History & local legend
During the artillery fighting on East Cemetery Hill on July 2, 1863, Cooper’s Battery suffered casualties before being relieved by Captain R. Bruce Ricketts’ men. One of the incoming gunners, L. Eugene C. Moore, found a severed hand at his position. He later recalled burying it in the earthen defense around his cannon, the second emplacement from a stone wall.
A Gettysburg ghost tradition identifies the hand’s owner as James McCleary, a member of Cooper’s Battery who was mortally wounded that day and buried in nearby Evergreen Cemetery. On foggy summer nights, his figure is said to move among the earthworks searching for the missing hand.
Moore’s surviving account describes the burial but does not identify whose hand he found. Historian Frank J. Piatek’s study of the battery’s casualties found that the familiar accounts of McCleary’s injuries do not all agree.
Sources
- Frank J. Piatek, Col. Charles S. Wainwright’s Account of Cooper’s Company B on East Cemetery Hill, a study of the casualties and the hand
- L. Eugene C. Moore’s account in the National Tribune (1909), transcribed and cited by battlefield researcher Tom Elmore
- Haunts and History, archived local version of the solitary figure at the earthworks
- Licensed battlefield guide Deb Novotny, McCleary and Cooper’s Battery on July 2
