Doubleday Inn

The Doubleday Inn in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania is the only bed and breakfast that sits directly on the battlefield, and the thing guests report most often there is a smell. Gunpowder. Sharp, unmistakable, with no source. It arrives without warning, sometimes on a still day on the lawn, sometimes upstairs at night, vivid enough to wake the person sleeping.

The location explains almost everything. The inn stands on Oak Ridge, and the original stone wall in its front yard marks the position the Union First Corps held during the afternoon fighting of July 1, 1863. The ground was part of the John Forney farm and his apple orchard. About 80 yards west of that wall is where the worst of it happened.

That afternoon, the Confederate brigade of Brigadier General Alfred Iverson marched up the ridge toward a Union line concealed behind the stone wall. The men holding it waited, then fired at point-blank range. Nearly 900 of Iverson's roughly 1,350 men became casualties in minutes, many falling in near parade-ground alignment. The shallow trenches where the dead were buried where they fell became known as Iverson's Pits. Iverson himself, the story goes, suffered a breakdown, was deemed unfit for command, and was relieved. He lived to 82 and died in Atlanta in 1911.

The house came much later. It was built in 1939 for the Reverend Abram Longanecker and his wife Agnes, and sold and turned into a bed and breakfast in 1987. It takes its name from Union General Abner Doubleday, who took command of the First Corps that July 1 after Major General John Reynolds was shot dead early in the fighting.

The folklore is older than the inn. In the 1800s, workers on the Forney farm refused to harvest the burial ground at dusk, reporting ghosts rising from the furrows in the mist and muffled sobbing on quiet nights.

Today the inn keeps nine rooms named for the men who fought on this exact ground, with 42 monuments standing within a quarter-mile. The Iverson Room faces the pits. The Paul Room, an attic room on the third floor, is named for Brigadier General Gabriel Paul, who was shot through the temple near Mummasburg Road and permanently blinded in both eyes. Guests report flashes of unexplained light, orbs, EMF spikes, drained camera batteries. Investigators say they captured a recording of a male voice with a single instruction: "Hold the line." That was the literal order the First Corps was given on this ridge.

People also describe a soldier at an upstairs window, gazing toward the field. Local paranormal guides disagree on which army he belonged to — some say a Confederate in gray, others a Union man with pale eyes you meet in the glass before you turn and find no one.