The cavern system is adorned with speleothems such as columns, mud flows, stalactites, stalagmites, flowstone, and mirrored pools.

The caverns host the Great Stalacpipe Organ, a lithophone made from solenoid-fired strikers that tap stalactites of varied sizes to produce tones similar to those of xylophones, tuning forks, or bells.

[1] A Smithsonian Institution report of July 13 and 14, 1880, concluded: "[I]t is safe to say that there is probably no other cave in the world more completely and profusely decorated with stalactite and stalagmite ornamentation than that of Luray.

[4] Visitors enter the cave via a path that curves downward through the caverns, eventually reaching Dream Lake, The Saracen's Tent, The Great Stalacpipe Organ and some large stalactites and stalagmites.

A skeleton, thought to be that of a Native American girl, found in one of the chasms, was estimated, from the current rate of stalagmitic growth, to be not more than 500 years old.

Because the true value of the property was not realized until after the purchase, legal wrangling ensued for the next two years with attempts to prove fraud and decide rightful ownership.

David Kagery of Luray and George Marshall of Uniontown, Pennsylvania, purchased the property in July 1890 and in October of that year the tract was sold to the Valley Land and Improvement Company.

Under bankruptcy proceedings in 1893, the property was bought by Luray Caverns Company, owned by J. Kemp Bartlett of Baltimore.

Professor Jerome J. Collins, the Arctic explorer, postponed his departure on an ill-fated North Pole expedition to visit the caverns.

By sinking a shaft five feet (1.5 m) in diameter down to a cavern chamber and installing a 42-inch (1,100 mm) fan powered by a five horsepower (3.7 kW) electric motor, Northcott's system could change out the air through the entire house about every four minutes.

Tests made over successive years by means of culture media and sterile plates were considered to have demonstrated the "perfect bacteriologic purity" of the air,[7] purportedly a benefit to those suffering various respiratory illnesses.

The Car and Carriage Caravan Museum features an impressive collection of over 140 items relating to early transportation including a Conestoga wagon and an 1892 Mercedes-Benz.

Cave Hill, 927 feet (283 m) above sea level, had long been an object of local interest on account of its pits and oval hollows or sinkholes (known as karst) through one of which the discoverers of Luray Caverns entered.

At some period, niches and already formed chambers were completely filled with water, highly charged with acid, which then slowly began to eat away at much of the softer material composing much of the walls, ceilings and floors.

This precipitation begins as a thin deposit ring of crystallized calcite, but continues to collect, creating stalactites and other types of dripstone and flowstone.

Other colors reflect impurities in the calcite resulting from elements absorbed from the soil or rock layers: Reds and yellows due to iron and iron-stained clays; black from manganese dioxide; blues and greens from solutions of copper compounds.

Luray Caverns remains an active cave where new formation deposits accumulate at the rate of about one cubic inch (16 cm3) every 120 years.

Some notable formations include the Leaning Column, undermined and tilting like the campanile of Pisa; The Great Stalacpipe Organ, a large shield formation, that was used from very early on as an instrument for a variety of folk and religious songs; and a vast bed of disintegrated carbonates left by the water in its retreat through the great space called the Elfin Ramble.

Here also are polished stalagmites, a rich buff slashed with white, and others, like huge mushrooms, with a velvety coat of red, purple or olive-tinted crystals.

In some of the smaller basins it sometimes happens that, when the excess of carbonate acid escapes rapidly, there is formed, besides the crystal bed below, a film above, shot like a sheet of ice across the surface.

[7] The dimensions of the chambers included in Luray Caverns cannot be easily stated, due to the great irregularity of their outlines.