Haunted Houses and
Family Ghosts of Kentucky
Haunted Houses
and
Family Ghosts
of
Kentucky
William Lynwood Montell
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY
Publication of this volume was made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Copyright © 2001 by The University Press of Kentucky
Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University.
All rights reserved.
Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky 663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008
12 11 10 8 7 6 5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Montell, William Lynwood, 1931–
Haunted houses and family ghosts of Kentucky /
William Lynwood Montell.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-10: 0-8131-2227-9 (cloth : alk. paper)
1.Ghosts—Kentucky. 2. Haunted houses—Kentucky.
BF1472.U6 M662 2001
133.1W769—dc21 2001003508
ISBN-13: 978-0-8131-2227-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
This book is printed on acid-free recycled paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
Member of the Association of American University Presses
Dedicated to the memory of family and community members who told supernatural and historical legends while I was a child in Rock Bridge, Monroe County, especially my father, Willie Montell, and grandfather, Chris Chapman. They ranked among the best.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part 1: Haunted Houses
Part 2: Family Ghosts
Notes
Index to Stories by County
Illustrations
Deserted house, eastern Pennyroyal
Owens House, Knox County
Brutus’s ghost, Bourbon County
Jones House, Lyon County
Smith/Richardson House, Breckinridge County
Cocanougher House, Washington County
Pretty House, Monroe County
Haunted house (side view), Butler County
Haunted house (front view), Butler County
Sextons House, Logan County
Map of Kentucky Counties
Acknowledgments
In compiling this collection of ghost stories from 103 counties across the Commonwealth, I was assisted by many people. I owe heartfelt thanks to students of all ages from middle schools, high schools, colleges, and universities around the state. Special thanks are hereby extended to students, professors, and archivists at Berea College, Mount St. Joseph Archives, Murray State University (MSU), Prestonsburg Community College, and Western Kentucky University (WKU). Approximately three-fourths of the ghost stories herein were contributed by students of all ages who obtained them from parents, grandparents, and community members, especially members of the older generations. I am also deeply indebted to all persons who told these stories to students or to me personally as I traveled around the state searching for these wonderful accounts. When the person who told a particular story is identified on the archival manuscript, he or she, along with the collector, is credited for providing it.
Singular gratitude for supplying these fascinating accounts of Kentucky’s supernatural entities is due to Roberta Simpson Brown (author), Sister Emma C. Busam (archivist), Judy Hensley Bryson (teacher), Myra Burnette, Connie Carroll (Eastern Kentucky University [EKU]), Ruth Colvin, Elbert Cundiff, Joan Diersing, Mary Ann Gentry (writer), Kay Harbison (teacher), Carol White Harrison, Pat Hodges (Kentucky Library, WKU), Jan Jakeman (writer, photographer), Dr. Loyal Jones (Berea College; writer, speaker), Tracy Jordan (journalist), Stan LeMaster (journalist), Sara McNulty, Kevin McQueen (teacher, EKU), Stacey Manning (journalist), Linda Montell (wife), Linda Nance (teacher), Melinda Overstreet (journalist), Margaret Jean Owens, Debora Reece, Robert Renick (Prestonsburg Community College), Harry Rice (archivist, Berea College), Gerald Roberts (Special Collections, Berea College), Danielle Roemer (teacher, Northern Kentucky University [NKU]),Missy Rogers (journalist), Ginny Snipp, John A. Stegall, Frankie Stone (Kentucky Library, WKU), Michael D. West, and to all other persons who told or recorded one or more of the stories.
Introduction
The central purpose of this book is to feature family and house ghosts, thus to have in print numerous narrative accounts that people feel reflect virtually two centuries of fact and fancy concerning themselves and their progenitors. These accounts that focus on the supernatural also describe an abundance of folk values that tend to make them precious in the eyes of the tellers and those persons who sit spellbound while hearing the stories being recounted.
Kentucky has a rich legacy of ghostly visitations, especially descriptive accounts associated with old houses and deceased family members. These orally transmitted stories are rich in historical detail about these houses and related buildings, and also provide details relevant to people’s assumed-to-be-true encounters with the supernatural. Some of the stories herein go back to pioneer times, and certain others are tied to antebellum homes and family progenitors who were present during those early years. Some even reflect the bitterness of slavery conditions and fratricidal conflict during the Civil War. All in all, ghost stories contain a lot of historical information in that they accurately describe folk practices and beliefs that have long been forgotten except by the older residents. It is important to record and place these stories in print so that the historical and personal information contained in them will be preserved for future generations.
The early generations notwithstanding, most of the interesting accounts in this book portray life and times of recent twentieth-century generations. Whether traditional or personal, such stories are an integral part of Kentucky’s regional identity with the South, and they especially enhance social and cultural ties with family, community, county, and state. From the mountains in the Appalachian portion of the commonwealth, across the lush pasturelands of the Bluegrass region, the hill country of both north-central and south-central Kentucky, and the flat-to-rolling terrain of western Kentucky, no part of the state is exempt. The force of these supernatural stories is strengthened by their obvious intent to portray things as they really happened, not merely to amuse the listeners. In this regard, Kentucky is much like other Southern states. Author Kathryn Tucker Windham writes, “There is something about the South that encourages, perhaps even requires, the presence of ghosts and the measured retelling of their deeds. And, somehow, these stories provide a nostalgic link with the past, with generations who were here before.”1
Old deserted houses like this one in the eastern Pennyroyal section of the Commonwealth are frequently the locations of family and community stories about ghostly entities. (Photo by the author)
Virtually all residents of Kentucky have shared, and many still do, in storytelling events involving supernatural visitations. Throughout history, Kentuckians have cultivated and perpetuated
the telling of traditional oral narratives. John Johnson, resident of Carter County during the 1930s when he was already in his eighties, offered the following commentary to Milford Jones, member of the Federal Writers Project, about family storytelling situations:
In my growing up or younger days, the fathers, mothers, and older people would sit around the fire of a night at home and tell all kinds of scary stories about things they had seen and heard. These stories kept us children wondering and scared all the time. We were always expecting some great disaster to happen to us, such as the devil or some hideous being would carry us off. These tales and stories made me afraid to be out of a night. When I was a boy, if I had to pass a graveyard or an old deserted house, I was always looking for something fearful, or to be carried off.
The mothers would sing scary songs or tell the children ghostly tales in order to make them mind.2
As indicated in the foregoing statement, whether true or not true, these stories may serve as subtle warnings especially to children and, on occasion, to elderly persons as well. For example, after a haunted-house story is told to describe a headless being that roams from room to room with an axe in hand, a parent or grandparent may say to a child, “Stay away from that old house. Old Man Evans thought he would be killed when he saw that thing, and it just might happen to you.” Whether or not the house is haunted, stories such as this may provide sound advice to the child to stay away from that old place so as not to be snakebitten, attacked by animals, or encounter various other dangers associated with the house. In earlier times, children thus understood the situation and were typically frightened into submission.
Peoples beliefs and stories about death and dying, and the return of the deceased as ghosts, tell a lot about who these people are, where they came from, how they deal with religious and traditional beliefs, and how they cope with bewildering facets in their everyday lives. Viewed in this social context, stories about supernatural entities are not merely fictional accounts that people dream up. Instead, they are accounts based on personal experience, trust, and tradition.
Supernatural tales thus describe extraordinary events typically believed by the storyteller to have really happened. People like to hear these accounts because they are told to as “actual experiences of the contributors or of their relatives or friends. In almost every case the original teller, at least, believes that he or the person involved has had a supernatural experience.”3And these accounts are usually told to the listener in such a way that the recipient person often feels as if he or she is viewed as a very understanding individual who is being provided with very private, personal information. These accounts of spirit visitations grip the listeners, and especially the tellers, with a genuinely uncanny power. Most of these gripping, spooky stories are believed from the heart, even when logical rationale would assert that what is being described really did not happen. Although encounters with these spirit-like creatures are generally dismissed by hard science, people from all walks of life and in all world cultures nonetheless cling tenaciously to their beliefs in the return of deceased family and community members as spirits. Thus it is that the stories told to describe what happened typically gain a power of felt veracity.
Nelson Maynard II, current resident of Louisville, had the following to say about his belief in supernatural entities during his growing-up years in Pike County:
I can’t tell you exactly why I am so interested in ghostlore, or in the field of folklore in general, but for as long as I can remember I have had an interest in old-timey ways and traditions, and a particular fascination for ghost tales. Clearly, my grandparents grew up in much more interesting times, what with their log cabins and spring houses located on the old countryside….
The notion of earthbound spirits hovering about in the fog and shadows fascinated me. Growing up on Johns Creek, I was absolutely certain our old house and the countryside was positively bursting at the seams with ghosts. … As a lad, I would sometimes wake up during the night scared, then go across the hallway to my parents’ room, but taking care to first pull the sheet from my bed and put it over me so that the ghosts would think I was one of them as I walked down the hall.
This eventually developed into a bit of good preschool dread for me, as my folks endeavored to convince me that there were no such things as ghosts. They were only make-believe and perfectly harmless. Ghost stories were only stories after all. So, I eventually lost my dread of ghostly encounters, but not my fascination for them.4
According to folklorist Barbara Walker, “If the supernatural is seriously considered, the events and phenomena reported or described within a group give us evidence of a particular way of perceiving the world. It provides insights into cultural identity…. How groups regard the supernatural contributes to thought and behavior, and by attending to those patterns, we gather a fuller understanding of what is meaningful to the group, what gives it cohesion and animation, and thus we develop a rounder perspective of cultural nuance, both within the group and cross-culturally.”5
No amount of formal historical documentation can provide the human understanding relative to beliefs, customs, worldview, and social values as that which is available in oral traditional stories. And while the supernatural visitations described in this book do not offer a total picture of Kentucky’s people, simply reading these accounts helps to provide the reader with central ideas and values that continue to undergird daily life in Kentucky and depict local life and culture in meaningful terms. These oral stories are especially valuable in that they reflect people’s inner lives by articulating their beliefs, fears, dreams, and hopes.
Many people think of supernatural entities as being something terrible, something that is here to scare you, to get revenge, or perhaps even to kill you. On the other hand, those persons who witness spirit visitations from deceased family members such as a grandparent, parent, spouse, or child, often find their presence comforting or informative. Stories that recount the return of a family member as a spirit entity to the land of the living portray the visitations as necessary, so as to warn, console, inform, guard, shield, reward, or save the life of a living relative.
A Bowling Green woman shared with the author approximately twelve years ago how her grandfather’s spirit saved her life the previous week. In explaining what took place, she stated that she left Bowling Green the previous Wednesday at 2:00 p.m. en route to Louisville. She was alone in the automobile. About the time she got within fifty miles of her destination, she could feel herself falling asleep at the wheel, something she had never done before. Apparently, she did fall asleep. At that precise time, someone’s hand from the back seat of the car grabbed her by the shoulder and began shaking her to wake her up. She saw that she was headed for the ditch, and simultaneously saw her grandfather sitting there in the back seat. She immediately steered the automobile back onto the interstate highway, then pulled over to the side of the road so as to regain her composure. Once the automobile was in a parked position, she turned around to speak to her grandfather and thank him for saving her life. “But even though I saw him after his hand woke me up, he was not there any longer,” she stated. “But how could he have been? Grandfather has been dead for five years.”
This is one of the many, many accounts that people have shared with the author to illustrate the love, concern, and compassion that dead relatives continue to have for the living. Some even tell of the return of a family member to inform a living relative where his or her money was located—money that had been hidden in the house, in a tree, cave, or buried underground for many years. Thus, family ghosts return for a definite reason. Some house ghosts are also those of family members with no explicit reason for their return.
One tenth of the accounts that deal with the return of family members as ghosts claim that the return was as an unseen presence of a known person. All other stories report that the family ghost was seen and fully recognized by the recipient person. In numerical order of appearance, of the seventy-four family ghost
stories herein, mothers made the most frequent visitations: twelve total. Of the other spirit visitors, there were nine grandmothers, eight grandfathers, six husbands, five fathers, four wives, three daughters, three uncles, two brothers, two sisters, two grandsons, two cousins, one great-grandmother, one aunt, and one little baby. In seven instances, the spirit visitations included two or more family members at the same time. Whether seen or not, the ghosts let their presence be known by walking on stairways or in hallways, knocking on doors, wailing and moaning, crying, or simply talking to the living.
While some family ghost stories do not explain why the spirit entity comes back to the earthly realm, most do. Articulated reasons for these returns, as indicated in the stories, include (1) the desire to console family members who are in agony, turmoil, sadness, or failing health; (2) to warn a family member of impending death; (3) to place burden of guilt on parents; (3) to reassure a family member that he or she is still loved by the deceased; (4) to tell a spouse that it is okay to remarry; (5) to agonize a former husband who had mistreated her; (6) to reveal buried treasure; (7) to persuade a brother to stop his rowdy behavior; (8) to return to a favorite piece of furniture frequently occupied when the spirit was a living person in this world; (9) to inform a widow how to conduct her business; (10) to say a final goodbye; (11) to occupy a spot where the death occurred.
Numerous Kentucky communities lay claim to a haunted house and its patron ghost. Haunted, or “hainted,” houses thus comprise the largest topical category of Kentucky ghost stories. No other category comes close. Most haunted houses in Kentucky are “people” houses—houses that were primarily designed and built by local people, for local people, using local building materials. And in times past, a residential structure often remained in the family for three or four generations; some even longer. This explains why so many of the stories about an “old hainted house” are about the return of deceased family members, who dearly loved the old home place during their life span here on earth. Of the 214 stories about house ghosts in this book, approximately one-third of the supernatural entities are not unidentifiable; female ghosts are featured in one-fourth of the stories, the exact same number that portray male visitations. Eleven stories describe the return of two or more family members at the same time as ghosts; eight of the accounts focus on babies, seven deal with children of various ages, and five feature animal ghosts.
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