M.B. HENRY 
A Ghost at Gettysburg: Pennsylvania Hall and Civil War Medicine
Once upon a late night in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, two college administrators threw in the towel. It had been a long day at Old Dorm – one of the few original buildings on the campus of Gettysburg College. The fourth floor was a busy place, with paperwork to file, admissions to check, and records to store. It made for a lot of work, and the women found it easier after the students left for the day. So, they clocked some overtime in exchange for the peace and quiet. However, quitting time had long-since arrived, and now they headed for the elevator.
Let’s set the mood before their bizarre tail unfolds. The corridors were probably dark. The few lights left on flickered with a quiet hum. The women, chatting and happy to be going home, stepped into the elevator. One pressed the button for the first floor. With a jolt, the box began its slow, creaking descent.
Things turned fishy when the elevator sailed right past the first floor. The two women exchanged confused glances. One punched the first-floor button again to force the elevator’s mechanical hand. The machine clunked to a stop in the basement, a dank room used for storage of old file cabinets and moldy cardboard boxes. Stacks of dusty paperwork. Maybe some leftover odds and ends from when the building served as a dormitory.
The ladies weren’t sure what the hell had happened with the elevator, and they also weren’t prepared for the nightmare that came next.
The elevator door slid open with a ding. Instead of a musty basement, the women observed a scene straight out of hell. Gory, limbless, and grisly men in Civil War uniforms lay on every inch of floor space – crammed in like sardines. They cried in pain and moaned with oncoming death. Their skin had turned white with blood loss and shock. Some were slate and stiff with death. Blood coated all the walls and pooled on the floor, smearing every stitch of clothing.
A haggard crew of Civil War medical personnel oversaw the hideous scene. Worn-out doctors, a few blood-spattered nurses, and military orderlies. They worked with goo-covered bone saws that claimed way too many limbs. Even now, they held a squirming patient down and went to work on a leg. The saw crunched through human skin and bone. Back and forth, back and forth, blood squirting, the man screaming. Nearby, another orderly carried an armful of the bone saw’s harvest – bodiless legs and arms with raw-meat stumps on the ends.
We can only imagine the horror of those two poor administrators. They screamed and cried. They jumped back in the elevator to get as far away from the spectacle as possible. They punched the buttons over and over, praying for deliverance from this horrible slip in time.
One of the medical orderlies of long ago suddenly turned to the elevator. He gazed at the visitors from a different and much safer time. A hollow, pleading gaze that cried for help, any help, with the horrible nightmare of his own era. He walked towards them. He reached out his arms….
…The elevator doors finally squeaked shut and carried the administrators to the first floor. When they got there, everything had returned to normal, except the poor women. Scared half to death (and who wouldn’t be?) they immediately reported the incident to the security office on the first floor. The officer on duty, in a later interview, recalled how shook up the women were. He personally escorted them back to the elevator. Under their terrified gaze, he pressed the button for the basement. When the door slid open, he found…. Nothing. The room was just the lazy old basement it always was.
What. A. Story. I can’t even imagine taking an elevator ride and winding up in the middle of a battlefield hospital, one that operated a century-and-a-half before my own time. This incident, referred to as a “time slip” or “time warp” in supernatural lore, must have been horrifying. However, the two administrators, fighting untold amounts of emotional turmoil, kept their positions at the college. Although they never took the elevator again. Even when they were exhausted, and even from the fourth floor, they remained ever devoted to the stairs.
Their ghostly tale isn’t the only one to emerge from Pennsylvania Hall. Strange goings-on have been reported there for decades. Author Mark Nesbitt interviewed a completely separate woman who had a similar experience with the building’s ornery elevator. Misty soldiers in gray uniforms have been spotted pacing back and forth in the cupola. Shadowy figures have been seen lurking in the tower. One student said he saw a phantom man in the building’s cupola who waved his arms frantically, as if asking for help. When the student called his roommate to observe the man, the apparition vanished. Many others have reported strange feelings of dread and uneasiness when they walk by Old Dorm, as if unseen eyes watch their every move.
So… what the hell is going on at Pennsylvania hall? We know the building is an original structure of the school, called “Pennsylvania College” back then. It first sprung up in 1837, and it was one of the largest buildings on the campus. It provided dorms for students coming from far and wide to study. By the time the Civil War broke out, Pennsylvania Hall had been called home to countless people over the years.
During those fateful days in July of 1863, when all of Gettysburg got torn apart, Pennsylvania Hall transformed into a makeshift hospital – one of many set up under the frantic circumstances. Hundreds of shattered soldiers, in both blue and gray, got dragged into the hallways of the once-quiet dormitory. Dying men bled on the floor. They screamed for help and for their mothers. For relief of any kind. Doctors and nurses rolled up their sleeves, tied on their aprons, and tried to keep up with the influx.
If you ask me, it’s no wonder those ghostly doctors at Pennsylvania Hall are begging for help. Because medical units were pretty overlooked back then, as they are when we study military history today. They shouldn’t be, either. Some of the best contributions to medicine have been made during the heat of wartime, by medical personnel who can think of only one thing – saving more lives. So they put themselves in the line of fire. They work ungodly hours, putting their patients above everything else, rising to the challenge to put bodies back together when war insists on tearing them apart.
Civil War doctors especially had a hell of a challenge. Because it was a curious time in warfare when one side hadn’t caught up to the other. War had begun its shift into the modern area, but medicine remained trapped in the Middle Ages. Surgical and medical kits contained primitive, lanky tools that looked like something out of a murder movie. Mystery concoctions of alcohol and questionable herbs served as medicines. No treatment existed for things like shock, because it wasn’t the least bit understood. Blood transfusions didn’t exist either. Ambulance services comprised of rickety carts that piled as many men in that would fit. Words like “bacteria” and “sepsis” hadn’t quite made it into the medical vernacular. That’s extra scary in a time when the only real treatment for wounded ligaments was to cut them off.
Civil War Surgical wards became infamous for the mountains of blood-soaked arms and legs stacked up outside, as well as for unsanitary filth. The same bone saw got used on dozens of patients before the surgeons would wash it. Instruments for prodding wounds didn’t get sanitized, nor did the operating rooms or the rest of the hospital. Chloroform or whiskey provided the only pain relief for hasty operations, and some soldiers didn’t even have that. Many died from the trauma and the blood loss. As for those with gut shots, doctors usually deemed them hopeless and left them to die. Because if it couldn’t be cut off, it couldn’t be treated. In short, Civil War doctors didn’t stand a chance against the mechanized killing dispensed from artillery guns, repeaters, and rifles.
This made Civil War hospitals almost more harrowing than the battlefields. Many soldiers avoided them outright. One eye-witness to the sorry state of medical care was Louisa May Alcott. Destined to become a very famous writer, she first penned a memoir about her time as a nurse in the Civil War. “I spent my shining hours washing faces, serving rations, giving medicine, and sitting in a very hard chair, with pneumonia on one side, diphtheria on the other, five typhoids on the opposite, and a dozen dilapidated patriots, hopping, lying, and lounging about… who suffered untold agonies.”
Another medical worker, Union surgeon W.W. Keen, doesn’t paint a much prettier picture. “We operated in old blood-stained and often pus-stained coats [with] undisinfected hands… We used undisinfected instruments from undisinfected plush-lined cases and had been only washed in tap water.”
Yikes. That sort of trauma would undoubtedly leave a stamp on the timeline. So many people who could have lived if medicine was just a pinch more up to speed. Although, the Civil War did spawn some major action on the battlefield of modern medicine. It saw the creation of the first organized ambulance and medical units for the United States armies. Nurse Clara Barton, the famed “angel of the battlefield,” put together countless supply drives, some financed from her own pocket, to get clean supplies and medicines to the hospitals. She also went on to form the first American branch of the Red Cross. No less heroic were the efforts of Doretha Dix. In addition to her outstanding services as a nurse in the Civil War, she also brought badly needed attention to the complications of mental illness, and her efforts brought forth some of the first mental hospitals.
The foresight of these people and many others was astounding, especially in such a terrible time. However, medicine still couldn’t quite catch up. Thousands of soldiers died for the sheer want of better medical treatment. Artillery and guns did a lot of damage on the Civil War, but disease earned the distinction of the war’s biggest killer. From the well-over half a million men that died in the fighting, disease killed twice as many as bullets.
It’s tragic that killing and war saw advancement before healing and medicine. Which brings us back to Pennsylvania Hall. Maybe that’s the injustice those ghosts are trying to right when they take unwitting people on elevator rides to the past. There are some ladies out there who might think so, even if most write them off as crazy. Ghosts aren’t real, many would say. Neither are time slips. Stories like that don’t belong in an academic conversation.
I might have to disagree though. I think there’s a lot about this world (and others!) that we don’t quite understand yet. Just like there was a lot about medicine they didn’t understand in the past. I also think those “misses” leave emotional markers on the trail of history – haunted spots that remind us of things we shouldn’t repeat or overlooked stories. People and places that should never be forgotten. It’s an important part of the conversation too, especially when it comes to history. Besides, those doctors and nurses deserve some extra recognition. If ghost stories are what it takes to get it out there, I’ll share them until the end of time.
SOURCES
Gettysburg National Military Park
Civil War Ghost Stories – A. Konstam
Ghosts of Gettysburg/Civil War Ghost Trails – M. Nesbitt
Spirits of the Civil War – T. Taylor
Hospital Sketches – L.M. Alcott
The Civil War: A Visual History – Smithsonian
All photos by M.B. Henry (sorry I don’t have one of Pennsylvania Hall! Next time!) For more from Gettysburg, click here.
A very Happy Halloween to all my readers! I wish you lots of tricks, treats, and creepy ghost stories!
An eerie, incredible, heart stopping story. Inexplicable events are often inexplicable.
Sometimes they are also unimaginable tragedies.
Bravo for this post.
Thank you! I’m so glad you enjoyed it. Gosh when I first read that story I was like “um… must share.” Lol! 🙂
Wow, MB — this is an emotional blockbuster of a piece. Dramatically told, exceptionally written, and painfully educational. A real horror story.
You know I wasn’t sure what was scarier. The elevator ride or the conditions in Civil War hospitals! So glad you enjoyed it Dave!
Just brilliant! You made me see it.
Thanks very much! 🙂 Such a creepy story, I couldn’t not share!
Sounds absolutely horrific.
Right? Those women are braver than me. I never could have gone back to work there!
Great story, M.B. – will reblog this on BookemJanO later this week! Loved it!
Oh I would be delighted if you did that! Thank you! <3 So glad you enjoyed it.
Look for it here Thursday morning! It’s soooo good! 😊💕
Yaaay! I certainly will! <3
That’s a harrowing example of the medical realities during the Civil War, M.B., and an intriguing report of the experiences of the two college administrators. It is difficult for our rational minds to make sense of what might have happened, but I also believe that there are phenomena we can’t explain.
Your narrative is spellbinding!
Thanks very much! Yes – I like to have an open mind about everything. You never know what we’ll discover years down the road and what that will mean! So glad you stopped by and that you enjoyed the post.
Very well written, MB, and informative. Thank you. It’s obvious that you put a lot of work into the post. As for ghosts, I’ve had two, and possibly three encounters— more than enough to make me a believer. They were mild compared to what the two women encountered, however. –Curt
Ooooh Curt that’s CHILLING! I would love to hear more about your encounters! I’m so glad you enjoyed the post, thanks for your kind compliments
This is a good season in which to tell this story! What a frightening experience for these poor women! I believe I would have made a new door somewhere to escape! Thank you for crediting the nurses of the Civil War era. They comforted many a suffering soldier and eased pain when possible. Another great story!
I probably would just pass out. “Wake me when it’s over!” LOL.
Suspenseful! When do we get to read more? I love Gettysburg and have been to both the campus and the battlefield more than once!
That’s so cool you’ve been more than once! I’d love to go again sometime 🙂 We really enjoyed our time in Gettysburg, they’ve done a fantastic job preserving that history. So glad you enjoyed the post and thanks so much for your compliments.
War is hell. Hopefully, our advances in medicine have been followed by advances in avoiding war although as humans we seem to have a propensity for killing each other. Very well written and researched piece, M.B..
It’s a sad truth you point out 🙁 I wish we could focus our energies on things that help everyone instead of destroying everyone and everything! I’m glad you enjoyed the post.
Very interesting story there and well written ,plenty of food for thought ,thank you !
I’m so glad you enjoyed it – thanks for reading and for your nice compliments 🙂
Chillingly informative and superbly told!
Thank you very much! 🙂
An outstanding re-creation of the Civil War horrors for the soldiers and a terrific correlation and moral with today’s veterans.
Thanks so much GP! 🙂 I’m glad you liked it.
Fabulous write-up and great images. Really eye-opening.
Thank you! 🙂
Incredible story. World War I was another war where the ability to kill rapidly outstretched the ability to heal. By World War II, it was a bit more equitable but still not good. Today we are doing better between quicker access to care and better care available. War should still not be the preferred alternative.
Yes – thanks for pointing out WWI as well. Amputation was still a big treatment of choice, and there was a lot they had to learn on the spot, especially when it came to poison gas and gangrene. I also know that a pair of nurses in WWI made some tremendous strides with the effects of shock and how best to minimize them. I agree also that WWII seems like the war when things started to catch up medically, but there was still an awful lot they had to improvise! And yes – if only we could find a better way than war 🙁 Thanks so much for stopping by and sharing your thoughts.
Now, that’s what I’d call on nightmare of ride, and it makes me wonder which would be worse. The one witnessing it, or being one of the ones that had such pain inflicted on them that it still haunts us to this day.
while I am trained in the hard sciences, and would have to examine all aspects of the sighting, I always remind myself of one simple thing; NOT EVERYTHING THAT IS, IS WRITTEN DOWN IN OUT SCIENCE BOOKS YET.
Yes – that is exactly right. I too am a firm believer in the hard sciences, but I like to keep an open mind. There’s so much out there that we don’t know or understand fully yet. I’m so glad you enjoyed the post!
Thank you for this informational and historical post!
You’re very welcome! Thanks for stopping by and giving it a read 🙂
What a gripping narrative you’ve created, M.B.! Energy is eternal – negative and positive. I can’t even imagine really how shocking such a sight would be to those women. Even worse for those who lived it firsthand.
Yes, it’s hard to imagine what it must be like to experience something like that. Part of me really wants to experience a time slip someday, but maybe one a little less gruesome! So glad you enjoyed the post 🙂
Very well written, M.B.! To tell you true, I have heard about this encounter some time ago. What bothers me is did this truly happen? Since there is no real proof of this, other than those 2 girls describing what they saw. I do believe that there strange things that happen in or around Gettysburg because of all the death that happened there. I have been to Gettysburg a few times, as you may know. I never saw anything strange, but it was always during daylight hours. I even took a Ghost Tour, but nothing was seen or heard. If I’d see something like that, I’d run like hell!
Right! I didn’t see or experience anything while we were there either. We did go out at night and we also did a ghost tour, just to try and tempt fate. While we didn’t see anything with our eyes, there’s certainly a sad energy that lingers around places like Gettysburg. I’m in your boat too. I would probably run like hell if I actually saw anything! 🙂
It is amazing what our imagination can make us see – and what a great Halloween post. War is indeed hell. Our civil war was particularly brutal. My great great grandfather was a medic in the civil war, on the Confederate side. He went on to be a much lauded doctor in Arkansas. Our family lore is that he used his grandmother’s native American knowledge to staunch or treat wounds with local mosses and herbs.
That’s really cool about your great-great granddad! What a neat story 🙂
I would love to get a copy of the book written about him.
There’s a book?! Awesome! I hope you get a copy, I bet that’s a fascinating read.
Great post! We were in Gettysburg years ago. It is haunted, I swear!
I totally agree! It’s an eerie place. Glad you enjoyed the post
Oh wow MB What a tale and well researched post. I have to go back and look at the photos as I just scrolled from word to word.
Thank you so much! 🙂 I’m glad you enjoyed it. I hope you like the pics!
I did MB. So much Civil War stuff around the place isn’t there
Definitely! I’d love to go back again someday 🙂 And visit a few more battlefields besides!
Take your metal detector with you 🙂 🙂
Oh they’re still digging all kinds of shot and shell out of those fields I’m sure!
I reckon they would be.
Another tale of history that kept me spell bound and left me wanting to know more. Great job, MB. 😊
Thanks so much! 🙂 <3 I'm so glad you enjoyed it.
Oh no! That’s scary! But thank you for the fascinating history. 🙂
You are welcome! 🙂 Sorry for the scare, I have to get my ghost posts out around Halloween 🙂
I understand! 🙂 Peace.
I saw ghosts at Camp Lejeaune when I was stationed there & worked in the old naval hospital. I’ve felt them & seen apparitions in St. Augustine. I think that when you believe there is more than what is explained & real on this earth, the spirits find you. I believe these women saw exactly what you described. Well written! Someday, I will get up there to feel it for myself.
Ooooooh that’s very interesting! I love that you shared your own experiences here. I haven’t seen any apparitions or anything (yet!) but there are places where I can definitely feel the chill in the air, so to speak. I totally agree too – the spirits (and the stories!) find you if you are open to receiving them. Some wonderful points you made there. I hope you make it to Gettysburg someday, I think you would love it.
The details are eerie & will be glad to share when I’m not so tired. 😊
I’ll be looking forward to hearing all about it!
You really are a gifted storyteller … made this story come to life.
And I agree we don’t know everything about other times and surreal experiences.
Thank you very much! <3 And yes, it's important to always keep an open mind. You never know what we will discover down the road.
A very realistic description of some of the horrors of war then (and now).
Thanks very much! Glad you enjoyed it.
The details of the blood soaked operating room, the shock on the faces of the clerks, and the screams of the patients, all of those details make the history alive and interactive. Well done. I’ve always enjoyed history, but your writing sucks me in like never before.
That makes me feel very good about myself! 🙂 Thank you so much for saying that. I’m so glad you enjoyed this post and others as well!
This is a great read. It spooked me. 😱
Oh no! Hopefully it was an enjoyable spook 🙂 Hope you have a great Halloween, glad you liked the post.
I really love supernatural stories (X-Files is one of my favorite shows), and this one is especially spooky. Thanks for that. I agree with you, too–there is much more to the world than we currently understand.
X-files!!! Such an awesome show. I tried to catch that when it was on back in the day 🙂 So glad you enjoyed the post 🙂
Yay! I love that show so much.
What a sad and scary story. Those soldiers (and medical personnel) went through hell. No wonder that area still has a sad vibe to it.
Yes, they certainly did! 🙁 I do believe something like that can be felt for a long time, and it may never truly go away.
A very interesting read!!
Thanks much!
Super tale and a terrifying ghostly scare for those two women… plus a frightening tale for Halloween. But agonizing scenes like one that had to be commonplace during that war. I know my GGGrandfather’s home was a temporary hospital and stains are still on the wood floors. Will we ever learn?
Yes, you are right. They were all too common place during the war :(. And what a story about your Grandfather! How eerie that the sings are still visible! And I wish that we could learn. I really, really wish that!
That is a scary story. I’d stick to the stairs too.
Me too!!! 🙂
I had goosebumps reading that. Up to now hospitals in general, even not the basements… are said to have a lot of these occurrences.
I wouldn’t be surprised! If anywhere ghosts and haunts would linger, hospitals sure have a lot going on. Thanks so much for giving this a read!
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