One of the top haunted places and right in Gordonsville, VA.

For those of you looking to put your Halloween celebration on steroids (or just enjoy the spine-tingling effects of the Unexplained), you’ll want to take note. Gordonsville’s Exchange Hotel is billed, according to A&E “History Channel”, as #15 on their “TOP 100 Most Haunted Places in the Country”. This comes as no surprise, considering the building once functioned as a receiving hospital for wounded Civil War soldiers. According to the records, the hospital treated up to 70,000 soldiers during the war, and, temporarily, had around 700 of them buried there. In their backyard.

For those looking to scare up some spooks themselves (or debunk the rumors), there’s the “Night @ the Museum” tour, which, according to the website, allows you to answer for yourself the question “…what happens after the museum closes, everyone goes home and darkness falls?” Check it out—https://colonialghosts.com/the-exchange-hotel-civil-war-medical-museum/

However, I have no particular hankering to dabble in the realm of Creepy (or to provoke my overactive imagination), so my husband and I opted for a more conventional approach and visited the Exchange Hotel during daytime hours, 10AM-4PM.

The museum is broken into a few segments to represent various aspects of the building’s diverse life, but overall flows well and makes sense. The bottom floor contains a reproduction of the original hotel tavern–and humorous details about the “whistle walk”. The Gordonsville train depot artifacts are currently housed here as well, so you can explore train travel in the 1800s (an integral part of the hotel’s history), the origins of the name “Exchange Hotel”, and the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad mascot kitty, “Chessie”.

The middle floor is primarily a display of hotel accommodations during the 1800s (including gender-appropriate dressing screens.) The top floor is devoted to the Civil War hospital museum, and includes display cases of surgical tools (*shudders*) and furnished wards.

Come to the Exchange Hotel in Gordonsville to learn about Civil War history, look for ghosts, and discover why Gordonsville is “The Fried Chicken Capital of the World.” Find out more at http://www.hgiexchange.org/