Appalachian Pinball Museum

Pings and dings, rock-guitar riffs, and robotic laughs create a lively cacophony inside the Appalachian Pinball Museum in downtown Hendersonville, North Carolina. 

Located on Main Street in a historic hotel building, the museum is the pet project of owners T.C. Di Bella and John Franks. The pair opened the museum in 2017, following the success of its sister Asheville location. Today, the Franks family maintains the daily operations. 

Two large rooms house roughly 65 pinball machines—some rare, most playable—and a separate video arcade holds 15 or so more games. The oldest machine, a 1947 Gottlieb Marjorie, predates having flippers on the playfield. 

Other highlights include Dogies, a 1968 rodeo-style game that was the first to introduce the zipper-flipper function; a 1978 machine paying homage to the rock band Kiss that was originally intended to be the first machine ever designed with speech elements; and 1973’s Time Travel, one of the only machines that doesn’t function by ball count, operating by a clock in the middle of the playfield.

Throughout the museum, you can snap photos with Marvel and Star Wars characters and other recognizable cutouts. Several machines and games are saved for display purposes only, including Allied Liesures’ 1971 Spin Out. The museum also has a full Pin Bot propped up, exposing the machine’s inner workings, coils and all. 

But the quirky pastimes aren’t the only nod to history here. The museum is located in the one-time grand ballroom of the historic Skyland Hotel, which dates to 1929. Famed author F. Scott Fitzgerald and President Ronald Reagan reportedly once stayed here. And, according to local lore, it’s haunted.