Seeing is Believing at the Farnsworth House

A tour through the haunted Farnsworth Inn in Gettysburg the other day was full of surprises. Tours are only given on weekends but Master Storyteller Bob was kind enough to dress for the occasion and let us roam.

The Sun Room was our first stop. It's now a sitting room that overlooks the garden area but during the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863 it served as a open air porch for Confederate sharpshooters. The soldiers used the brick wall for cover, ducking and dodging whizzing bullets that penetrated the wall.

Visitors today report seeing blood on the floor and the smell of death in this room. Try as I might I experienced neither.

Next up, the haunted bathroom, where the veils of time part so some can witness the bloody carnage left here on July 4, 1863. An old pull chain toilet, vintage sink and Elizabethan touches are all that's left.

To the attic we climb. The Garret room is where confederate soldiers had the best vantage point. All of Baltimore street to the south can be seen through a small frosted window. The only recorded civilian death occurred from this room when Mary Virginia "Jennie" Wade was accidentally shot while baking bread at her sister's home across the street.

It's said that visitors can hear the sounds of someone playing the Jew's harp and dragging trunks across the floor.

We spent considerable time here, listening to gruesome stories and taking photos of display cases filled with military artifacts, artillery and a spooky femur bone ring engraved with initials.

The tour continues. Through the McFarlane room where a rocking chair rocks back and forth no help from the living. Onto the Sara Black room where the sleeves of a white wedding dress dance in mid air. Stopping briefly inside the attached master bathroom that used to be a nursery where a spooky water faucet turns on and off by itself. To the cellar and catacombs dressed as a funeral parlor where 2 Civil War soldiers were dragged with bleeding bullet wounds from the second floor.

Upon leaving I was truly hoping for a sweep of cold spirits to ashen my face or a whisper in my ear to give me goosebumps or a fleeting image to materialize in my camera. But, none, absolutely none of this happened.

Maybe I was too eager, too focused, too deliberate in my search. I want to believe in ghosts and experience the unexplainable so, why, why, why do the ghosts retreat? What's their reticence? Tom and I joked that maybe we're scarier than them. That doesn't sound reassuring.