In Brief
At the Accomac Inn above the Susquehanna near Wrightsville, Pennsylvania, a 16-year-old milkmaid was shot dead in 1881. Staff say she haunts the inn — and in one upstairs room, they say she's seen there beside the man who killed her.
The Full Story
The Accomac Inn sits on the bank of the Susquehanna in Hellam Township, Pennsylvania, and in one upstairs storage room, staff lore holds that two figures turn up together: a young woman, and the man who killed her. The unsettling part is that they're said to share the room at all.
Her name was Emily Myers. In 1881 she was 16, a domestic servant and milkmaid at what was then a ferry crossing on this spot, one of the oldest on the river. John Coyle Jr., the roughly 26-year-old son of the inn's owner, kept asking her to marry him, and she kept refusing. On May 30, 1881, Decoration Day, he found her in the barn milking a cow, asked once more, drew a pistol, and shot her in the heart. She died instantly.
Coyle ran. He was caught after about ten days, and at trial he pleaded a weak mind. It failed. He won a change of venue to Gettysburg, where a second jury again convicted him of first-degree murder, and on April 22, 1884, he was hanged before a crowd of more than 300.
Emily was buried at Marietta Cemetery, beside her great-aunt. The cemetery association refused to let her killer lie anywhere near her. So Coyle's parents buried him on their own ferry property instead.
Walk out the back of the inn, past the parking lot and into the trees, and his single tombstone is still there, about 50 feet from the building.
People have reported a lot here over the years: music and voices with no source, doors slamming, dishes breaking, lights flickering, the building's intercom ringing when no one was inside. The inn's longtime general manager once said of Coyle, "I think, definitely, he's probably sitting here, listening to us right now." Staff have described a man at a corner table with his head in his hands who was gone when they came back, and a weeping woman in the dining room who later turned up sobbing on the hillside by the lot. The story they keep telling, though, is the one upstairs.
The murder is documented well enough to fill a book. A York County writer named Michael Maloney pieced it together from 1881 newspapers, court records, and trial transcripts for "Across the River: Murder at Accomac." He started after he learned about the grave behind the inn.
When Henry Shenk bought the place in 2018, he made a promise about the girl. "The table will be set for Emily," he said, "as long as I am the owner."
