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Historic haunted places in Alexandria, VA. Each page gives the ghost story, whether visitors can go, and a link to the site the story came from. The stories are folklore, not documented fact.
4 listings shown.
VIRGINIA / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
Regional ghost writers describe Sybil West, John Carlyle's second wife, who supposedly burned the belongings of his late first wife out of jealousy and is now seen screaming in the…
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
VIRGINIA / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
In 1816 a young woman and a man calling himself her husband took Room 8; as she lay dying, she reportedly made everyone present swear never to reveal who she was. She is buried und…
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
VIRGINIA / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
Most stories at this 1785 Lee family home date to its time as a Union hospital, when soldiers died inside. Staff and visitors report a woman in 19th-century dress on the second flo…
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
VIRGINIA / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
Built for Nelly Custis Lewis, Martha Washington's granddaughter, this 1805 estate is known for small repeated experiences rather than one dramatic tale. A sweet floral scent near t…
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
Explore verified haunted attractions and ghost tours in nearby cities.
Alexandria was established in 1749 on the western bank of the Potomac River, a tobacco-inspection warehouse site that grew into one of the young country's largest ports. It was incorporated as a town in 1779, ceded to the District of Columbia in 1801, retroceded back to Virginia in 1847, re-chartered as a city in 1852, and made an independent city in 1870. The core that survives — Old Town, now the Alexandria Historic District — is the ground every story on this page walks.
Two Old Town buildings anchor that ground in the documented record. The first is Carlyle House, at 121 North Fairfax Street, built by Scottish merchant John Carlyle in 1751–1752 and the only stone 18th-century Palladian Revival-style residence in Alexandria. In March 1755, Major-General Edward Braddock made it his headquarters and hosted the governors of five colonies there to plan the opening campaigns of the French and Indian War. In front of it later stood the Mansion House Hotel, seized during the Civil War and used as a Union hospital.
The second is Gadsby's Tavern, at 134 and 138 North Royal Street: a complex of a tavern built around 1785, the 1792 City Tavern and Hotel, and a later hotel addition. Englishman John Gadsby leased and operated the buildings from 1796 to 1808, and under him the tavern hosted George Washington's Birthnight Ball and Thomas Jefferson's inaugural banquet. The complex was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1963, and the buildings were reopened in 1976, after extensive renovation, as Gadsby's Tavern Museum.
This section is folklore — the city's best-known ghost story, framed here as legend, exactly as its sources frame it.
In 1816, a 23-year-old woman died of a disease at the City Tavern after travelling to Alexandria with her husband. On her deathbed, the people around her were made to swear an oath that they would never reveal her identity. The promise was kept. Her grave — a table-like structure in the cemetery of St. Paul's Episcopal Church — is marked only "Female Stranger," and its long inscription gives her age, 23 years and 8 months, and the date her sufferings ended, October 14, 1816, but never her name.
Her ghost is said to haunt the cemetery and Room 8 of Gadsby's Tavern, the room in which she died, and her visage is supposedly seen standing at its window. Two centuries of speculation about who she was have produced candidates — most persistently Theodosia Burr Alston, daughter of Aaron Burr — but the sources themselves note that the dates do not line up, and no identity has ever been established. The elaborate retellings that accumulated after the 1830s, with veiled faces, French maids, counterfeit money, and a husband who vanished, are presented in the record as romanticized tale, and this page keeps them there.
Old Town's second piece of documented lore is smaller and stranger. When Carlyle House was restored in the 1970s, the remains of a cat were found built into the foundation of the house's southeast chimney, dating to before the house's completion in 1753. The house's curator has written that staff considered the dried cat an "unseen guardian" and a good-luck charm, in keeping with an old British custom of entombing a cat in a foundation to ward off evil spirits. The remains were put back where they were found. It is a protective charm in the record, not a haunting claim — the same sources note the house is not otherwise believed to be haunted by one.
Hountix lists 4 places in Alexandria, VA. Seasonal attractions keep their own open dates, so check each business's own site before you go.
Gadsby's Tavern Museum is the rare attraction on this page that is not selling a haunting at all. It is a cultural history museum owned and operated by the City of Alexandria, in the two buildings its own city page describes: a circa-1785 tavern and the 1792 City Tavern and Hotel, built by John Wise and made famous by John Gadsby, who operated them from 1796 to 1808. The city's own account stresses what the tavern was in life — a centre of Alexandria's port-based economy where people dined, entertained, and spent the night, whose renowned hospitality was made possible by a large enslaved labour force, and whose notable patrons included George and Martha Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and the Marquis de Lafayette. The museum offers tours, programs, and special events; Wikipedia's account of the museum today lists self-guided tours at $5 and guided tours at $8, free for city residents and employees and for active-duty military and veterans.
The museum's own collected pages publish no ghost lore, and this page invents none for it. Its place in Alexandria's haunted geography comes entirely from the documented record around it. In 1816, in the City Tavern building, a 23-year-old woman died after making those around her swear never to reveal her identity; her table tomb in St. Paul's Cemetery is marked "Female Stranger"; and her ghost is said — by the legend, not by the museum — to haunt the cemetery and Room 8, the room in which she died. The unusual monument and the story around it have long been noted as a peculiar oddity of the town.
That makes Gadsby's the honest centre of an Alexandria ghost tour: a real, documented building, with a real, documented, anonymous death inside it, and everything beyond those facts openly labelled legend. Visit it in the daytime for the history. The tours in the stories above will tell you the rest after dark.
*Website: https://alexandriava.gov/GadsbysTavern*