Gettysburg National Military Park

For three days in July 1863, the fields and ridgelines around the small town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, hosted the largest battle ever fought in North America. When it ended, some 51,000 soldiers were dead, wounded, captured, or missing, and the Confederate army's retreat marked a turning point the war never fully recovered from. That November, Abraham Lincoln dedicated part of the battlefield as a national cemetery with a two-minute address that outlasted nearly everything else said that day.

The scale of what happened there has left the ground itself layered with named haunted sites: Devil's Den, Little Round Top, the Triangular Field, and Sachs Bridge among the most cited. Visitors, reenactors, and park rangers alike have long reported phantom cannon fire and drumming, the smell of gunpowder with no visible source, and figures in period uniform glimpsed at dusk and gone by the time anyone gets close.

Whether or not any of it can be explained, Gettysburg remains one of the most studied and most reported-on haunted landscapes in the country, its history and its hauntings by now almost impossible to separate.