Gettysburg Hotel

Rachel the nurse opens dresser drawers in your room. James Culbertson bleeds into the corner asking where his unit is. The 1983 fire changed nothing.

A dining cart in the basement of the Gettysburg Hotel rolled twelve feet across the concrete, turned completely around, and stopped.

The former employee who watched it happen didn't stay on staff much longer. That incident is one of a handful that got logged, informally, in the catalog of stories the hotel has collected since its 1797 opening, and the basement is where most of the stranger reports originate. During the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, the tavern that stood on this corner was used as a field hospital. The basement was the triage area. At least two of the named ghosts now walking the building died down there.

Rachel is the one guests report most often. She's described as a Civil War nurse in a long gray dress and a stained white apron, and she works the hallways the way she presumably worked the wards. Attentive. Moving. Never idle. Guests have described waking up to dresser drawers opening on their own, items on the nightstand rearranged, closet doors opening and closing in sequence, and lights going on and off without anyone touching the switch. The sound of long skirts brushing against a carpeted hallway is the most commonly reported audio phenomenon. Paranormal researchers who've investigated believe Rachel likely died at the hotel during the battle.

The second ghost is James Culbertson, a Pennsylvania Reserves soldier who was brought to the tavern during the fighting with a gunshot wound to the torso. Guests have reported a pale, faint figure in Union uniform, visibly bleeding from the stomach, standing at the foot of the bed or in a corner of the room. On rare occasions he has spoken. He wants to go back to the battle. He asks where his unit is. Rooms where he appears tend to lose about ten degrees in a single corner, usually the one nearest the door.

The ballroom has its own figure, a young woman in a pale 1860s gown who dances alone. Witnesses describe her moving swiftly side to side, as if following music nobody else can hear. She's never been named, and the staff don't try.

The hotel burned down in 1983. This is part of why the ghost stories matter to the current owners. The building was reconstructed essentially from scratch on the original foundation, with many of the surviving materials salvaged and incorporated into the rebuild. If the hauntings were tied strictly to the physical structure, the fire should have ended them. It didn't. The activity reported since the 1990s reopening is essentially the same activity that was reported before.

TVs that turn on alone. Faucets that run at 3 a.m. Heavy footsteps in empty hallways. The ballroom woman dancing by herself with her eyes closed. Ghost Hunters and several independent paranormal groups have filmed at the hotel, and the reports they keep logging cluster in the same three places: the basement, the second-floor hallways, and the ballroom itself.

The hotel sits on the main square of Gettysburg, directly across from the spot where Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address. Guests walking back to their rooms at night are walking through what was effectively a triage center during the bloodiest three days in American military history. The battle killed or wounded 51,000 men in 72 hours. Many of them were carried here.

Book a room on the second floor if you want the odds. If you want to know where Rachel started, the triage tables were set up in what's now the basement storage corridor, the same stretch where the cart rolled twelve feet and turned itself around.