A Night at The Farnsworth Inn

Member Article

Submitted By: Debra
Submitted On: July 5, 2004

We arrived at the airport and began our hour long drive to Gettysburg. This was more of a vacation than investigation and I was a bit disappointed as it was raining cats and dogs. I was hoping that this wasn't the way it was going to be the whole visit.

On our first night in Gettysburg we stayed at a Motor Lodge (cant' remember the name) because our room at the Farnsworth House wasn't until the following night. We toured the town, drove through the park, had dinner and settled in for the night. It was still raining.

The next morning it was still raining. But it did finally slack off a bit and we went back to the park and battlefield to spend some time there while waiting until we could check into the Farnsworth House. After spending several hours at the battlefield, we checked into our room. We had booked the Sarah Black room. At the time I made the reservation, someone had just canceled and this was the only room available. This was fine with me since it was supposed to be one of the most haunted rooms in the hotel and that's what I wanted.

We went back to the battlefield right at dusk to Devil's Den. There were several people still there and seems I had to wait quite a while for most everyone to leave and everything become quiet and settle down. I had my video recorder, digital camera and 35mm camera. New batteries had been installed right before we left the hotel. During the recording process at Devil's Den my video camera would turn off and on. Like something was zapping the energy from the batteries. I also had the same problem with my digital but I manually had to turn it on again. After dealing with this for about 30 minutes, I decided what ever it was didn't want to be photographed. So my husband and I left.

The first night I slept quite well. The second night was a different story. I was kept up till after 2AM with footsteps and the sounds of something being dragged across the floor right above our room. The Garrett Room was directly above us. This is the room where two Confederate Snipers were supposed to have been held out. The sound of the footsteps were most certainly from the sound of a boot. I had set up my video recorder on Night Shot. The video recorder picked up all the noise and footsteps from above in the Garrett. Unfortunately, my husband had bought 8mm tapes instead of Hi8 tapes and the quality of the video for posting to the web is horrible. I had set my voice recorder up on the dresser right before going to bed and nothing was captured on it. Evidently the tape had run out before the noises began above our heads because when I checked the recorder it was at the end of the tape.

At breakfast the next morning I made mention to the lady serving about the noises. She said they lock the Garrett at night and it's not opened again until the morning. She went right then to check and see if by chance it had been accidentally left unlocked. It hadn't. The footsteps and dragging of what sounds like a trunk is reported quite frequently from this room.