Farnsworth House Inn

A Confederate sharpshooter may have fired the bullet that killed Jennie Wade from this attic. Guests meet Jeremy, a child ghost who rolls marbles.

The attic at the Farnsworth House Inn has bullet holes in the walls. That part is real, and you can stand in the garret window the Confederate sharpshooters used on July 3, 1863, and look out toward the ridge where Union troops were shooting back.

What happens next in the tour is less verifiable.

Local tradition says one of those sharpshooters, firing from this attic, is the one who killed 20-year-old Jennie Wade in her sister's kitchen two blocks away. She was the only civilian killed during the three-day battle. A stray bullet came through two doors and hit her in the back while she was kneading dough. Historians have gone back and forth on whether a Farnsworth shooter was responsible. The angle works, the distance works, but there's no signed confession from the Confederate side. The inn leans into the story anyway, and the attic tour is built around it.

The inn's best-known ghost is Jeremy, a small boy who allegedly died after being struck by a wagon outside in the 1800s. One server told the Gettysburg Civilian Network about hearing the front door open, giggling, and then watching a little boy in old-fashioned clothing run past. A longer-tenured employee waved it off: "Oh, that's Jeremy. He was killed in the street out front by a wagon in the mid-nineteenth century." The boy shows up most often when children are in the building. He rolls marbles across the floor, tugs at sleeves, and laughs softly from empty corners.

Worth noting: historians who've looked at Jeremy's paperwork can't find him. The story surfaces in the 1990s, during the Shultz family restoration, with no census record or death notice behind it. Jeremy is likely folklore the inn acquired along the way, a ghost invented to give shape to a pattern of small weird things. Whether that discounts the experiences is a different question.

The attic is where the tour gets heavier. Guests report footsteps on wood flooring that isn't there anymore, a hot rotten smell that rolls through in waves, and the sense that someone is crouched in the corner by the dormer. Dowsing rods come out during the tours, which is a Victorian spiritualist technique and not exactly peer-reviewed, but groups who've tried them describe the rods swinging at the same two or three spots in the attic.

Other named ghosts have collected at the inn over the years. Walter the midwife, Mary a nanny or chambermaid, a Confederate soldier the staff call Shultz. Each has their own patch of the building. The dining room and the McFarland Room get the most daytime activity. Guests staying overnight in the Shultz Room have described cold pressure on the bed and the sound of breathing they couldn't trace.

The building itself survived the battle with those bullet scars intact, and there are better-researched hauntings in Gettysburg than this one. But Farnsworth has a specific advantage: it's one of the only properties in town with its war-damaged walls intact, and you can sleep in rooms that saw sharpshooters sighting down rifles at boys the same age as today's college students.

Jennie Wade's house is a two-minute walk away. Most people do both in the same evening and sleep worse for it.