Haunted Houses and Family Ghosts of Kentucky

by William Lynwood Montell

  I said to the family, “Must be that one of the cars came back but we didn’t hear it.” So I said, “I’ll go to the front door to see which couple it is, and to see how I can help them.”

  I went to the front door and looked, but neither car was back. My first reaction was that somebody saw those cars pull out of our driveway, then entered the house and went upstairs seeking valuables. Those footsteps took place for as much as two, maybe three minutes. So I stood at the bottom of the stairs, and yelled, “Can I help you?” “How can I help you?”

  There was no answer. I hollered again; there was no answer. I called to our son, “Go get the guns, we’re going to go upstairs.” I said, “And bring the dog.”

  We took the dog and the guns upstairs, and searched all over up there. There was nothing disturbed. There was nothing up there that the dog reacted to, nothing.

  To this day, we still hear what we believe are footsteps up on the second floor. I will not even go up there to look to see what it is.

  People tell me that we heard something on the roof. But that’s not true, as we’ve had the house reroofed twice, and you absolutely cannot hear people walking on that roof.

  It sounds like these steps are moving from one room to another. Now that’s the truth. And, who knows, maybe some of those Confederate soldiers are still here with us.

  Back in July 1999, we had guests in our Maple Hill Manor B and B. I was fixing some of our lamps to be turned on, and I was standing almost by the front door. All of a sudden, I heard a knock on the door. On the outside of our doors we have old-fashioned knockers. And I thought that one of our guests must have gotten up to the house without our motion detector going off. Sometimes that does happen.

  I went and opened the door but nobody was there. Well, as I opened the door, I felt this real cool breeze go by me. Oh, it gave me goose bumps! That was the first time I had ever experienced anything like that. The night when this happened, I called my husband from the hallway and told him what had happened. He looked at my arms, and sure enough, my arms had goose bumps all over them. As a matter of fact, I was in that house by myself for eight years, as Bob was working up north, and I never experienced anything like that while he was gone.

  But in more recent times, we’ve heard things fall. We’ve gone into rooms and could smell something like flowers or perfume in certain rooms. After you smelled it, you could go back out to do something else, then go back into that room and the smell was gone. This happened in different rooms at different times.

  Our guests have also experienced some of these things. We’ve had some letters written to us by guests who spent the night on our B and B. And we have some photos that have unusual lights in them. One is in the hallway like it is going into the bedroom and it is a very arching streak that looks like it is going through the door. That’s the most unusual photograph we’ve got. We have another picture of a wedding that took place in the dining room. This picture has an unusual light in it, too. The people who took the picture truly believe that it was a ghost or spirit.

  Our ceilings in the house are thirteen and a half feet tall downstairs. So when you get up to the top of the balcony on the second floor, you’re about fifteen feet off the floor. Periodically, at night when were asleep there’ll be a loud “bang” in the house; so loud that it will startle us and wake us up. This can happen in the summer when the furnace doesn’t run, or it can happen in the winter when the furnace is on. It’s like a loud bang in the hallway, and it can happen in summer or winter.

  We’ve both heard it, even recently. Sounds like it comes from the hallway. What it sounds like is that someone has jumped, or falls, from upstairs over the railing and lands on the first floor. When you go up onto the second floor, our railing is real curved around at the top of the steps. The railing at that point drops to about table height. Instead of being 36 to 40 inches, it drops for some unknown reason. Maybe it’s an architectural defect there in the railing, as it drops to about 30 inches. So if you leaned over, you could fall over the railing without trying too hard. So I always feel like that noise is that of somebody who jumped or fell over that railing.

  We’ve heard that noise, and we’ve had guests as recent as two months ago who claimed that they heard it one night. But neither of us heard it that night.

  Speaking of guests that have experienced things in the house, two different couples have written us letters about what happened to them here at Maple Hill Manor. One of these couples got married here back in 1992, and all the photos taken at the wedding had weird, eerie-like lights reflecting across the pictures. The bride sent us copies of a couple of the photos, along with a question that she asked. Her question was, “Could there be some sort of ghostly presence at Maple Hill?”

  The other couple was here in November 1997. They, too, sent a letter, along with a photograph of a light that appeared to be just floating through one of the doors. The letter contained the words, “Remember, I told you of my dream of the bride at the top of the stairs? Well, when I reached out to touch the arm of the mannequin, it was real and I was amazed at how well the bride was preserved…. Maybe I caught a glimpse of her wedding dress in the enclosed photo. Anyway, I think you must have very nice ghosts.”

  127. “Ghosts at the Green Mansion”

  Grayson County

  This place is called the Green mansion, or the big house. The first two rooms of the house were built by, we believe, the Sullivans in the late 1700s. The remainder of the downstairs structure and the front two bedrooms, bathroom and main hall upstairs were built in the 1830s. The back four bedrooms upstairs were built in the 1860s. All total, there are twenty-four rooms in the house, counting the solarium (or glassed-in porch).

  This all started when Willis and Ann Allen Green settled here in the mid-1830s. That was after Willis had bought the house and brought it up to code in order to suit his wife. They reportedly had two daughters. In that day and age, women didn’t inherit. So when Willis’ brother Morgan and his wife, Caroline, were killed in a carriage accident, Willis brought his two nephews, Lafayette and Napoleon, and his two nieces, Melvina and Elizabeth, here to be raised by Ann and Willis.

  Napoleon died when he was thirty, in 1862. Lafayette was already in law school when his uncle died in the 1860s. He was in Corpus Christi, Texas, at the time. He had relocated. Willis had to go through the war before he could get his uncle there in Texas. They exhumed the body and brought it back to Kentucky. He is interred in Cave Hill Cemetery, Louisville.

  Ann basically got a life estate. It was hers to enjoy for a lifetime, but it was to go to Lafayette upon her death. Lafayette married Eleanor Rebecca Scott, daughter of Elizabeth Brown Scott and Robert Wilmoth Scott from up around Lexington.

  Eleanor and Lafayette begat Elizabeth, Willis, Preston, Jennie, and Robert. Elizabeth died at one year of age, which left the other four to survive to adulthood.

  Eleanor Scott s brother, John Orlando Scott, was my great-greatgrandfather. He was a physician who wanted to help settle the frontier, so he went to Texas.

  There are some things said about ghostly appearances in times past, but the only things I can tell about are the things that have happened within my generation. We do know that Miss Jennie firmly believed in Ouija boards and unconscious handwriting. She firmly believed that she could communicate with her brother who had already passed away. She even had letters where she did the unconscious writing by letting him take control of her hand. She would ask him a question and he would respond to it by holding to her hand as she wrote. Carolyn Ridenour has one of those letters.

  By the time we [my parents and kids] got here, Jennie was very reticent about the other world. At that time, she was approaching the end of her life and was getting a lot of local ridicule for believing in anything other that what was normally believed. She died in 1965. She was a psychic, especially back in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, when it was so active in this country. Psychics were in huge demand. She was very socially active during that period. She
spent her winters in Florida, her summers in Michigan, and her spring and fall here in Kentucky.

  My mother, Mary Eleanor Perry [McGee] O’Neill, inherited the Green Mansion in 1961 from Miss Jennie when I was a very small child. She knew that she was to inherit it just before I was born…. But we didn’t move here until Miss Jennie died in 1965.

  It was thought by some people that Miss Jennie’s ghost may have stayed on here after her death. We had a California psychic who saw a picture of this house and told us that there was a very tortured soul still connected to it and that nothing here could “bear fruit and grow” until it was released. But none of us thought it was really her ghost.

  The most particular and alarming incident here happened when I was three years old in 1965, or maybe in early 1966. My father, Russ McGee, had been in Louisville working. He purchased Chinese food and brought it home to the family. The bulk of the family, except for me and my newborn sister, were in the kitchen eating. The eldest daughter, my sister, came upstairs to check to see if we were all right. On her way up, she encountered a red, sticky substance—something like blood—there on the third step from the top of the stairway. The blood then went on down the hall, paused at the entry door into the restroom from the hallway. You could tell it had stopped, for there was a pool of blood at that point. That door was locked, so the blood went on into the master bedroom, paused again, then turned right into the nursery where my younger sister and I were sleeping. Then it proceeded into the bathroom through the master bedroom entrance into the restroom. The sink and tub were covered with this blood. It was as if it had taken towels and tried to soak up the blood. The reason I say “it” is because all the windows and all the doors were locked.

  The blood was still wet, still tacky sticky. All the doors and all the windows were again checked, as were all the furniture and closets. My parents and siblings thoroughly canvassed the house. No one was found.

  The amount of blood that was lost was probably close to a half gallon—nothing that anyone could have walked away from. It had to be a spirit of some kind. After they figured that it wasn’t put there by a human being, Daddy just wiped up the blood with rugs.

  Some of the other things that would happen from time to time was that curtains would rise up on the wall on a perfectly still night. Chandeliers would just swing with no one there to touch them; no wind, no storm, no obvious reasons for them to move.

  Whenever these things happened, not every one saw them at the same time, but all of us would see things from time to time. And it’s not just here in the house. For example, there’s a lady that walks the old bridge out here. She’s dressed in a gray-like dress.

  Here in Green Mansion, my mother and one of my sisters were downstairs, and they heard the door upstairs slam. It was one of the bathroom doors that’s always kept locked. When they heard this, that meant that one of the kids was in trouble because they were upstairs slamming the door. It was an angry, loud slam. But none of the other kids were in the house, and when they went upstairs, the door was completely locked.

  I don’t remember that occurrence. But I do remember the séance they had here in the parlor. A lot of us kids were sitting around watching them focus a lot of energy on things we didn’t know anything about. The writing desk that had never been unlocked since we moved in was being used. They were calling back Lafayette Green. It was his writing desk. In the midst of the séance, the doors on the cabinet there in the room just flew open. They went back into the room and the doors were all closed. Everybody made a major exodus! We small children got trampled. That was scary. I was probably seven or eight years old.

  So, it seems to me that a lot of these scary happenings that still take place could be traced back to Miss Jennie, who was heavily involved in these things. If somebody stirred stuff up around here, it was probably her. And we had to live with it. And the time we saw that blood all took place within six months of her passing from this life. Then the chandeliers, curtains, and all that stuff started happening within eighteen months or so after her passing. Then it settled down, perhaps also due to the fact that there was a lot of tension in the family while Daddy was still here. When he went away, things stopped happening.

  But now back to the blood. Aunt Jennie had an aunt who committed suicide here in this house. Willis and Ann had two daughters. One of them ran away and married a drunkard that was very abusive, if the story is true. She came home, begged sanctuary. Her father denied it. We don’t know if she is the one that died in the insane asylum, or if she’s the other daughter who, after Willis died, came home and later committed suicide. So I’ve always felt that the blood was that of the lady that committed suicide.

  On occasion, I’ll wake up in the middle of the night when I hear human voices talking. The next morning, I’ll ask myself whether I really heard the voices, or if I were just dreaming. But only once did I hear the actual words that were spoken, and I was sleeping in Mom’s bedroom then. I’d been sleeping back there for only five or six weeks, so I was relatively new in that room. I was just exhausted one night when I lay down on the bed in that room to go to sleep. In the middle of the night, I woke up to the noise of the slamming of the front door—just like someone was coming in from the fields.

  I heard their footsteps, then I heard a male voice. I can’t recall the exact words, but I very clearly heard words at the time. This male voice basically told someone here in the house that he was in from the field to get a bite of food, then he was going back out to work. I can’t recite the actual words, but I very definitely heard a conversation. It was a man’s voice talking to two or three other people. One of them was a woman, and she is the one that was responding to him.

  My son probably heard more of the footsteps and stuff than I did. He’d tell me that he heard these noises that sounded like footsteps here in the house.

  And my mom was here when things were really active, like when the curtains were flying up, chandeliers were swinging, and all that stuff was going on. And I can recall when I was much younger, and during times when I was distraught, I would sometimes see this light in Miss Jennie’s bedroom hovering up near the ceiling. It looked something like a person. That light would give me a soothing feeling.

  The last thing that I’ve experienced in this house was back in June of this year [1999] when I was lying on the couch watching televison, and my feet got real cold, like someone’s cold foot was touching it. So I yelled out, “Move! You’re cold!”

  Believe it or not, that coldness went away right then. It’s like whatever it was, was watching the movie with me, and it had its icy foot touching mine.

  I’ve had a half dozen people to walk in, and some of them didn’t even know me very well. This one couple in particular was there when we were packing to move out of the house. They just got real nervous, jittery, scared. They said that they could feel something ominous almost.

  I was really ready to leave Green Mansion by that time, so I moved on out.

  128. “The Shattering Glass Ghost”

  Graves County

  The old ones of the community used to tell of a tenant house near Waggoner Bottom in Graves County where a man called Jim lived with his wife, Mae. Jim’s brother came to stay with them for a while. He and Mae took up together, and Jim ran away from home.

  Several nights later, Jim returned with a shotgun. He shot through the bedroom window, killing both Tom and Mae as they slept. Jim then fled the country. The owner of the house, hoping to find a new tenant, repaired the shattered windowpane. But each time he returned, he found the glass broken. He finally resorted to boarding up the window.

  My grandma would tell this story about the old house that she lived in at

  A new farmhand was found who moved into the house, but he didn’t stay long. He, too, fled the country. He told that each night, shortly after he fell asleep, he was awakened by the sound of a shot followed by the sound of shattering glass. Unable to persuade anyone else to live in the house, the farm owner used it to st
ore hay until the night a loud explosion was heard, and the house burned. Years later, Jim returned old and sick. He said that he had “hid out” over in Arkansas but had come home to die. He was harbored in the home of Joe Taylor, a prominent farmer in the community, until he died about a week later.

  129. “Ghostly Screams”

  McCracken County

  My grandma would tell this story about the old house that she lived in at one time. She said that an old lady died in that house in 1899, but her body was not found until 1900. Soon after she [grandmother] moved into the house, she started hearing screams of an old lady, but she never heard them until around two o’clock in the morning. Finally, the screams got so annoying that she had to move out due to lack of sleep.

  130. “The Little Girl in the Window”

  Bracken County

  I grew up in Milford in southern Bracken County. The house next door was said to be haunted. I never really believed that stuff, so never thought much about it. The story about the ghost says that about fifty years ago a man that lived there with his wife and daughter came in one afternoon and shot them to death and then killed himself. Their little girl wasn’t quite right, and we have always been told that he couldn’t handle it.

  Milford had a small automotive garage on the north end of town and the man had been visiting there that afternoon. He made the comment as he left for home that he was going to “end it all.”

  Neighbors have often said that they could see the little girl’s image in the window. Some said that they heard moaning and crying. I never really believed all that until the night I saw her with my own eyes.

  After the murders and suicide, an older couple bought the house and lived there for many years. They had both passed away by the time I saw the little girl. At that time, a younger couple with four small children were living there. When it all happened, I was standing at the kitchen sink doing the supper dishes. I remember all this because it was so rare my doing dishes. Anyway, I was looking out the window above the sink, which faced the side of the house where one of the neighbor’s daughters bedroom is located, upstairs. It was about seven o’clock or so and it had already gotten dark, but there was a full moon that night. I was just looking out the window, and I saw a little girl in the upstairs window next door. I just assumed it was my neighbor, so I waved to her. She didn’t wave back, but just stared for a minute or two, then she was gone.