Cashtown Inn

Confederate HQ before Gettysburg, amputation theater after. Rocking chair rocks in A.P. Hill's room. Boots pace the hall at 2 a.m.

A.P. Hill slept on the second floor. He had chronic kidney disease, probably gonorrhea-related, and in late June 1863 he needed a quiet room with a clean bed and running water more than most men at the head of a Confederate corps ever admit to needing. His doctors found him one at the Cashtown Inn, eight miles west of Gettysburg, and Hill moved his 22,000 troops into camp around it. Henry Heth and John Imboden used the inn too. The rooms in the second-floor hallway are now named after those three generals. From the window of the Heth room, on the morning of July 1, you can almost trace the road Hill's men took east toward a town they had been told would have shoes, and didn't, and the battle that started over a rumor about footwear.

Two days after the battle, when the Confederate retreat came back through Cashtown, the basement became a field hospital for the men they could still save and an amputation theater for the men they couldn't. Local accounts from the time say severed arms and legs piled up outside the cellar windows high enough to block the light. Whether that is literally true or something that grew in the retelling, the basement stayed dark for days. The building had been taking travelers off the Chambersburg Pike since 1797, when original owner Peter Marck would only accept cash for lodging and, in doing so, named the town.

A young Confederate soldier, shot from ambush by a townsperson, was carried to a second-floor bedroom and died there. His face has been photographed in the second-floor window as a white light that resolves, in a few frames, into something that resembles a young man closely enough to rattle the people who see it. The inn's website runs a page of guest-submitted images that they neither endorse nor remove.

The recurring phenomena concentrate on the original battle dates, July 1 through 3. In the A.P. Hill room, the rocking chair rocks by itself. Guests sleeping in the room report the weight of a second person pressing down on the mattress beside them. A Confederate soldier turns up in the Henry Heth room and near the bar downstairs. An old-timey woman, as the staff call her, shows up in the General Lee Suite, stands in the doorway, and watches. Doors rattle. Knobs turn, half-turn, stop. Boots pace the hallway at two in the morning. Nobody is there when the door opens.

Ghost Hunters filmed here for the episode called "The Fear Cage." Sam Elliott stayed in one of the rooms during the filming of Gettysburg and slept fine according to the staff, which not every guest can say.

A bed and breakfast built on a field hospital is a specific combination. The innkeepers have chosen to foreground the history, naming the rooms for the generals who slept in them and keeping the battle dates marked. The men who died here did not choose to be here. Neither, presumably, did A.P. Hill, who was shot through the heart at Petersburg two years later and never saw Virginia again.