Shepherdstown Sweet Shop

A bakery and sweet shop in one of Shepherdstown's oldest buildings, which served as a hospital during the Battle of Antietam in 1862. Shepherdstown, founded in 1762, is the oldest town in West Virginia and was a critical Civil War staging area.

The Shepherdstown Sweet Shop occupies an approximately two-hundred-year-old building at 100 West German Street in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, a structure that served one of the grimmest purposes imaginable during the Civil War before becoming the home of a beloved local bakery -- and one of the most haunted buildings in a town that has been called the most haunted in America.

On September 17, 1862, the Battle of Antietam was fought just a few miles away across the Potomac River, producing more than 23,000 casualties in a single day. Shepherdstown, the nearest town on the Virginia side, was transformed into one vast field hospital. The building that now houses the Sweet Shop was pressed into service as a Confederate field hospital, and it was on the second floor that surgeons performed amputations on the wounded soldiers brought streaming into town. The discarded limbs were systematically disposed of by throwing them through the second-floor windows onto flatbed carts waiting below. The horror of what happened in this building is difficult to overstate -- the screams of soldiers undergoing surgery without adequate anesthesia, the sound of bone saws, and the thud of severed limbs hitting the carts would have filled the air for days.

The Sweet Shop opened as a bakery in 1982, and it was not long before employees began encountering the building's most persistent resident. The ghost is known as the Colonel -- an aged gentleman described as wearing grey Confederate military attire, with white hair and a mustache. He has been seen predominantly at night but also during daylight hours, and his appearances are remarkably consistent across independent witnesses over decades of accounts. Employees and visitors report feeling the Colonel brush past them as they walk through the shop. Some have heard him whisper in their ear. His presence is described as authoritative but not threatening -- as though he is walking rounds, checking on his soldiers in a hospital that exists only in his perception.

One of the most striking documented encounters occurred when an individual attending a job interview at the bakery witnessed the Colonel pass directly through a wall. The apparition was so vivid and so clearly a man in military uniform that the witness had no doubt about what they had seen. Night-shift bakers have been particularly frequent witnesses, reporting sightings of the figure in grey and strange objects falling past the windows outside -- as though the phantom limb disposal continues in some residual loop.

The Shepherdstown Sweet Shop's haunting was investigated as part of the Destination America television series Ghosts of Shepherdstown, which aired in 2016 and 2017. In the show, the terrified night-shift baker described his encounters with the figure in the grey Civil War uniform and the inexplicable phenomena that accompanied the sightings. The series brought national attention to Shepherdstown's paranormal activity and boosted tourism by 311 percent.

The Colonel is classified by paranormal researchers as a residual haunting rather than an intelligent one -- a spirit trapped in a loop of behavior from the 1860s, forever walking the halls of a hospital that became a bakery, checking on patients who died more than 160 years ago.