In Brief
Visitors to Sachs Covered Bridge near Gettysburg keep photographing three pale faces in the rafters, said to be soldiers hanged from the beams. A researcher went looking for the execution in the record and found nothing before the 1980s.
The Full Story
At Sachs Covered Bridge, a red 100-foot span over Marsh Creek just south of Gettysburg, the story is about three men hanged from the rafters. Visitors come to photograph the beams, and the way it's told, three pale faces sometimes turn up in the wood — soldiers strung up here as a warning, three heads looking back out of the frame.
Who they were depends on who's telling it. Confederate deserters, some say. Spies, others tell it. Traitors. The number stays at three and the rope stays in the rafters, but the men keep changing.
The bridge itself is real history, and dark enough on its own. David Stoner built it in 1854 for $1,544, a hundred feet of lattice truss thrown across Marsh Creek in Adams County. By 1938 the state had named it Pennsylvania's most historic bridge, and most of why is the war. On July 1, 1863, Union brigades crossed it marching toward the worst three days the country had seen, the 142nd and 149th Pennsylvania among them, both about to be cut to pieces at Gettysburg a few miles up the road. In the days after the battle, Lee's beaten army came back over these same boards in retreat. Both sides walked the bridge, one going in, one coming out broken.
People who walk it alone report a tap on the shoulder with no one near them. Phantom pipe smoke with no fire. The clip-clop of cavalry hooves crossing the planks, distant cannon and drum sound carried over the creek, a lantern light that swings with nothing holding it.
There's a second ghost, too, braided into the first. A Confederate soldier is said to have drowned in Marsh Creek during the retreat, and on dry days wet footprints are reported climbing the ramp, a pale face rising out of the water below the bridge.
But the hanging is the one everyone comes for. And the hanging is the one with nothing behind it. A researcher went through the records looking for three men executed at this bridge and turned up no newspaper, no military report, no contemporary account at all. "I have not been able to find strong evidence that the hanging ever occurred," he wrote. "The first I can find anything reported about this triple hanging is in the 1980s."
So the most photographed ghosts in the county hang from a bridge that armies really did cross, in a war that really did kill the men who crossed it — for an execution that, as far as anyone can prove, was never carried out at all.
