“Ghosts of Gettysburg” Haunted Daytrips
As a youngster, one of the highlights of my year was our family vacation to Gettysburg.
Coming from the suburbs of Cleveland, the days spent in the rural atmosphere was refreshing for my parents. For me, the fabled history of Gettysburg was the draw.
We tried to visit twice a summer. After a while, we had visited every museum and attraction. I can’t remember who discovered that the battlefield of Antietam was not far away, but using Gettysburg as our base, a trip was planned.
Antietam had a completely different “feel” for me than Gettysburg. I was fascinated by it. Soon every trip to Gettysburg included additional daytrips. I remember going to Harpers Ferry, Manassas, Fredericksburg, the Shenandoah Valley, Appomattox, and even the battlefields around Richmond. Gettysburg was always our starting point.
When I moved to Gettysburg to work for the National Park Service as a Ranger/Historian, I continued the “daytrips” to other battlefields, often with fellow rangers. We would even travel to Virginia to visit Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, the Wilderness, and Spotsylvania Battlefields and return the same day to Gettysburg. Sometimes we’d take bicycles and see the battlefields that way.
The point is, Gettysburg is a great place to visit and stay, but there are other great sites that are worth the time to visit just a few hours away.
Most of them are even haunted.
After living and working in Gettysburg for nearly fifty years, I have always said that it is “acre for acre, the most haunted place in America.”
Over a thousand stories later, I still maintain that frightening boast.
Although Gettysburg has been my main focus for research into the otherworld of the paranormal, it seems that it is also the epicenter of a vast part of the country that has an abundance of haunted sites, many of which are a day trip from Gettysburg.
After speaking with visitors to Gettysburg at autographing sessions, I have learned that few realize how many historic haunted venues take only an hour or so to get to, a couple of hours to explore and another hour to return from. In other words, you can have breakfast in Gettysburg, a leisurely lunch in Sharpsburg (near Antietam National Battlefield), or Chambersburg (site of a haunted jail and where John Brown, abolitionist, planned the raid that ignited the Civil War), or Harper’s Ferry (target of Brown’s raid), then back for dinner in Gettysburg.
Some are located near enough to one another that you can even visit two or more in one trip.
Welcome to my blog: Ghosts of Gettysburg Haunted Daytrips.
Enjoy!
