Then she heard strange screams coming from the house. The longer she listened, the louder they got. She was so frightened that she left everything there, then took off in her car.
During the next week it rained and rained. The streets were flooded. The wind and rain caused people to stay at home all week. The first day that it stopped raining, although puddles and mud were everywhere, she decided to go back to the house and get her easel and shoes. She was still scared of the house, so she took her husband with her.
Once they got there, her easel had been blown down and all of her paints and canvas were ruined. When she reached down to pick up her shoes, she screamed at the top of her lungs. Her husband wanted to know what in the world was wrong. Looking down, he saw that the shoes were perfectly dry and looked as if they had never been wet, although there were puddles of water all around.
My aunt would never wear those shoes again, and she never went near that house. She believed that it was haunted by her own mother.
45. “A Woman’s Ghost at the Old Stagecoach Inn”
Metcalfe County
There was an old stagecoach stop up here at what’s now the Echo community. Back then it was Ninety-Six. The old inn was called the Richard Shirley Inn, and was located on the old Glasgow-Columbia Road. Richard was my great-great-great-grandfather. He and his wife had an old-maid daughter, Aunt Fannie, and her brother, Uncle George. Neither of them ever married. They were the last to live in the old house.
Miss Nicole McMillan told me that she used to hear Aunt Fannie and Uncle George tell about how they used to have these big stacks of half-moon pies—fried pies—and they would sell those to the travelers. I still have the bugle that they would blow when the stage was coming and leaving.
That old mansion was vacant for a long time, and I never even saw the house when it was standing. But they used to tell ghost stories about this old house that was once a stagecoach inn. They’d see these mysterious people go in and out of that old vacant house. And, you know, there’s nothing any scarier than a vacant house with gaping windows.
I think that it was Aunt Fannie that they used to see. She was considered to be a great beauty. My family used to tell stories that people told after they stayed at the Richard Shirley Inn. They would talk about this beautiful woman who, for some reason, never married during her early years. But after she grew older, she was to marry this man, but Uncle George asked her not to get married. And she didn’t marry. The two of them continued to live there in the old inn.
When my grandfather was about fifteen years old, they tore the building down after a big crack came in the wall. He helped cart the brick away. The Shirleys owned many black slaves. The slave graveyard has been plowed over, and the family graveyard has also been plowed over. I’ve heard it told that people used to see white, misty-like figures floating out there over these old graveyards. And people used to tell about seeing a ghost of Aunt Fannie standing in the door of the old house, peering out of an upstairs window, or walking across the area where the old stage-stop inn once stood. I guess she just loved that old historic place.
46. “A Haunted House in Breeding”
Adair County
Back in 1942, a family by the name of Poindexter moved into Breeding, a small community in southern Adair County. The house they moved into was a two-story farmhouse located high on a hill surrounded by large cedar trees on land owned by—I think his name was Steve Gilbert.
Crit Poindexter, the father, was a sharecropper who had entered into an agreement with Gilbert to till his land on a sharecrop basis. The other members of the Poindexter family were Crit’s wife, Maude, and their children Oleta and Howard.
The day that the Poindexters moved in, they arranged their furniture so that they could settle down for the night. By that time, it was late in the afternoon. Crit went to the barn to do the chores, while Maude and Howard were in the kitchen cooking supper. Oleta was in her room sitting on the bed.
Suddenly, Maude and Howard heard Oleta screaming for them to come to her room. When they got there, she was sitting on her bed crying. She told Maude and Howard that the stairway door, which opened up into her bedroom, had opened halfway by itself. When she screamed for her mother and brother, the door stopped abruptly. But after she yelled, the door proceeded to open the rest of the way by itself and bang against the wall. Needless to say, Maude and the two kids were scared to death when Crit arrived back at the house from the barn.
After hearing what had taken place while he was at the barn, Crit tried to assure them that there was no such things as ghosts or anything else that would have opened the door by itself. To reassure them that there was nothing in the house other than the family, he proceeded to walk through the house with the family following close behind. As there was no electricity in the house back then, Crit struck matches as they went from room to room. He was not the type of man to be scared easily. However, when he stepped into the hallway and struck the first match, there in the hall hanging in front of them was a large black raincoat. For some reason, just seeing that coat scared every one of them and sent chills down their spines.
Crit then proceeded to fasten the stairway door so that it couldnt be opened without quite an effort. Crit then told them that he was going to bed to get some sleep.
Maude and the two children couldn’t sleep, so they sat up and talked in whispers until about 4:30 A.M. At that time, Maude went to the kitchen to start preparing breakfast, and Crit got up and went to the barn to do his chores. Howard and Oleta continued to sit on Oleta’s bed and talked about what had happened earlier that night. Suddenly, the stair door opened about half way. Both kids heard it, but when they turned to look at it, the door stopped. Then it gradually opened up all the way, squeaking and bumping against the wall as if something had complete control of it. When Crit got back from the barn, it didn’t take long for the family to tell him about what had just taken place, nor to convince him that they needed to move away from the house.
After breakfast, Crit went to talk with Mr. Gilbert and explained to him what had taken place. He went on to tell him that the family would be moving as soon as they could find another place to live.
Gilbert, being a kind gentleman, told Mr. Poindexter that that was perfectly all right, that he fully understood the way they felt. Gilbert then went on to tell Poindexter that the previous family that lived there in the house was sitting in the living room one stormy night, and they heard a mumbling noise that sounded as if it were coming from outside. They went to the window to look outside, and as they looked, there was a loud clap of thunder and a bright flash of lightning. There in the yard, they saw what appeared to be several small children playing a game such as drop-the-handkerchief or ring-around-the-roses. The children there in the yard suddenly disappeared, and there were no voices to be heard any longer. It was as if they had never been there in the first place. Needless to say, that family moved out the very next morning.
The Poindexters stayed in the house for one week. They never had another chance to speak to Mr. Gilbert to find out if any other sorts of ghostly incidents had taken place in or around the house.
In 1977, thirty-five years later, Howard Poindexter, the youngest of the two children, took his family to visit the old house. It still had a ghostlike appearance, but nothing mysterious happened while they were there. However, they did notice that no one lived in the old house and probably never had for more than a few days at a time. You know, ghosts have their strange methods of scaring people to keep them away.
47. “The Ghost That Left No Tracks in the Snow”
Laurel County
A lady says she once stayed all night at the house of a woman who had lost her husband by death under suspicious circumstances shortly before. While they were all seated around the fire, someone was heard approaching the house and coming on the porch. At this time there was a terrific snow storm raging out of doors. As soon as the visitor came on the porch there was a great noise, as [if] someone [were] stampi
ng snow from his feet. And then, whoever it was opened the front door, went through the hall and clumped loudly up the stairs.
From where the two ladies sat around the fire, they could not see who entered the house. Becoming alarmed when no one came back down the stairs, and not knowing who it was upstairs, [they] mustered up enough courage to take a lamp to go upstairs to see. A thorough search of both upstairs rooms failed to find the intruder, [and] no snow tracks on the stairs were to be seen. Finally, on trying to open the outside door, it was found to be locked, and had been all the while. Unlocking the door, the frightened women examined the snow in the yard for tracks.
None were found, so it must have been a ghost.
48. “Was It Really a Ghostly Coffin?”
Green County
The story I’m about to tell happened in June 1930, about a half-mile outside the Greensburg city limits. One morning during that year, my dad, J.W. Moore, who was sheriff of Green County, got to his office about 7:30 A.M. I was a deputy. When we got there, there was an entire family by the name of Rodgers waiting for him outside the courthouse. This family was in a state of agitation and excitement. Dad said that they literally were scared. Here is the story that they told that morning.
They’d gotten up about the usual time in the morning and were preparing breakfast. They lived in this rather large old frame house. All of a sudden, they heard a noise out in the hallway and presumed that some neighbors were just coming into the house. The Rodgers family sat and waited a few minutes for whoever it was to come to the door and knock.
The noise just continued on and on out in the hall, and then suddenly the kitchen door opened. This happened just a little after daybreak, so it still wasn’t very light outside. Anyway, the kitchen door opened, and coming through the kitchen door from out in the hallway were these four tall men dressed in black. They were carrying a coffin on their shoulders, and on top of the coffin was a white lamb.
The Rodgers family told Dad that they quit eating breakfast when they saw these men and the coffin, and left to come into town. That was actually an understatement on their part, for later evidence indicated that they ran all the way into town after seeing this thing. There was no evidence that they had tried to talk with these men that had the coffin. They simply left the house and ran to Greensburg.
When the family members were questioned, they all told the same story. There was no question but that this family had all seen something and probably saw exactly what they said they saw. What they wanted was for the sheriff and his deputies—Patterson, Adkins, and me—to go out to the house and investigate. Well, we drove out to this house. To get to it, you had to drive up a long lane through the farm with large trees on each side. The old house stood on top of a high hill and was surrounded by very large trees. It was an old house that had been there for many years. It was a two-story frame structure and wasn’t in too good of a condition. The porch, both upstairs and down, had lattice work, and vines had grown up around the house and just completely covered the lattice and had also obscured a lot of the doors and windows. Actually, that old house looked like the kind of house that you would find a ghost in. Of course, I don’t believe in ghosts even though there’s some things that have occurred that cant be explained easily at any rate.
The four of us went into this house and began a search of it, room by room. We were looking for evidence of anything that might have taken place in the old house. We went into the kitchen first and there found plates on the table with a half-eaten meal, a half cup of coffee, a skillet on the stove with some meat and eggs in it that were burned because the skillet had just been left where it was when the family members saw these men carrying the coffin.
Then, we began to look through each room in the house to satisfy our own curiosity and to reassure the people that there wasn’t anything there. I don’t know how many people have ever looked for a ghost, but even though you don’t believe in ghosts, there’s something that’s just a little bit exciting about going into an old house where just a few hours before somebody had seen what they claimed was a ghost.
I expected to find nothing, nor did the others, as we looked. But in one of the stairways that went into the upper part of the house, a closet had been built under the stairway, a closet in which various pieces of clothing had been hung. The closet had a spool on the outside for a door handle, and I used it in an effort to open this closet. The closet door would just move a little bit, but not a great deal. It would move out at the bottom about an inch, and I’d pull on it. When I’d do that, the door would pull back, so to speak.
Finally, I got kind of upset, then jerked on that spool. The door flew open and something white came out of that closet and fell right over the top of my head. Well, when that happened it literally scared me real bad. But as it turned out, the white thing was just a sheet that Mrs. Rodgers had hung in the closet. But boy it sure scared me. It didn’t take me long to get over that, but for a minute I thought the ghost had me sure as the world.
We continued going through the house. By the time we got through and were ready to leave, there was some fifteen or twenty people from Greensburg who had come out to see what was taking place. Greensburg is a small town, and you know how ghost stories or word of a ghost gets around in a hurry and everybody wants to see it before it gets away.
We went back to the sheriff’s office, and it wasn’t long until we got a call from the owner of the house stating that there were just a lot of people driving across his fields and going into the house, and that this was getting to be a nuisance. He asked us to go back out there and check things out again about the possibility of a ghost, and to tell people that there just wasn’t a ghost there.
So we made another trip out there, but the people kept coming out there all through the day and night. I guess that altogether close to a thousand people showed up. We kept getting calls from the owner, asking us to go out there and run the people off. Finally, deputies Patterson, Adkins, and myself got into a car to go back out to the house. But that trip still didn’t stop people from going out there.
This old house still stands on what is known as Marshall Ridge Road. What the Rodgers family saw, I don’t know. However, they were personally convinced that they saw the ghosts of these four men carrying this casket with a white lamb on top of it. This ghost had never been seen there before that, and it has never been seen since then. Whether or not it was an effort on somebody’s part to scare these people so that they would leave the old house, thus making the place available for sale at a much cheaper price, I don’t know. Maybe no one will ever know. But the Rodgers were convinced that they saw what they said they saw. I mean, man were they ever scared. They did move away, and the old house remained vacant for many years afterwards.
49. “This Old House”
Warren County
Let me tell you about our ghost whom we’ve fondly named Otis. It all started happening in the mid-1980s, when my brother and I were still youngsters. My parents had just remodeled and moved into this old house that belonged to my great-grandfather, near Woodburn, here in southern Warren County.
My brother and I each had lovely upstairs bedrooms. However, during my years of living in this house, I often went to bed at night feeling a strong presence in my room, just as if someone were looking at me. Many times I was awakened at night with that same eerie feeling of someone staring at me. But usually I just tossed aside my thoughts of anything scary.
Once my brother and I saw a white ball, maybe it was some sort of light, dash across the upstairs hallway and suddenly vanish. Both of us saw it, and we looked quite a while for an explanation, but nothing ever turned up.
Another strange event took place one morning when the car lights on my father’s automobile, a 1960 Studebaker, came on by themselves, and the car horn suddenly started blowing. He could never figure out what caused this, and he knows about cars.
I also remember some of the doors, both upstairs and down, opening and closing by themselves. And
my brother and his best friend experienced some very unusual things, such as his collection of rocks being thrown from one side of the room to another. Also, our two chandeliers and a hanging plant were swaying back and forth for no apparent reason, and the door to our utility room, a door that is always propped open, somehow closed by itself.
Other things I have experienced in this old house include voices, one of which whispered my name on three different occasions—once when I was reading a book, once when I was walking out of my room into the hallway, and a third time when I was simply standing in my room. Things such as keys, blouses, shirts, and whatever, will turn up missing, then reappear two or three months later at the same spot where they were last seen.
Many other occurrences have taken place since we have lived here. We have heard footsteps going up and down the stair steps and walking in the hallway. I have personally seen two bubble-like things that had clear, human-like outlines.
The only physical thing that has taken place happened to my brother. He and his friend were both thumped on the back by what felt like a hand when no one was there.
I did some research into the history of this old house, both in early times and in later years. I was able to piece together the written and oral history of this interesting structure. This man [name withheld] purchased the sixty-five acres that the house is on back in 1922. He cleared the timber from the land and built this ten-room house, with an eight-foot deep front porch all across the front of the house.
When the Great Depression gripped the country in the 1930s, this man fell into deep mental anguish as his financial situation was near bankruptcy. It was at this point that he decided to end it all by taking his own life. He shot himself in an upstairs bedroom, and his blood stained the wooden floor ever after. My parents, after buying the property and moving into the house, remember seeing a large, dark spot on the wooden floor. My grandfather, who had seen it numerous times, told them that this was the mans bloodstain. Mom and Dad tried and tried to remove the stain, but finally resorted to covering it with carpet.
Haunted Houses and Family Ghosts of Kentucky Page 10