In Brief
At the Jean Bonnet Tavern near Bedford, Pennsylvania, guests keep seeing a lone man in colonial dress drinking at the bar, said to be the innkeeper himself. One night two men locked the empty room, glanced back through the glass, and saw him sitting inside with a drink.
The Full Story
The figure people see most often at the Jean Bonnet Tavern, a cut-fieldstone inn near Bedford, Pennsylvania, is a lone man in colonial dress, sitting at the bar with a drink. Guests and staff have reported him for decades. They say he's Jean Bonnet, the innkeeper who took over the place in 1779.
The story that gets told most happened after closing. A bartender and a friend shut down the empty bar, drove a drunk customer home, and came back past the building. Through the window, they saw a solitary man sitting inside, sipping a drink. "That was impossible," the tavern's folklore page recounts, "for they had made sure the bar was empty before leaving." They unlocked the door and hurried in. No one was there. The two of them held the only key to the iron grillwork that sealed off the upper floors. He had nowhere to have gone.
The building went up around 1762, native stone walls more than two feet thick, chestnut beams overhead. In 1794, during the Whiskey Rebellion, farmers angry about the federal whiskey tax gathered out front and raised a liberty pole while Washington's troops camped here on their way west. The hauntings only started reaching the public after the Enyeart family bought the property in 1957.
As the story goes, the ground holds older violence. A horse thief, caught fleeing onto the property the day a court was in session, was said to have been tried on the spot and hanged in the hallway, and a separate legend has a man convicted of being a French spy buried under the tavern floor. No court record or newspaper confirms either; they live only in the lore.
The man at the bar isn't the only one people report. A nondrinker named Al Brindza, there one night with a paranormal group, said he watched a cluster of people in frontier clothes looking in through a doorway at a man playing piano, then gone when he turned back. He compared it to "trying to watch two televisions at once." A former owner said the attic-apartment door kept changing position on its own, open and then closed, in a building she searched and found locked from the inside and empty.
The tavern still runs as an inn, food served on pewter plates by candlelight, and it keeps a Ghost Book at the bar where guests write down what they saw. One couple left a note about a wife's glasses moving across the room in the night. They signed off: "Ghost? Maybe! We'll be back!"
