Pennsylvania Hall (Gettysburg College)
Built in 1837 as the first building of what was then Pennsylvania College, the Greek Revival "Old Dorm" was the largest structure in town when the battle reached its doorstep in July 1863. As control of the campus passed from Union to Confederate hands, its classrooms and student quarters became a field hospital where surgeons treated nearly 700 wounded men from both armies, many of whom died inside its walls. The building's most enduring legend dates to the 1980s, when two administrators working late are said to have ridden the elevator down only to have it bypass the first floor and open onto a blood-soaked operating ward in full swing, a surgeon glancing up to wave them in before the scene dissolved. Popularized in Mark Nesbitt's Ghosts of Gettysburg and broadcast on Unsolved Mysteries, the account is often described as a "time slip" in which the building's past briefly bleeds into the present. Today the hall holds the college president's offices, its quiet corridors still trailing one of Gettysburg's best-known ghost stories.
📍 Gettysburg College campus, 300 N Washington St, Gettysburg, PA 17325, Gettysburg, PA · Get directions