Triangular Field

Cameras fail inside the Triangular Field. Film exposes white, batteries drain, recorders catch voices. Hood's Texans died crossing this ground.

Digital cameras stop working inside the Triangular Field. Not occasionally. Often enough that Gettysburg photographers build the failure into their plans. Film comes back exposed pure white. Memory cards store nothing. Batteries that tested full at the parking lot read empty at the field's edge. Video picks up voices nobody heard. Professional crews with new gear have documented this so many times that it has stopped being a ghost story and started being closer to a local climate fact.

The field is a shallow triangle of open ground just northwest of Devil's Den. On July 2, 1863, Confederate brigades from Texas, Arkansas, Alabama, and Georgia had to cross it to reach the rocks and the Union line beyond. The cannons on the ridge above had a perfect angle down into the triangle. The attack came in waves. Very few of the men who started across it were still upright when they reached the boulders on the far side.

The camera failure is the Triangular Field's signature, but the full list of reports is broader. Rebel yells carried on wind that is not blowing. Cannon fire and drums in the distance. Impressions pressed into the tall grass that shift and shift again, as if crawling men are still trying to make the slope. Confederate sharpshooters glimpsed in the rocks at the low end of the field. And a Union soldier who sometimes stands at the left-hand gate near the trailhead, who passes for a reenactor until a ranger later confirms no reenactment was scheduled.

The "reenactor" encounters happen often enough that Gettysburg tour guides carry a disclaimer. If you speak to a uniformed man on the Triangular Field and he doesn't answer on the second try, don't push it.

Nobody has settled the explanation for the electronics. Some researchers blame the iron content of the boulders at Devil's Den, but iron doesn't account for cameras working fine 50 yards away at the lot. Others blame local atmospherics. A third theory says the ground itself doesn't want to be photographed, which isn't an argument so much as a feeling shared by enough visitors to keep showing up in write-ups. For what it's worth, the same gear failures crop up at the Slaughter Pen and parts of Little Round Top. All three sites sit within a quarter-mile of each other on what was, for three days in 1863, the bloodiest ground in America.

The reputation holds because the experiment is repeatable. New visitors arrive with new equipment, and the new equipment fails the way the old equipment failed for the last crowd.

The Texas brigade that attacked across this field on July 2, 1863 was commanded by General John Bell Hood. He took a shell fragment to the arm somewhere above this ground and lost the use of it for the rest of the war. If you stand at the gate where the uniformed figure sometimes appears, you're looking at the slope Hood's men climbed under Union canister fire, and you're looking at the last patch of open grass a lot of them ever saw.