Chasing Ghosts by Marc Hartzman

Author:Marc Hartzman [Hartzman, Marc]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quirk Books
Published: 2021-09-28T00:00:00+00:00

Riddled with bullet holes still visible in its brick wall beneath the garret, the bed-and-breakfast is located near Cemetery Hill and the historic battlefield. When new owners purchased the inn in the early 1970s, their eldest daughter, Patty, discovered she had a sensitivity to ghosts and began hearing their stories in her dreams. She invited the paranormal investigator Lorraine Warren to inspect the inn and give her a crash course in the supernatural. Warren detected a malicious presence in the basement and painted a cross on the door to keep it contained. Perhaps Patty saw this cursed space as a blessing. She opened a séance room in the cellar, dressed as a Confederate widow, and started sharing the stories she’d gathered. And thus, a Gettysburg ghost tour industry was born.

“There are a lot of reasons for this place to be haunted,” says Niki Saunders, a paranormal investigator and employee at the Farnsworth. “I mean, there was literally blood rolling down the street. A lot of bodies and piles—a lot of death here.”

Of the tens of thousands who died in the battle, one of those bodies belonged to the lone civilian casualty. Jennie Wade was minding her business, kneading dough in her kitchen, when a Confederate sharpshooter perched in the Farnsworth’s attic fired a shot that pierced two doors and zipped through the twenty-year-old’s kitchen, striking her dead. Wade is known to haunt her own house—in fact, visitors can still see a floorboard with her blood on it—but she has also appeared before guests at the Farnsworth. Perhaps she’s been looking for the man whose rifle took her life; the soldiers who holed up at the inn are allegedly still there. The sight of blood and its coppery scent have been experienced by guests, as have the sounds of gunshots, bodies dragging across the floor, and soldiers stomping back and forth through the hallways. Their ghosts have even been known to tie people’s shoelaces together to make them fall. It sounds immature for a soldier, but those soldiers weren’t much older than boys. Or maybe they learned from the ghost of a little boy who died at the inn.

Jeremy, age six or seven, found out the hard way that playing chicken in the street with a horse and carriage is a bad idea. After a devastating accident, he was picked up by an adult on the scene and brought to the Farnsworth’s main bedroom, where a staff nurse, Mary, cared for him. Someone fetched his father, who raced over and held his son in his arms as he passed away. There at the inn, as the tale goes, he stayed forever.

“Jeremy is one of our most beloved ghosts,” says Vivian Vega, the housekeeping supervisor and ghost tour guide at the Farnsworth. “Everybody likes to bring him toys.”

He’s been known to move objects, knock on doors, throw things in the room to get people’s attention, and, yes, play with the toys people bring him. Vega has had her own interaction with the ghost by giving him a ball and some blocks.

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