I could I get used to this.

I’m sitting on the tiny front porch of our camping cabin just south of Gettysburg; I’m typing on the laptop — thanks to the campground’s kick-ass wifi — while The Wife is reading me snippets from her newly purchased ghost-hunter’s field guide to the battlefields that surround the town. Pretty cool.

The first day here went pretty quickly — a stop at the park’s visitor center and a look at the stuff in their museum, an amazing crabcake dinner while a huge storm blew through town and then on to one of our main events: the ghost tour The Wife picked out.

The night was close to perfect for trooping around downtown Gettysburg — misty, heavy air, no light penetrating the clouds that drifted over head. There’s usually a little theater involved in these things, but our guide kept that to a minimum — the stories here generally provide plenty of drama by themselves. We also got an interesting history lesson alongside — where the battle was waged in town, where the armies’ respective lines set up as night fell, what houses were directly involved. That stuff was interesting enough by itself, and then we got the creepy stuff besides.

The best one — Jinny Wade, the one and only civilian casualty of the battle. We stopped by the home where she was born, and heard about her death and what’s happened since. After the battle began, Wade and her mother traveled down Baltimore Street to stay with a friend who was stuck alone in her home, which sat directly between the Confederate and Federal lines. Wade was killed on the third day when a Confederate sniper took aim at the home’s doorknob — a common practice, our guide said, to zero the sights on the rifle before the sniper started shooting at people. The sharpshooter’s sights were a bit off with that practice round — the ball crashed through a wall in the home and struck Wade in the back of the head, killing her instantly.

The ghosty part? Union soldiers took her body to the home’s basement, where it lay until a mortician could remove it after the armies left town. That house is now privately owned, and, for a fee, tourist can take a walk-through which ends in the basement, in front of the same bench where Wade’s body waited for an undertaker. Our guide said visitors frequently see the chain that separates the visitors and the bench start to sway without being touched; she said the chain once started to move while she was on the tour, and paying customers were startled enough that it cleared the room.

Pretty cool stuff.

Tomorrow we’re going to spend a good part of the day on the actual history, touring the battlefield and checking on a few spots where things happened in town. We’ll do the requisite shopping — I found a reproduction of a Civil War-era Union soldiers’ handbook that I must have, if for no other reason than to compare it with the one I was issued in 1988 — and then my Main Event: tasting and dinner at the Appalachian Brewing pub and restaurant, right next door to General Lee’s headquarters. I’m told they like to use this location to test small-batch beers before they make them in larger quantities at the big brewery in Harrisburg.

The Wife and I? We’re willing subjects.