Doubleday Inn

The only B&B directly on the Gettysburg battlefield, a half-mile from Iverson's Pits. Guests wake to the smell of gunpowder at three in the morning.

The smell hits first. Gunpowder, sharp and unmistakable, in an upstairs bedroom of a bed and breakfast where nobody is holding a gun, usually at two or three in the morning, always vivid enough to wake the sleeper. Guests have reported it hundreds of times across the forty-some years the Doubleday Inn has operated as a B&B, which makes it the single most-repeated paranormal experience on the property.

The location explains almost everything. The Doubleday Inn sits on Oak Ridge, directly on the Gettysburg National Military Park line, the only overnight lodging actually on the battlefield rather than in town. The property's eastern fence line is an original 1863 stone wall that marks the position where the Union First Corps under General Abner Doubleday held off the Confederate advance on the afternoon of July 1, 1863. The inn is named for him. Doubleday was the corps commander that day, not the inventor of baseball, despite the legend that's stuck to his name since the 1908 Mills Commission report.

What you're standing on when you're standing in the yard is roughly a half-mile from Iverson's Pits, which is where General Alfred Iverson's brigade of North Carolinians was ordered forward across open ground on July 1 and was cut to pieces by Union volley fire from behind a low wall they couldn't see. Nearly 900 men went down in a matter of minutes, and they were buried in shallow trenches on the field rather than moved. Iverson survived, watched the slaughter from the rear, and by most contemporary accounts broke down afterward. He lived until 1911 and never stopped grieving his men. Guests at the Doubleday have described a man in gray Confederate officer's uniform, middle-aged, standing at an upstairs window looking toward the direction of the pits, multiple times across multiple years. Local paranormal guides have identified him as Iverson.

The attic room, known to the innkeepers as the Paul Room, has its own reputation. Guests who've stayed there across decades describe waking up to the sense of someone sitting on the end of the bed, or standing in the corner. Nothing malicious, just present. Repeat guests request the Paul Room specifically.

The hard reports are the orbs of light. Flashes of white or pale green, rising out of the lawn toward the stone wall, seen by enough separate guests that the innkeepers stopped questioning whether the guests had been drinking. Investigators using EMF meters have logged spikes clustered along the wall line. Batteries in digital cameras die in the yard and come back to life inside the house.

The audio evidence is the unsettling part. Paranormal teams working the property have captured EVPs on multiple visits, including one now well-circulated clip of a male voice clearly saying "Hold the line." Those exact words were shouted up and down the First Corps position on July 1, as Doubleday tried to keep the Union left from folding. Whether the recording catches something real or a modern stray signal, the phrase is exactly right for the ground.

The inn is small, nine rooms, Civil War period decor, served breakfast by whoever's running the place that week. The smell of gunpowder doesn't come on a schedule. But if you stay two nights in the front rooms facing the stone wall, the odds are reasonable that something about the property will announce itself before you check out.