BARNESVILLE — Visitors have the chance to step back in time and enjoy nights filled with silence at the Victorian Mansion Museum.

The Victorian Mansion Museum will be starting its “Silent Movie Night” series at 6:30 p.m. today at 532 N. Chestnut St. in Barnesville. Doors will open at 6 p.m., and the movie is free for the public to attend. The museum plans to have these movie nights every other month throughout the year leading up to October. Today’s movie will be “Gold Rush,” a comedy starring Charlie Chaplin.

Board member Brock Rogers said the museum wants to jump around with the different kinds of movies that will be shown.

He noted there are some local people who made it as film stars, so the museum will feature some of those movies. He added that the museum is keeping the names of the selected films quiet for now, so it can reveal them down the road.

Snacks, including popcorn, candy and beverages, will be available for purchase on movie nights.

The museum plans to have the last movie outside in October, featuring “Nosferatu,” which Rogers described as “one of the best vampire movies ever made.”

“We’re looking for different ways to get people engaged at the museum and in the doors that maybe wouldn’t have come for a tour otherwise,” Rogers said.

The museum was built between 1888 and 1893 by the Bradfield family, who retained ownership of it until the 1960s. The Romanesque style brick structure is now owned by the Belmont County Historical Society.

Rogers and his colleagues thought about silent movie nights because people living in the 1920s watched them for entertainment at local movie houses. He said these nights provide a peek back into what people were doing in the Victorian era and early 1900s, but the museum will make its movie nights a little more modern.

People could not talk in the earliest movies because filmmakers didn’t have the technology to capture sound, so the movies would be silent. Actors would use gestures, expressions and body language to convey emotions.

There would usually be an instrumentalist in the theater playing live music during these film showings.

“It’s something different we don’t always think out. Movie theaters, even now, are kind of going by the wayside a little bit with times of streaming, but roughly 100 years ago that was a big social event,” Rogers said. “And it’s about creating a little bit of community again and getting people out to experience things together again.”