Haunted Houses and Family Ghosts of Kentucky

by William Lynwood Montell

  No answer.

  “What do you want?”

  No answer.

  “Who are you?”

  No answer; not a word. All at once he just vanished; he wasn’t there anymore. I don’t know who he was or what he wanted, but he looked as real as any human I’ve ever seen.

  I told Shirley Bush West about it, wondering if anything strange had happened while they lived there in this house which, by the way, is located here in Northtown, Hart County. Pap and I moved into the house in 1951, and Shirley’s family had lived there prior to that.

  She told me that it wasn’t at all unusual to hear the pump organ playing at midnight, with no one in that room. She said that another time a man came and stood by Dorothy’s bed, just looked at her, then disappeared. He was dressed in dark clothes and wore a hat. And guess where the girls were sleeping? In Pap’s room!

  121. “Uncle Frank’s Ghost Really Wasn’t”

  Hart County

  The old Uncle Frank Anderson house, located here in the Northtown community, Hart County, was torn down when Roger and Birdie Rountree built them a new house. Uncle Frank’s house was like a lot of other homes back then—two log rooms and a hall, steps in the hallway to an upstairs; dining room and kitchen were built later.

  Bob and Mary Lewis Sanders stored potatoes upstairs when they lived there. Oris and Erma Stasel hadn’t been married long and were spending the night with the Sanders. They talked about Uncle Frank’s ghost (he died there) moving around upstairs and in different places up there.

  That night, Oris and Erma slept in the room toward Northtown. Sometime during the night, Uncle Frank’s ghost started making those noises upstairs. Then they heard him coming down the steps, “thump, thump, thump.” Suddenly, they heard the footsteps coming into the room where they were in bed. Oris got up, closed the door to the hall, struck a match and lit a lamp. Then he grabbed a shoe and the battle with the ghost began.

  Across the hall, Mary Lewis shook Bob awake. “Bob, get up quick! Oris and Erma are fighting, and sounds like they are having a good one.”

  He gets up, lights a lamp, and across the hallway in his long johns he goes. In his very deep and almost gruff voice, Bob says, “Confound it all, what’s going on in here?”

  “Well,” Oris replies, “I’ve killed your ghost! It was an enormous rat with a potato still in its mouth!”

  So ended the saga of Uncle Frank’s ghost.

  122. “The Church Registar”

  Warren County

  Our family moved to the small community of Rich Pond here in Warren County from Murray back in 1965. My parents, Mack and Barbara King, had just purchased our first home. The old house they bought had not been lived in for several years and needed a lot of work to make it livable. The place was spacious and very cold during the winter months. Vines of some type had even grown over the front steps and had to be cleared so we could walk onto the front porch.

  After living there about eighteen months, strange things began occurring. From time to time, I could hear singing as if it were at a distance, or if someone had a radio turned down real low. At first I didn’t really pay much attention to it, but as time went on I started hearing the song again and again. I didn’t recognize the tune, but it appeared to be a hymn of some sort. One Sunday, I heard the song in church. When the radio began playing, I realized it was the same. A cold chill ran through me, and I was stunned. The hymn was “Faith of Our Fathers.” I said to myself, “That’s it!” But I still could not understand where the singing was coming from at home when I would hear it. It sounded like a small choir or group of people singing the same hymn over and over. But why I did, I couldn’t figure out. I even asked other members of my family if they could hear it, but none of them heard it. I thought that maybe I was losing my mind.

  Believe it or not, this went on for several years. Then one night I was awakened by a strange feeling. I raised up in bed and saw the figure of a man dressed in a long black coat, bow tie, and high collar, standing at the foot of my bed. He was also holding an open book. He didn’t say anything. I closed my eyes because I was frightened. When I opened them, he was gone. This same occurrence went on for several years. I didn’t understand the whole affair. I thought that maybe I had been dreaming, so I didn’t mention it to anyone. I would also hear the hymn in my dreams and even associate the tune with the man.

  His clothes seemed to be from the turn of the century, the high collar and all. They were not clothes of our day and time.

  After talking to some neighbors, it was learned that there used to be a church standing on the site where our house was presently located. The house had been built from the lumber that came from the church after it was torn down. I also used to find old coins in the yard dating from the 1890s to the 1920s. I suppose that the money was lost by the people congregating at the church.

  When I became an adult, I visited the courthouse in Bowling Green to trace the deeds of the old place, and learned that the property belonged to the Rich Pond Episcopal Church South from 1885 to 1934.

  This could explain the events that took place. Through searching, I found the old church register with the names of all its members. Fm sure the man in the long black coat, holding the book, could be one of these people, a song leader or an elder. But what did he want with me, a boy of eleven? Was he trying to tell me something, or did he want me to do something for him? Maybe the book he was holding was the church register instead of a hymnal. Maybe I did what he wanted but didn’t know it when I saved the church register from being lost or destroyed.

  I’m presently writing a history of this old lost church, and even visit my old home place from time to time. The house no longer belongs to my family because my parents are now gone. I still wonder about the man in the black coat. Why did he choose me to appear to, and no one else?

  123. “Morgantown’s Woman in White”

  Butler County

  When I was around thirteen, I began seeing a woman in white in my bedroom almost every night there in Morgantown. The experience always started out in the same way. I would be in bed, and I would hear a gliding sound on the rug in the hallway. Then I would see a white, filmy-like glow, followed by a lady with long black hair, wearing a white flowing gown. She was incredibly beautiful, but there was a terrible look in her eyes, and her mouth had a cruel twist to it. She would glide up to the side of my bed and pull out a dagger from the folds of her gown; then she would raise it above her head, but before the dagger ever reached me, she would vanish. That happened each time I saw her.

  During the entire episode, I would not be allowed to move. It was if my body was frozen solid. This happened at least once each month for approximately six months. Then the nocturnal visits stopped for the most part, although I did have one occasionally up until the age of eighteen, when I left for college.

  After I moved out of the house, my sister Penny took over my room; she even used my furniture. One day she began telling me about the strange things that started happening to her since moving into my room. Of course, one of them was the visits of the lady in white. Penny described exactly the same experiences that I had when I was there, down to the last detail. My sister was fourteen years old at that time.

  Two years ago, she rearranged the bedroom, moving the bed to the other side of the room at an angle. Immediately all visits by the lady in white ceased.

  We thought maybe that someone had died on the spot where our bed had been situated there in the room. The house is approximately twenty years old; a three-bedroom brick house, just like all the others in that part of town. No one else has lived there. It may be that the house is built over an old family cemetery.

  124. “The Ghost of a Teenage Girl”

  Jefferson County

  These two boys, who were friends of mine, bought a house way out in the eastern end of Jefferson County; past Middletown. They bought this house that used to be a stagecoach stop; a real old house that is painted yellow now. It’s got a fence around it. It�
��s on Flat Rock Road in Long Run Park, at the entrance on the left side of the road.

  There was a family that lived there in the last century, and they had a daughter whose name was Eloise. She was about seventeen years old, and she was mentally retarded. They kept her in this little room upstairs, a room with a sloped-down ceiling, like an attic room. This girl died when she was real young, like when she was about seventeen, and everybody said that she was weird. They buried her in the family graveyard right beside the stagecoach house. That’s where her parents were also buried.

  It is said that the girl’s ghost still lives in this house. So Fred and John and Bobby rented the house from this old man who owns it, and he’s the one who told them this story. But they didn’t believe it. Anyway, one night Fred got up about three o’clock one morning to go down to the kitchen to get something to eat. He was standing at the top of the stairway on the landing, and he could hear somebody walking up the stairs. He could hear the stairs creak, but there was no one on the stairs. He got scared but he kept on walking and then brushed up against something like a human form. He looked, but there was nothing there.

  That was the first encounter they had with this girl’s ghost. So they started believing in her. Then, they decided to test it out to see if there really was a ghost there.

  A couple of nights in a row, they’d go to bed but they locked all the doors and windows first. They’d even check them two or three times to make sure they were locked. Every time they did this, they’d wake up the next morning, and everything would be slam bang open—the doors, the windows, everything.

  Well, Burks and me and Marilyn went over there one night to have a party. We stayed there until about three o’clock in the morning and were getting ready to leave. So me and Marilyn went outside and got in the car and were waiting for Burks to come out.

  They had a Grecian-like lady statue in the back yard, and when a car is parked in the driveway, you’re looking at the statue, say about twenty yards away, next to some old trees.

  Well, it was real foggy out that night. It looked like the fog was about two-feet deep and it was real spooky out there. And everything happened real quick at the same time, like in a dream. You know, all of a sudden we’d been just talking about the ghost story and everything. Well, Marilyn opened the vent window of the car. It was real windy out and it sounded exactly like a ghost. It went, “Wooo-ooo- .”

  All of a sudden I heard a tap on the window and I turned real quick. Fred’s face was pressed right up against the window and I just screamed. Like to have scared me to death! I thought it was that girl. But Fred was just coming out to bum a cigarette before we went home. It’s just that it all happened so fast that it just about scared us all to death. And that’s the truth.

  125. “Spirits, Spooks, and Ghostly Pool Players”

  Allen County

  Sheila Marr of Scottsville remembers one haunting night like it was yesterday, although it was more than thirty years ago.

  She was about five years old, and Marr saw something she believes was a spirit in the family’s North Eighth Street home. It took the image of her grandmother and then her father.

  “I’ve always known it took place, but now I cannot actually say it was a ghost or a human being, just something unexplainable—I’ve never been able to put it into words,” she says. “It’s something I’ll find out later when I’ve passed from this world, maybe.”

  Marr had just said goodnight to her grandmother, who promised to be up shortly to tuck her in. The little girl had just put her hand on the banister when she looked up. Her grandmother stood at the top of the stairs. “I just froze for a few seconds,” she says.

  She looked back in the living room, where her grandmother was still sitting, then back to the top of the stairs where her grandmother was standing, then back to the living room again and back again to the top of the stairs, where her grandmother seemed to be motioning for Marr to come to her.

  Marr yelled for her grandmother, who came from the living room, and when they looked up, no one was at the top of the stairs. Marr’s grandmother told her that she was very sleepy and tired and must have just imagined it. “It’s very vivid,” Marr says, “and it will never leave me. I could not see all the way through it, but it would put you in mind of a mist, a very thick mist…The most predominate feature was the eyes, and they had an almost iridescent quality.”

  Her grandmother tried to comfort her, and put her to bed with her Raggedy Ann she’d had since birth. Marr says that she lay there with her eyes wide open, not at all sleepy, with the street light coming through the window and a night light in her room.

  Her father, David Calvert, was standing beside her bed, or so she thought. “I lifted my arms and said, ‘Daddy, take me,” Marr says.

  He raised his arms to waist level with palms upward, looked down at her briefly, then faced forward. “He walked through me, the bed, and out through the wall,” Marr recalls.

  She was again upset, so she went downstairs, leaving her Raggedy Ann sitting on about the fourth step from the bottom. She went into her parents’ bedroom, and her mother told her that it must have been a really bad dream. As they started back upstairs, Raggedy Ann was gone. Then about two weeks later, her mother found Raggedy Ann in an unfinished upstairs room in an old cabinet.

  A month or so after that, a neighbor joined the family for dinner. Then came the sound of a rack of pool table balls being broken and scattering around the table upstairs, followed by the sound of a ball falling into the ball return and hitting another ball. They all heard the sounds….

  David Calvert got his pistol, and he and a neighbor went carefully up the stairs and into the room. Nothing was out of place. Calvert went on to say that he heard the pool playing a couple of times after that….

  Calvert says that one previous owner, O.B. Towe Jr., told him that something came down the steps and he swung at it with a baseball bat, but the bat went right through the figure, which proceeded into the downstairs bedroom and out the back of the house.

  According to Calvert, previous owner Fount Hunt said his wife Lucille woke him up one night because it sounded like someone was beating on the house. He got his gun and went outside but couldn’t find anyone, yet he could still hear the beating noises….

  Twelve years ago, not too long after Phillip Calvert and his wife Elaine moved into the house that was built in 1810 by Theopolus Read, they had David Calvert and his wife over and the foursome decided to use a Ouija board and see what happened. The board spelled, “Get me out.”

  They were on the back patio but could see straight through the windows and door to the front porch. David and Elaine saw a figure that had on an overcoat and hat go across the front porch.

  David Calvert says another time he thought he saw a woman wearing a high-necked garment from the 1800s in an upstairs window over front door, and when he asked his brother who it was, the brother said that no one else was around.

  Phillip Calvert still sees [from his house], at least twice a month, a white misty figure that looks sort of like a person wearing a long white gown go from the cemetery that is on the farm to the nearby creek about 10:30 or 11:00 p.m., and you can still hear someone walking up and down the stairs, two of which creak, he says. Phillip says that even if there are spirits around, as long as they don’t bother him he doesn’t mind.

  126. “Ghostly Occurrences in Maple Hill Manor”

  Washington County

  “We’ve owned Maple Hill Manor in Springfield for approximately twelve years. The house is now our B and B, and was built in 1851 by slaves. It took them three years to build it. They made the bricks on the ground, and hand cut the wood, as there was no power tools in those days. The house was built for Thomas McElroy, who was forty-one years of age at the time. He soon married Sarah Maxwell, who came from Lebanon, Kentucky. When they married, she was twenty years of age.

  They had seven children, four of whom died in their early years—one- or two-year age bracket. And anothe
r perished as a teenager. Sarah herself died at the house at age forty-eight. Her husband was approximately sixty-nine when he passed away in the home.

  On October 8, 1862, there was a battle fought in Perryville, with approximately 75,000 troops involved. After the battle, the Confederates brought their wounded and dying along Perryville Road into Springfield and into the courthouse at Springfield. The courthouse there is documented as having had Confederate troops in it. The records also state that the plantation homes that were between Perryville and Springfield were all obviously Confederate supporters, because they were slave plantations. The wounded and dying Confederate soldiers were brought into these plantation homes, including the house that we now own. So it just may be that all the heartaches and pains that were felt at that time are what causes the spirit world to exist. Maybe it’s people trying to get back to where they came from.

  A lot of things have happened in this old house, even within the past twelve years after we moved here from Chicago. One of the stories that I tell guests goes like this. We’ve got a gravel drive leading up to the house. And today we have a motion detector that will ring a buzzer if a car comes onto our driveway. During the first years that we were here, we had one of our sons stay with us during the summer months while he was going to college and help us do work at the home.

  During this particular summer, all the windows in the house were open. My wife was there, our son was there, and I was there. And we had a dog.

  We had two couples coming to stay with us this particular evening. They came separately, as they did not know each other. Both couples stayed in rooms on the second floor of the house. At approximately six o’clock in the evening, both couples decided to go out to dinner, separately, in their two automobiles. At that point, the three of us family members sat down in our kitchen to have dinner.

  Part way through dinner, we heard heavy footsteps on the second floor of the home. These steps were moving back and forth in the room that we call the rose room. Sounded like the steps were going from one side of the room to the other, back and forth in search of something.