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Heavily Investigated

The Exchange Hotel doesn't just hold history — visitors say it holds the dead. Soldiers who never made it home are reported drifting its wards; stand in the upper floors and the air shifts, temperature plummeting as something oppressive closes in. That's said to be Major Quartermaster Richards, a Confederate officer who allegedly killed his unfaithful wife and himself within these walls. Meanwhile, Anna — the old cook — reportedly answers questions by EVP from her kitchen, unaware the war ended long ago.

Built in 1860 for Richard F. Omohundro beside the Virginia Central Railroad junction, the Exchange Hotel offered weary passengers a grand layover — until March 1862, when the Confederacy converted it into the Gordonsville Receiving Hospital. Over 23,000 soldiers passed through; 700 were buried on the grounds. It later served freed slaves as a Freedman's Bureau Hospital before returning to hotel life, then slipping into decline by the 1940s. On paper, a tidy arc of American history. The building, it seems, filed a different report.