The Gettysburg hauntings

Ghost stories told about Gettysburg, where Union and Confederate armies fought for three days in July 1863, and the ghost-tour trade built on them.

The National Park Service puts the toll of the battle's three days at about 10,000 soldiers dead or fatally wounded, 30,000 wounded, and 10,000 missing or taken prisoner. Wikipedia gives total casualties of 46,000 to 51,000 for the two armies. The park service says the dead were first buried in haste in shallow graves, marked in pencil on wooden boards. When rain and wind wore those graves away, townspeople pressed for a cemetery where the Federal dead could be buried properly.

HISTORY quotes a ghost-story researcher named Nesbitt, who traced the earliest ghost story tied to the battle to the hours from July 1 into July 2, 1863. Nesbitt says soldiers of the Union Fifth Corps, marching toward the town in the dark, saw a rider ahead who came and went from view and was dressed in Revolutionary War uniform. He says many of them took it for George Washington's ghost.

The ghost tours that grew up around such stories were the subject of a 2013 roundtable at Gettysburg College. It looked at how ghost tourism works at historic sites, why it draws crowds, and how it relates to the way the public learns history.