St. Paul Episcopal Church

St. Paul Episcopal Church in Sharpsburg served as a field hospital for both Confederate and Union forces during the Battle of Antietam in September 1862, with surgeons amputating limbs on the sanctuary floor. The bloodstains soaked into the wood and have never come out despite sanding, and people walking past the church at night report hearing screams from inside the locked building.

The bloodstains on the floor of St. Paul Episcopal Church in Sharpsburg won't come out. The congregation has tried sanding them. They're still there, soaked into the wood from September 1862, when surgeons used the sanctuary as an operating room during the Battle of Antietam.

The original cornerstone was laid on May 31, 1819. For 43 years, St. Paul's was just a small Episcopal church on Main Street in a quiet Maryland town. Then came September 17, 1862, the single bloodiest day of the Civil War: 23,100 men wounded, killed, or missing in the fields around Sharpsburg in under twelve hours.

Confederate forces seized the church first. They ripped out the pews and furnishings to make room for the wounded, and surgeons began amputating limbs on the sanctuary floor. When the Confederates retreated, Union forces moved in and kept using it as a hospital. The church saw both armies' wounded, back to back, with no real break in between.

Soldiers who died were buried in the church cemetery. Those remains were later moved to Washington Cemetery in Hagerstown, but the church kept its scars. The pews came back, the services resumed, but the floor told a different story.

People walking past St. Paul's at night have reported hearing screams from inside the building. The sounds match what you'd expect from a surgical ward where anesthesia was scarce and amputations were the standard treatment for shattered limbs. A flickering light appears in the church tower sometimes, visible from the street, when the building is locked and dark.

The war damage was severe enough that the church eventually needed a full reconstruction. A second cornerstone was laid on October 30, 1871, and the rebuilt church was completed in 1874. The Vestry sued the United States Government for compensation and won. The 59th Congress awarded them ,000 for war damages, which went toward the restoration. The builders reused the original stone and the original bell.

St. Paul's sits at 209 West Main Street in Sharpsburg, right on Route 34, close enough to the battlefield that you can visit both in a single trip. The church is still an active parish. Sunday services happen in the same space where surgeons worked through the night 160 years ago, and the floor, sanded and scrubbed and prayed over, still carries the stains.