History & local legend
The small stone George George House on Steinwehr Avenue in Gettysburg briefly sheltered the body of Union Major General John F. Reynolds after he was killed on July 1, 1863. Reynolds was being prepared for the journey home to Lancaster. A later ghost story imagines that vigil still visible through the house’s window.
In the account recorded by Civil War essayist Kent Gramm, two women taking an evening walk stopped to look inside. A motionless man lay on a cot in a corner, while a woman dressed in black sat beside him in a rocking chair. Because neither figure moved or acknowledged them, the walkers assumed they were looking at a wax display.
When the women returned the next day, the room was a craft shop. The figures were gone, and even the arrangement of the interior had changed.
Sources
- Kent Gramm, Somebody’s Darling, Indiana University Press, 2002, ‘The Ghosts of Gettysburg,’ page 21
- Tufts University, Linger: Searching for Ghostly Justice in American History, discussion of Gramm’s room, figures and craft shop on pages 9–10
- Gloucester County Historical Society, historian’s account of the George George house and local window legend
- Gettysburg Daily, photographs of every side of the stone house, address, resident and Reynolds’s route
- Library of Congress, ‘Reynolds House’ illustrated in the 1909 album Historic Views of Gettysburg
