldiers National Museum with guided tours that leaned hard on the basement. Ghost Adventures locked down the building in 2011 and tried to contact Carmichael directly. The Travel Channel's "Most Terrifying Places" featured it in 2019. Sam and Colby filmed inside it in August 2024. Across every version, visitors describe the same three things in the basement: running footsteps from a corridor where no one is walking, children crying in rooms that have been dark for decades, small handprints appearing on the stone walls.

The battlefield a few blocks away killed about 50,000 men over three days. Those soldiers are remembered. The specific ghosts attached to this building are not soldiers. They are the children Carmichael was paid to take care of, and the difference in tone between the battlefield accounts and the museum accounts is the difference between death in the open and harm done in the dark.

The museum has been shuttered for more than a decade, and the building's most recent paranormal investigation, Sam and Colby in August 2024, came back with the same small handprints on the basement stones that Arquette's tour guides were pointing at in the 1970s.