by Brady Guy Staff Reporter _______________________________________________________________________________________________________ My friend Harry Jessell invited me to come with him on a weekend trip to Gettysburg to sleep at the Farnsworth Inn, which is supposedly one of the most haunted places in the United States. I was excited and naïve, expecting the night to be full of cheap parlor tricks and lots of laughs. I was wrong. The town of Gettysburg itself seemed to be haunted due to its history as the bloodiest American Civil War battle where the largest number of casualties occurred. When Harry and I first arrived in Gettysburg, we decided to take a tour around the old battlegrounds. Ghosts of the confederate snipers and the Union soldiers are rumored to haunt the places in which they died, which means that around 50,000 soldiers roam this area. After our tour in the battlegrounds, we went into town to check into the Farnsworth Inn. As we drove up, the first thing I noticed was that one of the main brick walls of the house was filled with bullet holes from the Gettysburg battle. Five of the rooms offered at the Farnsworth Inn were supposedly haunted and named after the people who had died in them - including the Sweeny, Jenny Wade, Lincoln, Belle Boyd, and Sara Black Room. The Sara Black Room was supposedly the most haunted room in the Inn, as it has been “visited” by multiple ghosts. It was also the room that Harry and I were to sleep in that night. The main reason we were staying at Farnsworth was to attempt to see and experience an actual haunted house. In order to do this, Harry and I were scheduled to take a midnight tour of the house. The staff who knew the history of the Farnsworth House and worked there during the day conducted the tour. The beginning of the tour began with fifteen guests, including Harry and myself, who listened to one of the guides tell stories about the history of the Farnsworth house and each of the rooms we would be visiting. The tour guide, Bob, had a deep, powerful voice that gave his words influence and meaning. The history of the Farnsworth House seemed a bit cliché to me, but then again, I expected most of the night to be one big joke. According to Bob, over the years those who stayed at the Farnsworth Inn succumbed unlikely or misfortunate deaths. The first deaths began around the time of the battle of Gettysburg. Confederate snipers took up positions in the attic and other windows of the house, shooting at Union soldiers passing in the streets. When the Union soldiers finally caught on, they returned fire upon the house, thus creating 100 bullet holes in the wall I had seen earlier on. The firefight resulted in the deaths of the Confederates occupying the Inn, however, only one of those soldiers is known to still reside in the house today and also happens to be the most violent and abrasive ghost there. This is supposedly the reason why it is “frowned upon” to speak this particular specter’s name inside the house. All the tour guides would tell me is that his name began with a W. I could not help but laugh out loud when I heard this part of the story, later making it a game to say the ghost’s name as loudly and obnoxiously as I could in order to try to get a rise out of it. Even after the war ended, the gruesome deaths still continued. All sorts of people had died inside the Farnsworth House, including a little boy who was playing “horse tag” and was stampeded to death, and a little girl who died of a disease that was common back in the day. After Bob was done talking, another tour guide, David, stepped up to the front of the room carrying a huge bag. David began by introducing himself as an electrician by day but a ghost hunter by night. He then pulled out numerous electronics from his gigantic bag. Apparently, we were to use special tools in order to aid us in our search for a paranormal experience. David took out a night vision monocular, a video camera that threw everything in the dark into a sharp white relief, an instrument that looked like a remote control with buttons flashing from red to green that was supposed to monitor the amount of “energy” in the air, and my personal favorite, as well as the most low tech of all the equipment there, divining rods. We held the divining rods in an almost downward position, and in order to determine whether there was a ghost in the room, we had to ask the specter to cross the rods if it was there. If the rods did cross then we were free to keep asking the ghost yes or no questions in order to figure out whose ghost it was and other facts about it. This, of course, seemed absolutely ridiculous to me. The only way the rods could possibly cross was if the person holding them moved them. I literally had to bite my hand to stop myself from laughing when one older lady in the group got carried away with the rods. At some point in the tour she decided that she was an expert on ghosts, that everybody else’s “results” throughout the night were fakes and that she was the only one being contacted by the specters. The kicker: I overheard the woman’s husband sitting with his divining rods asking the ghosts if they would please “beat his wife.” That time, I did laugh out loud. We were free to bring our own recording equipment, so I had brought my tape recorder in order to store all the cool stuff that we all hoped would happen that night. The actual tour of the house commenced when we were split up into groups and sent to different parts of the house. Harry and I were lucky enough to begin in the attic. The attic had been another place of death where more confederate snipers had been shot and killed. However, it was also notorious for attracting a beautiful female ghost who had died due to “mysterious circumstances.” It was in this attic that my skepticism for the Farnsworth House came to an abrupt halt and where the scariest part of the tour occurred, a fact I did not even realize until the next morning. While we were up in the attic, I turned on the recorder in order to catch any paranormal happenings. During the first fifteen minutes, nothing happened, but then it began to get weird. As I was sitting down in a small wooden chair on one side of the attic, I felt a chill go up my spine. It was shortly followed by the sweet sound of a music box playing. At first we thought that it was someone’s cell phone, but we soon figured out it was not. The music became louder and continued playing, then all of a sudden just stopped. Afterwards, the other guests and I began to search for the music box. I found a small carriage with a broken clay cat at the bottom, and shortly after my discovery, another guest discovered the bottom half of the music box in an obscure corner of the attic nobody had been in. When I put the clay cat onto the bottom of the music box, it was a perfect fit. The music box appeared to have wound itself up and played. The scariest part of my adventure came the next morning. My tape recorder had caught everything that happened while we were up in the attic, and when the music box suddenly went off, every person in the attic was dead quiet – pardon the pun. But when I played back the music box part the next morning, there was a voice while it was playing. It sounded like a little girl singing along with the song. The only woman in the attic with us was the woman who thought of herself as queen of the ghosts, and her voice was much deeper and huskier than that of the voice singing on my tape. For the rest of the night I moved from room to room with my group using all of the cool gadgets I had gotten from David. Even though I did not actually get to see a ghost, I still had tons of fun joking around with the other guests and trying to taunt Walter (by this point in the night we had discovered the aggressive ghost’s name) into showing his transparent face. One of the guides later explained to us that we were all too “manly and strong” for Walter and that he only responded when a woman would try and give him an order. Go figure. It was around this time that we decided to go to bed. There was no paranormal activity going on in our room that night, even though Harry swears he heard footsteps next to our bed at one point. One last creepy thing happened to us after we woke up – I specifically remember placing a stuffed dog on top of a journal that was on our dresser, but when we woke up we found both the journal and the stuffed dog underneath our bed. Apparently a ghost had haunted our room in the middle of the night while we were asleep. The ghost was once named Jeremy and he was the very same ghost who was trampled to death as a child right outside the Farnsworth House. He was notorious for messing around in the Sara Black room because the attached bathroom used to be his nursery. Regardless of the bogus theatrics and over-the-top dramatics of the tour guides and the one lady who believed all the ghosts loved her, I still had a great time trying to provoke the spirits of the dead. If I could, I would have definitely spent a second night there - if not for the ghosts, then for the night vision equipment we were lucky enough to use. The Farnsworth House was 99% built up tourist traps, but that other 1% makes me believe that the house was legitimately haunted. I can honestly say that I cannot wait to visit another haunted house, and next time, I am going to bring a Ouija board. |