Old Town Alexandria Historic District · Alexandria's Civil War-era Union occupation
Ghost City Tours operates ghost walking tours in dozens of U.S. cities. In Alexandria — a colonial port founded in 1749 whose Old Town historic district was later occupied by Union forces for the length of the Civil War and converted into a network of military hospitals — the company runs two separately ticketed products: The Echoes of Alexandria Tour, an all-ages walk centered on Gadsby's Tavern and the unsolved 1816 death of the woman known only as the "Female Stranger," and The Devil Walked Old Town, an adults-only walk covering the domestic slave trade that operated out of a Duke Street building, an 1861 killing at the Marshall House, and the epidemic disease that filled the city's burying grounds.
Neither product page discloses a specific meeting address; both state the exact location is "provided at booking." The operator separately maintains a sitewide directory of 8 places it describes as haunted in Alexandria — among them Gadsby's Tavern, Alexandria's City Hall, and the John Carlyle House — but that directory is presented independently of either tour's stated route and is not treated here as a tour stop list; only Gadsby's Tavern is named directly within a tour's own route description.
Both Alexandria products run nightly, rain or shine, and cover roughly 1 mile of Old Town's historic cobblestone and paved streets.
Sources
- https://ghostcitytours.com/alexandria/
- https://ghostcitytours.com/alexandria/devil-walked-old-town/
- https://ghostcitytours.com/alexandria/echoes-of-alexandria-tour/
ApparitionsUnexplained SoundsFeelings of Being Watched
The Echoes of Alexandria Tour is built around Gadsby's Tavern, an operating 1785 building where the operator recounts the 1816 death of an unidentified young woman who swore witnesses to secrecy about her name before she died — a mystery the operator calls one of its "most beloved stops," and whose grave marker reads only "To the memory of a Female Stranger." The Devil Walked Old Town covers harder ground: the operator states that for nearly a decade one of the country's largest domestic slave-trading operations ran out of a building on Duke Street, and separately covers the 1861 killing of a Union officer at the Marshall House on King Street, an incident regarded as an early death of the Civil War, alongside the yellow fever and smallpox epidemics that once emptied Alexandria households.
All of this is the tour operator's own marketing and narrative material, not documented history verified independently for this listing; it is included here as a description of what the tours cover, not as an endorsement of any specific paranormal claim.
