Jean Bonnet Tavern

A hanging tree, a Whiskey Rebellion trial, and a woman in gray who lifts the blanket in Room 3. Jean Bonnet still pours drinks.

The hanging tree is the part of the Jean Bonnet Tavern story nobody can quite verify and everyone in Bedford County tells anyway. The version most often repeated: during the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, a group of insurrectionists was tried on the ground floor of the tavern, convicted, and hanged from a large tree in front of the building the same afternoon. The tree is long gone. The rope marks on the ceiling beams are not, if you believe the innkeepers.

Jean Bonnet Tavern sits at the intersection of the Forbes Road and the Glades Road, which in 1762 were the only two routes west out of Bedford into the Pennsylvania frontier. The fieldstone walls are more than two feet thick. The innkeeper Robert Callender built it as a way station; Jean Bonnet bought it in 1779 and gave it his name. During the Whiskey Rebellion, local farmers gathered at the tavern to plant a Liberty Pole in protest of the federal tax on whiskey, which is the documented history. The hangings are the part that got added later.

The man guests describe most often at the bar is an older gentleman in colonial dress who appears seated at the far end, orders nothing, and is gone when the bartender looks back up. Staff at the tavern have taken to calling him Jean. The Enyeart family, who bought the property in 1957 and still operate it, have collected these reports for sixty-plus years. Don Enyeart told the Bedford Gazette in 2011 that he had personally seen the figure twice.

The upstairs guest rooms are where the stories get specific. Room 3 is the most commonly reported. A woman in a long gray dress has been seen standing at the foot of the bed, not menacing, just present. Guests have described her lifting the blanket once before disappearing. Room 5 has a cold corner in the northeast wall that guests report even in July, when the windows are open and the rest of the room is warm. A Bedford paranormal group's 2014 investigation recorded an EVP in Room 5 that sounded like a woman's voice saying "my son."

A second male figure gets described near the cellar stairs. He wears a frock coat. Guests who encounter him say he looks at them without surprise, the way you'd look at someone you recognize, and then he steps backward down the stairs that aren't quite there anymore.

The tavern still serves dinner and rents rooms. The Enyearts don't push the ghost story in their marketing, though they'll answer questions if you ask. The better reason to stop at Jean Bonnet is the building itself. Two-and-a-half centuries of travelers have slept under those chestnut beams, and some of them apparently did not check out.