How Ann and I Were Murdered by Ghosts in Gettysburg

Oooh, ghosty.

Ann and I recently stayed the night at the Farnsworth House in Gettysburg. For those of you who don't know, the Farnsworth house was used in the battle at Gettysburg. Snipers hid in the attic and shot out through the window. One of the snipers was responsible for accidentally shooting Jennie Wade, the only civilian killed in the battle.

Farnsworth is also supposed to be haunted as crap. It's been ranked by tons of tv shows as one of the most haunted places in America, ghost experts conduct ghostly experiments there all the time, complete skeptics stay the night and emerge believers. It's cray. Naturally, Ann and I decided this would be a good place to sleep.

I'll preface this all with saying that I'm pretty open to the idea of ghosts. I wouldn't go so far as to say I definitely believe in them, but there do seem to be a lot of things that happen that we haven't found concrete explanations for. It also seems unrealistic to me that we have figured out exactly how everything in the world works. It seems more likely that there are some things we haven't figured out yet. When Louis Pasteur came up with the germ theory, everyone thought he was crazy. The idea of invisible little things floating around and making everyone sick seemed stupid. Thing is, they just didn't have the tools to see germs yet. I think maybe supernatural stuff is the same way.

Anywho, Ann and I decided to be real scientific about this thing. We brought notebooks and wrote down everything that we felt and experienced. We decided not to tell each other what we were writing, so we couldn't trick each other into experiencing the same things via the power of suggestion. Anytime something weird happened, we tried to find a physical explanation for it first. For example, when our door started shaking on its hinge like someone was trying to get in the room (terrifying), we realized after standing in the hallway for awhile that it did that every time another door in the inn closed. Not ghosts. Just an old house.

Still, a lot of little weird, creepy things happened. Here are a few highlights.

One of the ghosts that supposedly haunts the inn is a little boy named Jeremy. Apparently he was trampled by a horse and carriage in front of the inn. He was carried inside and died in the room we stayed in. There is a whole dresser filled with little toys for him, and a lot of people leave them out to see if he moves them.* We set up toys and coins all over the room, and took pictures of everything to see if they moved. Here's what happened.

When we went to sleep, the pennies looked like the first picture. When we woke up, they looked like the second. We didn't leave the room, and no one else came in. After I noticed this, I shook the table a few times, to see if one of us could have accidentally bumped the table and made the pennies slide. Every time I tried it, the pennies went pell-mell. I couldn't make them move into a neat formation like this. Also, if you look closely, you'll see that every single penny face is facing the exact same direction in the first photo as the last one. I can't think of how the pennies could slide and just happen to all keep facing the same way. Also, I just now realized that the wipes moved as well. Hmm.

Then, this happened to Ann's shoes.

Again, the first picture is how they looked when we went to sleep, and the second is how they looked when we woke up. At first we thought maybe the rug had slid, but it's in exactly the same place. Like the pennies, we practiced gently kicking and nudging the shoes to see if we could have accidentally moved them. We couldn't find a way to do it that got them to line up this neatly. They just kind of scattered.

At one point, when Ann and I were about to go out for lunch, we heard a sound coming from the dining room. It was empty, but the swinging door that went to the kitchen was creaking. It seemed like that was the direction the sound had been coming from, so we went over and looked at it. While we were watching, the door opened several inches, hovered there for about a second, and then closed. This resulted in a lot of us yelling and freaking out a bit. Then, we started to mess with the door. If you pushed it in, it swung really easily. If you tried to push it out though, (the direction it had moved), it was very heavy and hard to move. Also, every time we pushed it, it immediately swung back shut. It never hovered like when it moved on its own. We left, thoroughly freaked out, and passed a couple on our way out. The next morning, they told us that right after we left, they heard the door moving and went to go investigate. It opened several times for them. He filmed it opening about 6 inches.

It sounds like people in the other rooms had a lot more activity than we did (which is kind of annoying, since we paid extra to stay in what is supposed to be the most haunted room). The couple had their bed shake and felt someone touching them, and a mom and daughter had things moved to complete opposite sides of the room. 

Now, obviously, none of this is proof. For all you know, I moved the stuff in those pictures around myself. Also, what is the point of all of this? Was a ghost really like "HahaHA, I'm going to slightly wiggle your pennies around! How fearsome!" I'm not even completely convinced this was ghosts. Much like my attitude towards God, it seems implausible to me that we could guess completely correctly about this kind of thing. Maybe there's residual energy from the battle moving things around. Maybe there is a physical explanation that I just didn't figure out. Who knows. I definitely think there's something going on in the house (really, in that whole town). Too many bizarre things happened for me to think otherwise. Like this.

Horrifying.

*People also leave candy for him. I may or may not have stolen some of the dead ghost baby's candy and eaten it. I will likely be haunted forever.