Hotel Gettysburg

At the Hotel Gettysburg, on the corner of Lincoln Square in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the strangest reports come from the basement. The story most often retold is about a dining cart. A former employee, the lore goes, watched it start rolling on flat ground, travel an estimated 12 feet, turn completely around, and come to a dead stop on its own. He didn't stay on staff much longer.

There's a reason the basement gets singled out. A tavern has stood on this corner since 1797, when James Scott built one here, and over the next century it ran through a chain of names: the Indian Queen, then McClellan House, the name it carried during the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863. That summer, the building was commandeered as a makeshift hospital. Sisters of Charity nuns came over from Emmitsburg and converted its parlors into infirmaries, where doctors and nurses worked over the wounded and the dying.

The two ghosts guests report most both trace back to that summer. One is called Rachel, a Civil War nurse who walks the hallways and is seen opening dresser drawers, taking things out and rearranging them, as if she's still doing her rounds. Guests describe the soft swish of skirts in the corridor at night. No record names a nurse called Rachel among the Sisters or the local women who tended the wounded here, so she lives in the telling, not the register.

The other is given a name and a unit: James Culbertson, said to be a soldier of Company K, Pennsylvania Reserves, brought here when the place was a medical tavern and dead of a gunshot wound to the torso. He's described as a pale figure in Union blue with a bloody hole in his chest, trailing cold spots, and some say they've heard him insist he's ready to rejoin the battle.

The ballroom has its own. Guests there report a young woman in a Civil War-era gown who dances, sometimes paired with an unknown soldier, the two of them turning across an empty floor.

The tavern was replaced by a modern Hotel Gettysburg in the 1890s, and over the years the building outlived nearly everyone in its stories. President Eisenhower used it while recovering from a 1955 heart attack, and the Eisenhowers were among the last guests before it closed in 1964.

Here's the part the present owners like. In 1983, after years as apartments, a fire ravaged the building, and it was restored and reopened in 1991, rebuilt essentially from scratch. The walls those soldiers were carried through are gone. The reports kept coming anyway.