Accomac Inn

A 16-year-old servant shot dead in the barn in 1881. Her killer's grave is 50 feet from the bar. Staff see them both.

Emily Myers was sixteen, milking a cow in the barn at Anderson's Ferry, when Johnny Coyle shot her in the heart. It was May 30, 1881. She had turned down his marriage proposal. He was twenty-six, the son of the inn's owner, described at trial as slow-witted and often drunk. He fled into the hills for ten days. A jury convicted him of first-degree murder. Another jury, after his defense won a venue change to Gettysburg, convicted him again. On April 22, 1884, roughly 300 spectators watched him hang.

The barn is gone. The inn is not. The Accomac Inn sits above the Susquehanna in Hellam, a 1775 stone building that has worked as a ferry stop, dance hall, tavern, and white-tablecloth restaurant in turn. Emily, according to the staff, is in all of it.

Waitresses have watched a young woman in strange clothes weep in the dining room, walk out, and then turn up again sobbing on the hillside by the parking lot. She won't answer when anyone asks if she needs help. A night manager tried twice in one evening and got nothing back. In an upstairs storage room, guests and employees have seen both Emily and Johnny together, which is the detail that gets to people. The killer and the girl he killed, sharing a room above the dining floor.

The men get seen too. A waitress once noticed a man sitting alone at a corner table with his head in his hands. She went to get him water. When she came back, the chair was empty and no one had walked past her.

Then there is the rest of it: the intercom ringing in an empty building, doors slamming in empty halls, dishes breaking on their own, lights flickering, music and voices with no source. A former owner named Henry Shenk used to keep a table permanently set for Emily, as if she might sit down. The Mason-Dixon Paranormal Society has investigated the property and says they've made contact with both Coyle and Myers, though a seance doesn't prove much.

Here is what is verifiable. Emily was buried in an unmarked grave at Marietta Cemetery, next to her great-aunt Sarah. When Coyle's parents tried to bury him near her, the cemetery refused. They put him on their own property instead, about fifty feet south of the inn. Walk out back through the trees and the lone tombstone is visible.

The killer is here. Not metaphorically. In the ground, fifty feet from the bar.