Dobbin House Tavern

Gettysburg's oldest building (1776) hid enslaved people in a wall cupboard and took Civil War wounded in every room. The bloodstains are still there.

There's a cupboard on the second floor of the Dobbin House Tavern that isn't really a cupboard. It's a hinged wall panel, and the space behind it is a crawl space barely four feet high, dug into the timber framing when the house was built in 1776. Enslaved people hid in that space on their way north, one stop on one of the earliest routes of what would become the Underground Railroad above the Mason-Dixon Line. National Geographic documented the crawl space in print. The staff at the tavern will open the cupboard for you if you ask.

The house was built by Alexander Dobbin, an Irish Presbyterian minister who had studied Latin and Greek in Londonderry and theology in Glasgow before crossing the Atlantic and buying 300 acres on the edge of what would become Gettysburg. He finished the house the same year as the Declaration of Independence. It's the oldest structure in town. It has seven fireplaces, a working hearth kitchen, and native-stone walls two feet thick at the base.

July of 1863 turned the house into a field hospital. The Battle of Gettysburg sent casualties from both armies onto any roof large enough to hold a stretcher, and the Dobbin House took Union and Confederate wounded into every room. Blood soaked into the floorboards, and the restorers who brought the building back in the late 20th century reported stains on the original wide-plank floors that bled back through no matter how many times they were sanded. The stains are visible in the upstairs dining rooms today.

The ghost most often described is a woman in a long blue gown who passes through the second-floor rooms without acknowledging anyone. Staff who've worked the late shifts for years split on whether she was a nurse during the hospital period or a grieving mother from the Dobbin family era, when the house also served as a schoolhouse and at least one Dobbin child died young. She doesn't speak. She doesn't stop. Several servers have walked upstairs with trays and watched her glide across the hallway in front of them before turning into a room that was closed off.

Children are the second category of reports. Staff hear laughter, running footsteps on the stairs, whispers in the upstairs corridor when the restaurant is below capacity and nobody under twelve is in the building. A busser told a Gettysburg reporter in 2019 that she had stopped working the upstairs dining rooms because the children would giggle directly behind her head.

The lower level is grimmer. A Union soldier, described as wounded and moaning, has been seen and heard near the basement stairs. Guests visiting the restroom in the lower hallway have reported sudden nausea, temperature drops sharp enough to fog breath in summer, and the unmistakable sound of a man in pain from a room they can't locate. That maps onto the hospital period: the lower level of the house took the worst of the amputees, and amputations at Gettysburg were performed without anesthetic when the morphine ran out, which it did on July 3.

Alexander Dobbin himself gets reported occasionally as an older man in colonial clothing, smoking a cigar on the front porch or at one of the tables in the main dining room. He looks, by all accounts, content. He built the house, preached in it, ran a classical school in it, sheltered people in it, and died in it in 1809 at the age of 67. If any of the Dobbin House ghosts actually belongs to the building, it's him.

The tavern is open for dinner most nights. Ask for an upstairs table, sit under the low beams, eat by candlelight, and if you're curious about the cupboard, the staff will show you without making a show of it.