CHAPTER 9
Exchange Hotel Civil War Hospital Museum
GORDONSVILLE
Bearing the bandages, water and sponge,
Straight and swift to my wounded I go,
Where they lie on the ground after the battle brought in,
Where their priceless blood reddens the grass the ground,
Or to the rows of the hospital tent, or under the roof’d hospital,
To the long rows of cots up and down each side I return,
To each and all one after another I drawn near, not one do I miss,
An attendant follows holding a tray, he carries a refuse pail,
Soon to be fill’d with clotted rags and blood, emptied, and fill’d again.
—Walt Whitman, “The Wound Dresser”
TO SAY THERE IS SOMETHING STRANGE going on at the Exchange Hotel Civil War Hospital Museum in Gordonsville would be somewhat of an understatement. My interaction with museum staff when I visited the site in May 2008 with my father, mother, and wife, left me inclined to believe that there was a reasonable chance the site was, indeed, haunted. But when I heard the irregular, garbled sounds that obscured my one-hour taped interview with curator Robert Kocovsky, I joined the ranks of definite believers.
This did not make me in any way unique, of course. The Exchange Hotel has for some time run ghost tours of the property for those with a casual interest in the subject, and has made provisions for ghosthunters and others with a stronger interest to conduct investigations overnight in the building. From what I understand, they are rarely disappointed.
A new era began for Gordonsville on January 1, 1840, when it became a stop on the Louisa Railroad—renamed the Virginia Central ten years later—allowing passengers to travel to and from the town and goods to be shipped from the farms and plantations of the surrounding area. Its first depot was opened in 1854, at the south end of Main Street, when the Orange and Alexandria Railroad extended its tracks from Orange to Gordonsville to connect with the existing line (a second depot was built in 1870 and its last one in 1904).
People coming into or departing from the depot frequented the nearby tavern run by Richard F. Omohundro, who did a brisk business in food and drink. When this establishment was razed by fire in 1859, Omohundro immediately built a beautiful new hotel, complete with high-ceilinged parlors and a grand veranda, on its ashes.
The elegant, three-story Exchange Hotel combined elements of Georgian architecture in the main section of the brick building, and Italianate architecture in its exterior features, both styles popular in the pre-war years. Other features included a restaurant on its lower level, spacious public rooms, a central hall with a wide staircase and handsome balustrade, and central halls running through each of the upper floors. It quickly became a popular and inviting spot for travelers.
When the Civil War began in 1861, towns like Gordonsville and the railroads that ran through them became critical strategic assets to the Confederate government. Railroads had never been used in warfare before but were to play a large role in the conflict that would eventually become referred to as “the first railroad war.”
In March 1862, the Confederate military authorities took over the Exchange Hotel and established it as the headquarters of the Gordonsville Receiving Hospital, which provided medical care to tens of thousands of Northern and Southern troops over the following four years. Wounded soldiers from battlefields that included Brandy Station, Cedar Mountain, Chancellorsville, Mine Run, Trevilian Station, and the Wilderness were brought into town by rail, unloaded, and moved directly into the sprawling hospital compound that grew up around the former hotel.
In an era when men died of injury and disease in droves—about twice as many as those slain in combat—the Gordonsville Receiving Hospital was the exception to the rule, with a markedly lower death rate compared to most other contemporary medical facilities. Of the approximately 70,000 men treated at the hospital, only somewhat more than 700 died at the site, a much smaller proportion than what was typical for the conflict. The deceased were buried on the hospital grounds initially and then later exhumed and moved to the nearby Maplewood Cemetery. (According to Kocovsky, the spirits of some of the buried soldiers apparently remained behind, and the area where the cemetery was located has been the site of ghostly phenomena.)
Director of the hospital was Dr. B.M Lebby, who oversaw its operations through October 1865. Although pro-Confederate and a native of South Carolina, Lebby had received his medical training in the North and was both compassionate and proficient. The relatively low death rate at the hospital (a mere 26 Union soldiers) can be attributed to his humanity and skill as a physician and administrator.
After the war, the site served newly freed slaves as a Freedman’s Bureau Hospital for several years before eventually reverting to use once again as a hotel. In 1971, Historic Gordonsville Inc., acquired the property, restored it, and converted it into a Civil War medical museum.
Today, the Civil War Museum at the Exchange Hotel contains exhibits on the history of Gordonsville, the hotel, and its transformation into a receiving hospital, the only one still standing in Virginia. It includes an impressive collection of artifacts relating to medical care during the war, including surgical instruments; pharmaceutical bottles and containers; medical knapsacks and panniers; stretchers and litters; prosthetic devices; and even dental tools.
Exhibits at the Exchange Hotel Civil War Hospital Museum include rooms with original hospital furnishings and artifacts arranged as they would have likely appeared during the Civil War.
It is also home, Kocovsky said, to at least eleven ghosts that he and the staff have identified! The museum makes no secret of this presence, and touts it both in its published materials and highly popular ghost tours.
“It isn’t necessary for our guides to purposefully frighten you as our ‘permanent residents’ often make their presence known,” the tour description reads. “There have been numerous reports of apparitions as well as the many unexplained sounds described by past visitors.”
While not all the ghosts have been identified by name or connected with specific historical figures known to have been associated with the Exchange Hotel, quite a few have, in part through the help of ghosthunters and psychic researchers who have visited the site.
A marker outside the museum alludes to the fact that the hospital tended to wounded soldiers of both the Northern and Southern armies during the Civil War.
One such ghost is Annie Smith, a black woman and the hotel’s former cook, who has been spotted numerous times in the windows of and around the outbuilding used as a summer kitchen where she worked. Another is Mrs. Leevy, the wife of one of the doctors assigned to the hospital, who went mad during her stay at the site. And yet another is the aptly named George Plant, the facility’s gravedigger, who has been known to waken reenactors camping out on the grounds surrounding the hotel. A number of nameless ghosts, believed to be those of Civil War soldiers who died at the hospital, quite possibly in agonizing surgical procedures or of one of the diseases that claimed so many lives, are also among those that haunt the site.
Kocovsky also told me about a dark, shadowy, and hostile ghost—whose name is yet unknown—who has frightened a number of people over the years, including, on one occasion, some police officers who were checking to make sure the building was properly locked up.
Other ghostly incidents people have reported at the museum include sightings of a spectral woman sitting as if upon a chair, even though one was not there, and photographs that have picked up a number of anomalies, including spirit orbs.
Despite the vast number of incidents that have occurred at the Civil War Museum at the Exchange Hotel, it is, unfortunately, a bit much to expect that one should experience anything similar during any particular visit (especially a first one, it would seem). Indeed, the museum itself echoes this sentiment in its materials: “As it is impossible to predict when these ‘permanent residents’ will make their presence known, we u
rge you to visit often.”
Good advice indeed. Because if the strange, incomprehensible sounds—voices?—on the tape I walked away with is any indication, then the museum is well worth further investigation.
CHAPTER 10
Edgar Allan Poe Museum
RICHMOND
Thou wast that all to me, love
For which my soul did pine—
A green isle in the sea, love,
A fountain and a shrine,
All wreathed in fruit and flowers
And all the flowers were mine …
—Edgar Allan Poe, “To One in Paradise”
THERE IS NO DOUBT that the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe lives on at the museum dedicated to him in Richmond. Whether that spirit is attended by one or more ghosts, however, is an open question.
When I met with Chris Semtner, a somewhat subdued artist in his early thirties who has served as curator for the Edgar Allan Poe Museum for the past eight years, he was quick to state that it is not haunted. During the hour or so my mother and I spent chatting with him at the museum on a bright, sunny day in early March 2008, however, he recounted episode after episode of incidents associated with the museum—many of them firsthand—that most believers would accept as clear evidence of ghostly presences.
Semtner does, in fact, believe that some places are haunted and claims to have lived in one that might have been. “I’m just somebody who likes to debunk things when there are alternate explanations,” he says, and he has not seen anything at the museum that he does not believe could be explained in some other way.
If Richmond is home to any ghosts at all, of course, it would certainly be reasonable that some of them might haunt the “Old Stone House,” the oldest extant building in what is one of the oldest cities in the country. None of the sites in Richmond where Poe actually lived or worked still exist, and the museum is located in a collection of four contiguous buildings that includes this aptly named structure, a 19th century carriage house (undergoing renovation during our visit in preparation for an exhibit of comic books and graphic novels inspired by the author); a building constructed of bricks taken from the house where Poe’s mother died; and one other vintage house—all clustered around an enclosed garden.
Poe did actually visit the Old Stone House at least once, when as a boy he was part of the honor guard that accompanied the Marquis de Lafayette on a tour of the city that stopped there. It is located just a few blocks from the home in which he grew up and the offices of the Southern Literary Messenger, the newspaper that gave him his first opportunity to write professionally, primarily as a literary critic.
His commentary on other peoples’ work aside, anyone familiar with the development of English-language literature knows that the fiction works of Poe are among the most influential produced in America, particularly upon the genres of horror, mystery, science fiction, and poetry. A number of first-edition copies of the author’s works are on display at the museum, including an 1845 edition of The Raven and Other Poems; a textbook on conchology that became a bestseller and led to accusations of plagiarism when it was discovered he wrote only its introduction; a facsimile of his first book, Tamerlane, a failure when it was released in 1827 but now one of the rarest and most valuable pieces of American literature; an original handwritten manuscript of the mysterious prose poem “Siope”; and the edition of Godey’s Lady’s Book in which Poe’s scandalous and highly popular “Literati of New York City” appeared.
The Edgar Allan Poe Museum is also home to the largest collection of “Poeana,” as its stewards term it, in the world. Such artifacts include the bed he slept in as a child, a walking stick that he inadvertently left in Richmond just a few weeks before his death, the key to the trunk containing his meager belongings, and a lock of hair posthumously clipped from his head by a friend.
This museum is much more than a collection of books and memorabilia, however, and visitors to it are made cognizant of the fact that there are people who have been profoundly affected by his words to the extent that they would be moved to memorialize the author who penned them. To whit, the Poe Museum was established less as a museum than as a shrine. Nowhere is that more clear than in the “Enchanted Garden,” as the site’s organizers dub it, a garden enclosed by the museum’s buildings that has been one of the place’s most attractive features since it was opened by the Poe Foundation in 1922.
Indeed, Poe considered gardens to be one of the highest forms of artistic expression, and it is thus appropriate that the centerpiece of the museum dedicated to him should be a garden inspired by his works in general and by the poem “To One in Paradise” in particular. Its features include plants, arrangements, a fountain, and other elements that can be found in the author’s various works, along with a columned arcade made of bricks from the old Southern Literary Messenger offices that contains a bust of the author. Overall, it is certainly a pleasant and fitting tribute to Poe and probably an unparalleled spot to read or meditate upon his works. The garden is also a popular local venue for weddings, some nineteen of which were held in it last year, Semtner said.
The Enchanted Garden at the Poe Museum
An air funereal as well as matrimonial permeates the museum, of course, and one of the exhibits in the museum points to how Poe’s death is as much of a mystery as anything he ever wrote about and that its cause remains unclear to this day. Causes suggested over the more than a century and a half since his October 7, 1849, demise in Baltimore, Maryland—most based on successive developments in forensic medicine and many of them contradictory—have included being beaten to death (1857 and 1998), epilepsy (1874 and 1999), dipsomania (1921), heart problems (1926 and 1997), toxic disorder (1970), hypoglycemia (1977), diabetes (1977), alcohol dehydrogenase (1984), porphyria (1989), delirium tremens (1992), rabies (1996), and carbon monoxide poisoning (1999).
With as strange and mysterious a life and death as Poe is reputed to have had—something that was overstated to a great extent in the years after he died—organizers of local ghost tours would obviously be missing an opportunity if they did not include the Edgar Allan Poe Museum as one of their stops.
Semtner says that a lot of the tour guides say they’re frightened of something upstairs in the carriage house. “Sometimes they claim to hear footsteps upstairs when they’re downstairs,” he said. Birds walking on the roof or acorns rolling down the roof, Semtner believess, are more likely explanations (although the oak tree that once produced those troublesome acorns is no longer there).
Such tours also stop outside the carriage house, Semtner says, where their participants are told that in photographs taken of one of its windows they can sometimes see the face of a child.
People have also experienced other evidence of what they believe are hauntings inside the various buildings, and there are other museum staff members, Semtner says—including a woman who also guides local ghost tours—who would swear the place is haunted.
“At the top of the stairs [in the carriage house] there’s a little bedroom display, and some of our tour guides are afraid to go into it at night, because they have to go into the bedroom, turn on the light, and then lock the door behind themselves,” Semtner says. “One of our guides says she would leave the downstairs door open so she could run out when she was afraid.”
Ghost stories associated with the site generally involve children and would thus not seem to have any connection to Poe at all (whose interest in children seems to have been directed primarily at his cousin Virginia Clemm, whom he married when she was thirteen and he was twenty-six). Semtner also says there are no records of any children having died in the house. As my mother pointed out, of course, children regularly died from any number of causes prior to the industrial age in America. Records of such deaths, if they ever existed, might not still survive, and it is not unreasonable to think that children might constitute a relatively large proportion of the ghosts in certain kinds of places, such as family homes. Many of the odd occurrences people have experienced a
t the museum are, in fact, prankish or childlike in character, Semtner says, such as feeling their ears flicked or having small objects tossed at the backs of their heads when no one else is present.
“One fellow who was upstairs by himself [in the carriage house] claimed he was pinched,” for example, Semtner says. And just within the past few years, he says, guests at weddings in the garden have claimed to have seen children playing in it even when it is clear that no living ones were actually there.
Semtner also says that a number of professional ghosthunting groups have conducted experiments in the museum and generally determined it was haunted, but he is dismissive of their methodology, which he brands as flawed and unscientific (a standard he seems committed to, his background as an artist rather than a scientist notwithstanding).
Indeed, Semtner—who is often the first person to arrive at the museum, sometimes while it is still somewhat dark—says he has personally experienced a number of anomalies that are almost classical in their association with haunted places. These have included hearing the courtyard door to the Old Stone House opening and closing in the early morning hours when he was the only one at the site and having his knocks upon walls mimicked from elsewhere in the house when no other people were there. Because these effects cannot be reproduced in accordance with the standards of the scientific method, however, Semtner says he is not willing to accept them as evidence of a supernatural presence.
While that would seem to be an unduly high standard to a more naturalistic ghosthunter like myself, my mother and I certainly did not witness any evidence of hauntings while we were at the museum—although it is not likely that we would have anyway on a short visit during the day. And, while the identities of the spectral urchins some believe to haunt the place are at the least uncertain, it is a pretty sure bet that there is one unquiet spirit that does not haunt the place: Edgar Allan Poe, who could hardly be anything but pleased with this heartfelt memorial to his life and works and to the somewhat macabre reputation it has acquired.
Ghosthunting Virginia Page 7
