Gadsby's Tavern

A complex of historic buildings including a 1785 tavern and 1792 City Hotel. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Madison all dined here.

Gadsby's Tavern stands at the heart of Old Town Alexandria, a Georgian brick complex comprising a circa 1785 tavern and the grander 1792 City Tavern and Hotel. For decades, this elegant establishment served as the social and political center of the young republic. George Washington celebrated his last two birthday balls here in 1798 and 1799. Thomas Jefferson held his 1801 inaugural banquet in the grand ballroom. John Adams, James Madison, James Monroe, the Marquis de Lafayette, Benjamin Franklin, and Alexander Hamilton all passed through these doors. The tavern takes its name from John Gadsby, an enterprising Englishman who operated the establishment from 1796 to 1808, transforming it into the finest inn between Philadelphia and Charleston.

But it is not the Founding Fathers who haunt these halls. It is a woman whose name no one knows.

In the autumn of 1816, a ship arrived in Alexandria from the West Indies carrying a well-dressed couple accompanied by a French-speaking valet and maid. The woman, draped in a black veil, was gravely ill with what physicians suspected was typhoid or yellow fever. Her husband secured Room 8 at the City Tavern and summoned Dr. Richards, the city's most respected physician. There was one condition: the doctor must ask no questions about their identities. He agreed.

For weeks, the mysterious woman languished in the East Bedchamber as her condition worsened. Dr. Richards and a nurse named Elizabeth Steuart attended her faithfully, but neither could save her. As death approached, the stranger gathered those at her bedside and extracted from each a solemn oath: they would never reveal her name or her husband's identity. On October 14, 1816, at the age of twenty-three years and eight months, she drew her final breath in her husband's arms.

The aftermath only deepened the mystery. Her husband personally prepared her body and sealed the coffin, allowing no one to view her remains. He arranged an elaborate funeral at St. Paul's Episcopal Church and commissioned a costly marble table-top monument for her grave. The epitaph he composed remains one of the most haunting in American history: "To the memory of a FEMALE STRANGER whose mortal sufferings terminated on the 14th day of October 1816. Aged 23 years and 8 months. This stone is placed here by her disconsolate Husband in whose arms she sighed out her latest breath, and who under God did his utmost even to soothe the cold dead ear of death." The inscription includes verses from Alexander Pope's "Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady" and Acts 10:43.

The total cost for lodging, medical care, funeral, and monument came to $1,500 in English currency, a fortune in that era equivalent to months of wages for skilled laborers. After the burial, the husband, valet, and maid vanished, never to be seen again. The English bank note was later discovered to be a forgery.

Theories about the stranger's identity have circulated for two centuries. Some believed she was Theodosia Burr Alston, daughter of disgraced Vice President Aaron Burr, who was lost at sea in 1813 and may have survived pirate captivity. Others speculated she was an illegitimate child of Alexander Hamilton from the Reynolds Affair, or a wealthy English heiress who had eloped with a penniless lover and fled to America. One account even suggested the husband was later spotted in Sing Sing Prison under the alias "Claremont." The truth remains buried with her.

The Female Stranger is not alone in death at Gadsby's. In June 1808, Anne Brunton Merry Wignell Warren, the most celebrated actress in America, checked into the very same Room 8 while her theatrical company prepared for a summer production. She delivered a stillborn son, briefly rallied, then slipped into feverish delirium and died at age thirty-nine. Her ghost, too, is said to linger.

The paranormal activity in Room 8 and throughout the tavern has been documented for generations. Visitors and staff report a veiled woman in black moving silently through the East Bedchamber, sometimes holding a candle, sometimes gazing longingly from the window. Passersby on Royal Street have looked up to see a pale apparition in the window of Room 8, only to watch her vanish. At parties in the historic ballroom, guests have followed a strangely dressed woman into Room 8, finding the chamber empty save for a single lit candle on the bedside table, its wick impossibly white as if never burned.

Museum Director Liz Williams has shared accounts of candles appearing lit in the sealed room after closing, only to find the glass lantern cold when staff investigate, as if an unseen presence had just extinguished the flame. One summer employee encountered the ghost face-to-face in the kitchen on her first night. She screamed, dropped her plates, and fled, never to return. Soft crying echoes from Room 8. Icy drafts sweep through closed rooms accompanied by the faint scent of perfume. Footsteps echo in empty hallways.

At St. Paul's Cemetery, visitors report overwhelming grief when approaching the Female Stranger's grave, as if two centuries of sorrow have soaked into the marble. Some have seen her standing beside her own monument, watching.

Today Gadsby's Tavern operates as both a museum and restaurant under the care of the City of Alexandria. The complex was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1963. Every October, around the anniversary of the stranger's death on October 14th, the museum hosts "Death at the City Hotel" events exploring her legend. Port City Brewing Company releases an annual black IPA called "Long Black Veil" in her honor. The original ballroom woodwork now resides in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but the ghosts remain in Alexandria, still guarding their secrets.