Shenandoah Valley Discovery Museum — Attraction in Winchester

Update: The owner Dawn Devine called me early this morning to say she saw my reviews on yelp and asked "did you think you would get a refund after those reviews?" So I called the cops and told them I felt harrassed and told them what happened BOTH times. The deputy told I could hire an attorney and take her to court and I can continue to leave the bad reviews.

Two terrible experiences. After years of membership and money spent here, my self and my son will not be returning to this unprofessional place of bias. In house management is poor and unprofessional to the point where I felt threatened enough to call the cops. After this incident, all I recieved was an apology email from Mark, the disrespectful manger, to come back to the museum and play. Agaisnt my better judgments, we did. Once again, staff was rude and blatanlty disrespectful towards myself and son. And once I tried to bring attention to it things would be escalated by management resulting in an embarrassing and traumatizing situation for myself and son again. After months of trying to reach Dawn Devine, the director, she finally called me back only to offer a refund and to tell me to never come back. Shocked and upset I told her I would never want to return and I would be leaving a review on Yelp about this. She then said if I left a bad review on yelp she would not refund me. Is...

Finally got to take my little boy here and was soooo excited! When we walked in the front desk employee was less than welcoming. He seemed irritated that we were even there and seemed like that was the last place he wanted to be. A children’s museum catered towards children is the last place I would expect this type of attitude from staff. I explained that it was our first time and I wasn’t sure how ticketing worked but it was just me and my son. He then asked how many tickets. I repeated myself and he stared at me and mumbled. I asked if he could repeat himself and he proceeded to talk even more quietly and mumble even more, almost on purpose. It was a painful conversation to get through. After struggling through the front desk’s horrible atmosphere and lacking customer service, my 14 month old did have a blast. There was so much for him to do and he spent hours just exploring everything. The “shopping center” and water tables were...

We love the Discovery Museum. There are lots of different things for littles to do. With 4 levels of activities, it’s easy to move on to something new. The 2 things I took a point off for are as follows: 1- many of the toys & play items are clearly heavily used (which is great!), but could use updating. Lots of things are broken or ripped or maybe not as clean as they could be. & 2- the activities generally have been the same since we started going there around 2021. As local residents that go often, it would be fun to see the activities / toys changed out more often. Of course I understand these things are based on donations, so I get it. I would HIGHLY recommend anyone from outside the Winchester area visit for sure - especially with children aged 1-7 or 8. I wish I could donate more to help update things more frequently. We still love to visit on occasion- maybe once a month- as...