Fairfield Inn to Present Christmas Shows

The Evening Sun, Nov. 20, 2003

   The Fairfield Inn will offer three week-ends of themed entertainment Dec. 5 and 6, 12 and 13, 19 and 20.

   The evenings will include music, entertainment, revelry, warm hearths and delicious cuisine from the 1700's, 1800's and turn-of-the-century Victorian 1900's.

   Each feast, offered Friday and Saturday, will cost $39.95 a person.

   Century-old traditions and cuisine influence each of the theme week-ends. The feast and entertainment re-creates the atmosphere of an authentic Victorian, Civil War era and 18th century holiday celebration, casting aside much of the pomp and circumstance to highlight the food, fun and fantasy of the holiday season.

   The 2003 Feast of Christmas begins 7 p.m. Friday, Dec.5, and 6 p.m. Saturday, Dec 6, with a Victorian Feast.

   The Feast will include Victorian Parlor Magic performed by Professor Joe Kerrigan, magician and illusionist.

   Guests will enjoy entertainment by musicians Henry and Lynn Cohen and Ron Peters during a five-course feast. Musicians will perform period music, strolling throughout the inn as they play the concertina, violin, viola, mandolin, recorders and harp.

   The second feast offers guests a chance to travel back in time when friends and family joined soldiers and sang for holiday entertainment.

   The Civil War Caroling Christmas Feast highlights the music of the 19th Century.

   An ensemble of musicians, folk and friends, will perform Civil War and era and favorite Christmas songs. Stephen, Beth, Margaret and Joel Folkemer, Allen Campbell, Dan Diviney, Nancy Gable, and Andy Rosenfeld will perform vocals, accompanied by lap dulcimer, penny whistle, acoustic bass,concertina, guitar and piano. 

   The Civil War Caroling Feast is scheduled for 7 p.m. Friday, Dec. 12 and 6 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 13.

   Lord Baltimore's Feast of Christmas will feature the beautiful 18th Century sounds of the hammer dulcimer performed by Tom Jolin.

   When the Fairfield Inn was built in 1757, the town of Fairfield was in Maryland. It would be another ten years until the Mason-Dixon Line would be drawn in 1767, officially placing the town of Fairfield in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

   Lord Baltimore, owner of the land, had many feasts celebrating the upcoming holiday. The Fairfield Inn continues this celebration, with Lord Baltimore's Feast of Christmas 7 p.m. Dec. 19 and 6 p.m. Dec. 20.

   Doors will open with a traditional toast from the wassail bowl.

   The Fairfield Inn, listed on the National Register of Historical Places, is located eight miles west of Gettysburg.

   For information and reservations, contact the Historic Fairfield Inn at 642-5410 or at http://www.thefairfieldinn.com/

  

   ... The Civil War Era Dinner Theater will not operate Dec. 5 and Dec. 6 but will be operational during the other feasts, in the upstairs Ballroom.

  

 

 

Doctor Shock

Magician Joe Kerrigan offers a spooky Halloween alternative in Fairfield.

By MIKE CAGGESO
Daily Record staff
Friday, October 24, 2003


 
Joe Kerrigan says he operates a time machine.

He reads minds, scares his customers with chilling stories and talks to the dead.

Say what?

In the quiet, almost spooky setting of the historic 1757 room of the Fairfield Inn, Kerrigan hosts a dinner theater while juggling the roles of historian, magician and actor for small audiences. It’s tiny and quaint — about 15 feet between each wall and 8 feet to the ceiling. It’s the same room where General Robert E. Lee was served the same ham and bean soup recipe that is still served today. The room is also officially declared haunted by the Capital Ghost Forum, a Harrisburg-based paranormal investigation team.

‘Tis true and all is included in Kerrigan’s multi-faceted entertainment package. While patrons slowly eat an elegant three-course meal, Kerrigan stands right in front of the tables performing as three characters from the Civil War era — a magician, an ol’ timer and a séance medium.

“A lot of the story line goes around my life,” the 57-year-old said.

Kerrigan has been a professional magician for more than 20 years. The stories in his arsenal can fill an empty warehouse, like how he has lived in a haunted house for 10 years.

His one-man show is a marriage of his two loves — magic and history.

“I’ve been accused of doing a history lesson in disguise,” Kerrigan said. “The material came to me easily and quickly because I had been thinking about this for 15 years before I started doing this.”

The event begins at 7 p.m. when the waitstaff takes a party’s order. Meanwhile, Kerrigan slides into his first outfit as casually as Mr. Rogers. Though it can’t be seen, he straps on a retro dialect and Civil War mindframe. For the next two-and-a-half hours, Joe Kerrigan does not exist. What resembles him are actually his characters speaking about events that transpired 140 years ago.

‘The professor’

Perhaps a misleading title, the professor is an intentionally corny mid-1800s magician. All the professor’s tricks are from that era, so don’t expect him to make the Statue of Liberty disappear.

Just as the main entrée arrives, the professor is about one-third of the way through his show. Audience-interactive tricks include disappearing scarves, magic ropes, various card tricks, a choreographed cannonball and Chinese linking rings.

Between each trick, the professor gives insight to life as a magician in the 1800s. Travelling was dangerous, he says, especially when gunfire was in the vicinity. Magicians often carried an ample amount of “80-proof snake oil” in their carriages to barter for military-protected escorts.

“It also seemed to take the bumps and bruises away from the ride,” the professor says.

Magicians typically performed in lavish mansions or posh theaters, many times with musical accompaniment of an orchestra or opera singer. Seats ran for about 25 cents each. During the war, magicians became a popular ticket because people wanted to release their minds from the trauma attached to a loved one on the frontlines.

“We’d tried to arrive in town a day or two ahead of time to get those flyers out,” the professor says. “Even when we were performing to theaters back then, we’s been playin’ to a packed house.”

‘The ol’ timer’

About the same time the waitstaff sets a delicious dessert in front of customers, an excited old man replaces the professor as the evening’s storyteller. He leans heavily on his cane, speaks in a backwoods prose and gives great detail of life in Gettysburg before and after the lacerations left by a bloody Civil War on July 3, 1863.

When the ol’ timer was a child, the ‘rebs’ invaded his family’s home and ordered them to either “geet in your cellars or geet outta town,” he says. The clouds and smoke covering the 72-hour battle veiled the “pure living hell” awaiting the town of farming town of 2,400 people.

“When those folks came outta their cellars, they discovered a mess,” he somberly says.

The rambling old man randomly jumps from story to story, often aflame in his tales before getting back to his original point. He constantly keeps tabs on his tilting top hat, which he dubs “a southern gentleman’s hat.” His pocket watch spends half its time in his left palm, as if his character is rushed or intruding on someone’s time. He speckles his stories with trivia about what common life post-war Gettysburg — the survival rate of childbirth was 1-in-3 for mothers, 1-in-2 for children, to name a couple.

But most often, the ol’ timer delves into ghost stories about Gettysburg and about the room you’re eating in (by the way, the chocolate sundae is gone already).

One name frequently mentioned was Jenny Wade, the only civilian killed in Gettysburg during the battle. Wade was accidentally shot through her heart from a rebel soldier posted in the ol’ timer’s house.

“Lucky fer her, I reckon, she was dead real instant-like,” he says. “Folks say they still see the spirit of Jenny Wade walking through downtown of Gettysburg to this very day.”

‘The medium’

Now all the food is out of the way, the waitstaff closes the door and the room is dimly lit to the glow of four candles. Each object in the room casts multiple wavering shadows on the walls, floors and ceiling that waver in front of the flickering flames.

A priest-like figure in all-black garb emerges from a small dressing screen. His official title is a séance medium, a profitable profession before and after war broke between the Union and the Confederacy.

At first, people attended séances for fun, then became obsessed with them. Former First Lady Mary Lincoln was a big subscriber, having unexpectedly lost her husband and several children in a handful of years.

There wasn’t a day that’d go by “where the news wasn’t writing somethin’ ‘bout ‘dem séances,” the medium says.

“Gettysburg,” he pauses to chuckle, “it’s so much more than a Civil War town. Oh, so much more. Gettysburg is said to be, acre for acre, the most haunted place in America.”

He slowly paces across the rickety floor, explaining that spirits are trouble makers that like to have fun with people living. But the reason why supernatural entities exist is because they have “unfinished business” to take care of where their living selves died.

The medium calls upon the spirits frequently, challenging them to prove their existence by aiding him in magic tricks.

“Spirits,” he whispers, “come forth. You know the drill.”

Regular Joe

The show wraps close to 10 p.m.

By then, the figure drinking water and chatting with the audience is just Joe.

Kerrigan was born and raised in Gettysburg. After graduating high school, he spent a few years working for WGET-AM (1320) in Gettysburg before driving a bus for Lincoln Bus Lines in Hanover for 15 years. Tired of life on the road, he resigned to follow his love for magic, a pursuit of his since his parent bought him a magic set when he was 10 years old. Through several corporate connections, Kerrigan toured the country showing people the “magic of shopping at Wal-Mart.”

“It turns out magic put me on the road more than when I was driving the bus,” he said.

He traveled as a magician for 23 years before returning home. He began performing the Civil War Theater in various eating establishments in the area, before finding his home base in Fairfield Inn. There, his love for history and magic are united in a form he can share with a private audience.

Well, he can’t share everything.

“I’ll answer anything they have except, ‘How’d you do that?’” he said.

Reach Mike Caggeso at 771-2051 or mcaggeso@ydr.com.

 

 

Professor to perform Civil War séanceEvening Sun, Thursday, October 2, 2003


Civil War séance specialist Professor Kerrigan will perform a 6:30 p.m. dinner show and a midnight séance with dessert Friday, Oct. 31, at the Historic Fairfield Inn, eight miles west of Gettysburg.

Professor Kerrigan, illusionist and storyteller, has been performing for more than 25 years and has been featured on the Travel Channel. His show is performed every night at The Fairfield Inn at 7 p.m. and Sunday matinees at 1 p.m.

On the evening of Oct. 31, he will be performing two special Halloween shows. The dinner showing at 6:30 p.m. will include a table-side dinner of spirited soup and spooky salad, choice of ghostly ghoulash, poltergeist poultry or rest-in-peace roasted prime rib of beef with the final resting of a Deadly Delicious Dessert. Entertainment and dinner are $39.95 per person.

The midnight séance starts at 10 p.m. A hauntingly humorous and mysteriously mischievous spirit will join the guests for an All Saint's Eve séance of an assortment of dangerously deadly desserts, coffin coffee and tomb tea. Séance show and dessert is $24.95 per person.

Reservations are required. For either the dinner show or the midnight séance, contact The Fairfield Inn at 642-5410.