Living in limbo
When I scheduled my visit to the Exchange, I wondered why I couldn’t seem to find any reliable witnesses to strange events in Charlottesville. A friend recommended I meet with someone she knew who “was really into this stuff,” so I headed to Pantops for another interview.
“Halloween is the one time of year I’m actually a cool mom instead of the weird, spooky one,” said Nan Coleman. With her blonde hair and rich laugh, Coleman looks like she belongs at soccer tryouts passing out orange slices, not huddled on a windy Starbucks patio discussing visions of life after death.
Though the children’s book writer and insurance saleswoman is not a formal member of a ghost-hunting group, Coleman attends investigations all over the country. “I’m not a psychic but an empath,” she said, a witness to shadow people and inexplicable phenomena her entire life.
“I don’t get mad at skeptics,” she said, leaning in conspiratorially. “They just haven’t seen anything yet. But I’ve met so many people who’ve seen and experienced the same things as me: cold spots, strange voices, breaths in my ear. People come out of the woodwork to talk to you about ghosts when they know you won’t give them The Look.”
Coleman went on to describe incredible visions witnessed by her and other investigators: a solid black ball, hovering slowly through the air of a friend’s living room; a green floating head in an abandoned sanatorium; the clear features of a double body apparition. When I asked her if she’d heard of haunted sites in Charlottesville, I didn’t hold my breath.
“Oh, there are ghosts all over this place,” she said, grinning at my obvious surprise. “Like right over there. In one of those buildings, people hear disembodied voices talking.”
“Really?”
“They think it was built on a Native American burial ground.”
I pulled my jacket tighter against the sudden chill.
Charlottesville’s history is one of its main draws for Coleman, who told me “the chance to hear and see history from such a unique history is what keeps me coming back.” At a church near Hydraulic Road, for example, she sensed the spirit of a little boy who smelled like old-fashioned molasses candy. “I felt this cold spot around my feet, like he was playing with them during the service. I got a sharp pain in the front of my head, and as soon as I got up and left, the pain disappeared. I assume something happened to his head, some sort of wound.”
Though she couldn’t recommend a local site where I could do a ghost hunt, Coleman’s tongue-in-cheek humor and constant laughter made me less afraid of the prospect. “Ghosts are everywhere,” she told me. “Being scared of them is a waste of time.”
Close encounters
“Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle; be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray: and do thou, O Prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God, thrust into hell Satan and all the evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.”
Thusly prepared, my boyfriend, J.T., and I stepped into the drizzle and darkness toward the entrance of the Exchange Hotel in Gordonsville. An annual fundraiser was in full swing; screams echoed through the nearby woods as teens purchased tickets for the Trail of Terror and Depot of Death, a haunted house in the historic rail depot.
Angel May met us at the front door. Vice president and administrator of the Exchange Hotel’s governing board as well as a member of Virginia Wilderness Paranormal, the noted medium’s warm eyes and artful highlights that bely her ability to speak with the dead.
Three stories tall, with rooms now restored to their 1800s elegance, filled with painstaking records and period antiques, the Exchange began as a hotel and tavern. It received railroad passengers until the Civil War, when it became a Receiving Hospital. Over 700 people were buried in the yard.
When Union troops began burning the South, they spared the hotel because fellow federals lay recovering there. It went on to become a Freedman’s Bureau and a boarding house, and it’s the last Civil War-era receiving hospital still standing in Virginia. It’s also, according to The History Channel, the 15th most haunted place in America.
By the mid-1900s, the house had been abandoned, its residents driven out by segregationists, and a homeless population sheltered under the trees out front. They wouldn’t go inside because they heard people walking up and down the stairs, and that’s part of the reason the house was still in such good condition when the current non-profit bought it.
Normally, history lovers conduct self-guided tours for a nominal fee. Night tours—ghost-seeking ventures conducted by paranormal groups—are a bit more expensive, but they include exclusive use of the facilities, explanation of each room’s ghosts and artifacts, scientific equipment to measure activity, and post-tour analysis of possible evidence. Tonight, however, we’d be on our own.
“Feel free to go in,” Angel May said, smiling from her seat.
Rain caught in my hair and on my shoulders as I crossed through mud toward the front door. Open, I thought, let my heart open. One deep inhale, and I pushed inside, bells jingling above me.
I lacked a veteran’s instant read of a space—active or peaceful, haunted or not—but as blood stirred beneath my skin, I hoped my body would read like one.
A room full of visitors and volunteers chatted happily around me. I said hello to the smiling hostess and glanced at the gift shop postcards before ducking through a threshold into a white hallway and a sudden, startling quiet.
“If a ghost touches you,” Coleman had said, “it will feel like cold wet gauze brushing across your skin, but it’s not cold or wet.”
My head felt a bit like it was submerged under water, but nothing actually touched me. I took several photos into the dark reflection of the windows, dark and grainy in the candlelight. I also snapped photos up the darkened stairwell before climbing creaky stairs to the second floor. Maybe it was my imagination, but the air felt different up there. More active, somehow, as if I could sense people hiding around every corner.
I tried to forget the warnings about demons: the sense of oppression, suffocation, sharp swings into rage or misery. I moved toward an antique mirror that stood in the corner of the hallway. Age spotted its lacquered surface, bronze spots twisting like its molded frame. I glanced at my body, a long lick of black, and dragged my vision across the empty background, wondering what my limited senses were missing.
I raised my camera and took a picture. Then another and another.
In the infirmary room, complete with bone saws, ether masks, and other medical instruments, we paged through a copy of a hospital ledger and saw photos of the men who received treatment there. We heard stories of nurses in black floating down the hallways, and two teenage girls who took a bunch of selfies and found a white-masked surgeon in the background.
In Major Quartermaster Richards’ room, legend has it that two tourists mistook a peg-legged ghost for an actor and had an extended conversation with him. Only after they came back downstairs did they realize their mistake. J.T. glanced at a small rocking chair near the window. When we were out in the hallway, he quietly told me that he had felt the hairs on his arms stand up.
“Did you notice there are night vision cameras in every room?” J.T. asked.
“I don’t think they’re meant to film people,” I said.
When we entered the sisters’ room, a tiny space with two twin beds stuffed between blank walls, the high frequency energy of the second floor seemed to reach its peak. Three nuns used to live there, I read on a plaque, brought in to teach cleanness and good manners to soldiers.
For the first time I felt certain that I wasn’t alone, or perhaps that someone had stepped out of the room so I could squeeze in. “I wonder if anyone’s in here,” I murmured, a half-whispered attempt at a question.
Then Angel May appeared. “A psychic told us that one of the nuns feels she wasn’t as caring as she should have been, and now she’s back trying to help the ones that are still here.”
Yikes.
The three of us looked at the final room, a dimly lit woman’s bedroom.
“That’s Ella’s room,” Angel May said. “It’s been very active of late.”
I held up my recorder.
“So maybe we should ask her questions?” I asked. “Since I already have my recorder out?”
She nodded, and I felt my face flush. “What do you think I should ask?”
“Just be respectful,” Angel May said, “and talk to them like you would to me. I try to research different slang they’ve used. I even sang “Wish I Was in Dixie” a few weeks ago to see if we could get an EVP, and we did.”
Ugh. I should have done more research.
Angel May left us to explore the darkness of Ella’s room. Beneath my fear I felt a wave of warmth and found the nerve to speak.
“Hi Ella. Thanks for letting us come look around your room.” My voice crept higher. “Is it O.K. having all these people in your house? I guess it’s a lot noisier than, um, you’d expect?” I babbled about an antique hairbrush and sitting for oil portraits.