Exchange Place

Kingsport stagecoach farm where Aunt El hides keys, shuts staircase doors, and refuses to leave even after volunteers moved her house.

The volunteers at Exchange Place have a name for the ghost in the main farmhouse. They call her Aunt El, and they talk about her the way you'd talk about an aging relative who lives in a back bedroom: she's particular, she has opinions, she sometimes hides things, and you learn to work around her.

Aunt El haunts Roseland, the historic farmhouse that anchors the Exchange Place Living History Farm on Orebank Road in Kingsport. Roseland was built as part of the Preston-Gaines family farm in the early 1800s, when this property served as a relay station on the Great Stage Road. Travelers riding the road between Tennessee and Virginia stopped here to exchange tired horses for fresh ones, swap currency between state systems, and pick up mail at the small post office attached to the farm. The exchange function is where the name comes from.

The most striking thing about Aunt El is that she relocated. In the 1990s, when the historic farm site was being expanded and reorganized, the Roseland house was lifted off its original foundation and moved to a new spot on the property. Caretakers expected the activity to stop. It didn't. As one of the previous owners told the Exchange Place staff at the time: "Aunt El is with Roseland, there's no doubt it." She followed the walls, not the foundation stones.

The reports volunteers describe are domestic and minor. Doors that close themselves while people work in adjacent rooms. The staircase down from the attic shutting at the top while someone is partway down. House keys disappearing from the kitchen counter and turning up two days later in a drawer nobody opened. A sense of someone standing behind you while you're alone in the parlor. None of it is threatening. The volunteers, several of whom have worked the farm for fifteen or twenty years, describe Aunt El as territorial but not malicious.

The Exchange Place site itself is one of the better-preserved 1850s working farms in East Tennessee. It's run by a nonprofit, staffed almost entirely by volunteers, and operates as a living history demonstration with heritage breeds, heirloom kitchen gardens, weaving and blacksmithing demonstrations, and a Fall Folk Arts Festival every September. The property is small and the site interpreters are available for direct conversation. If you want to ask about Aunt El, somebody at the farmhouse will tell you their own version, which may not match the version on the website.

The site plays up its ghost reputation in October. The Witches Wynd, an evening lantern walk through the property with storytellers stationed along the path, is the best-attended event of the Exchange Place calendar. Storytellers tell Appalachian non-fiction ghost stories collected from the surrounding Sullivan County region. Some of the stories are about the farm itself. Others are local legends from the Holston River valley. The lantern light along the orchard path works.

Exchange Place is open seasonally with free general admission, and the Roseland farmhouse is on the standard tour route. The narrow staircase to the second floor is where visitors most often report the door closing behind them on its own. The volunteers who log these incidents have been doing it for fifteen or twenty years, and they've stopped marking them down as anything more than Aunt El.