Many years later, a slave woman who had been close to Mr. Field, confessed on her deathbed that she had strangled the young wife in a fit of jealousy. To this day, there are bloodstains on the bottom stair at Airy Mount, and some folks refuse to sleep in the house.
Many times during the past few years, the Kelleys, as well as some professionals, have tried but failed to remove the ghostly bloodstains from the bottom staircase.
164. “Whew! A Scary Story”
Pendleton County
My grandfather was never one to consult my grandmother about many things. After all, being of the rational type, my grandfather looked at situations logically and made decisions based on what he thought. But my grandmother, being the irrational type, worried about everything about which she did not immediately jump to illogical conclusions. That being said, I think you might understand why my grandfather, for better or worse, always went out and bought new homes for his family without even mentioning the fact that he was intending to do so. If he had told Grandma, she would have fretted. If he did not, she would just complain, which seemed to suit my grandpa much better, for he could complain in return. They loved to argue.
One farmhouse that Grandfather bought in this fashion carried its own secret that Grandpa was very careful to keep from my grandmother. A man had shot and killed himself in the second story of this house. In order to explain the large stain that rested on the ceiling of their bedroom, Grandpa told her that something (other than a man’s blood) had been spilled on the floor above. For once, Grandma did not jump to conclusions, but instead she accepted that explanation and enjoyed their new home as much as she would let herself.
The facade worked well until one of my grandfathers friends came in for a visit not terribly long after they had moved into the house. During the course of the conversation, the man mentioned the stain and the horrid circumstances that led to it.
Grandmother was understandably spooked by this revelation, so she immediately wanted to move out of the house. However, Grandpa met this argument with one of his own. They were to remain there, and that was final. Whatever had happened in that house before had no bearing on them whatsoever. They’d already been there for a while and liked it, so why did knowledge of the man’s death change anything? Remember, Grandpa was the logical one.
Grandma calmed herself after a few days and fell back into her usual routine—until one night.
Around one o’clock in the morning on this night, Grandmother awoke to strange noises upstairs. She knew what—or should I say, who—it was. Quaking in her bed, with some difficulty she awoke my grandfather. She told him that she had heard the ghost of the dead man upstairs, to which my grandfather responded with a string of curse words.
After a few minutes of this exchange, my grandfather, seeing he was going to have to make a point, got out of bed and was heading toward the stairway. Grandma stopped him and made him take his shotgun, for all the good that would do. Grandpa, to appease her for once, did so. I cannot be sure that Grandpa was as brave as he said he was as he headed up the stairs. According to Grandma, I believe he might have been doing some shaking and quaking of his own; nevertheless, he headed up the stairs, gun in tow.
As he crept up the stairs, he heard noises—not noises of chains being pulled across the floor, or moaning, or any other weird, eerie noises that a ghost is supposed to emit—but scurrying. Confused, and a little frightened, he peered over the edge of the floor, not knowing what to expect. Would he see a bloody specter? Would it be a headless form? A white sheet? No, it wasn’t to be any of those ghostlike specters. Another frightening sight was to meet his gaze that night. He stood there in total amazement. The upper story of that house had been invaded by a large family of rats! They’re the ones making all that noise.
I personally would have preferred the ghost.
165. “Ghostly Footsteps on the Walk”
Pike County
This is an account of a Pike County haunting involving my mother and me. It happened back when I was just beginning to get up and toddle around. My parents moved our family into an old farmhouse on Johns Creek just below Meta. The house had once belonged to a fairly prominent local family who were cousins with my father’s side of the family, but it had been abandoned for several years following the death of the last son of the family.
The house was a big two-story clapboard affair with an “L” addition behind the main building, and after years of neglect, it was little wonder that it was locally regarded as haunted. My folks fixed it up nicely and moved into it about 1968, when I was two years old.
I never personally experienced anything of an uncanny nature while we lived there, but my mother told me about a singular experience she had the year after we moved in. I had been playing outside and was worn out, so Mom had laid me down for a nap on the front living room couch while she began preparing supper in the kitchen, which was on the far side of the dining room at the back of the “L.” She was washing vegetables in the sink when she heard running footsteps on the stone walk that ran from the front of the house around to the backdoor. The steps were light and quick, and she could hear hard leather shoes slapping against the broad paving stones. As a young mother, she immediately recognized the sounds of an energetic toddler on the loose, and she called out, thinking I had slipped back outside, “What are you into, Tykie?”
At that moment, the sounds stopped abruptly, and the kitchen door to the dining room closed with a bang—not simply closed, but slammed shut. Well, that got her attention in a hurry. She dropped her veggies, tore open the door, and ran through the dining room to the front of the house where she had left me.
And that was where she found me, still sound asleep on the couch. I had slept through the whole thing. She never heard those ghostlike footsteps on that stone walk again.
166. “The Golden Ring”
Nicholas County
This is a story my mother told me to be the truth. When she was a young girl still at home in the 1920s they lived back in an area called Hudnall Lane here in Nicholas County, just off Sugar Creek. She and her mother and an unmarried brother were at home. This was at a time when people used mostly fireplaces as light and heat. Earlier in the week, a lady was going to the hospital to have an operation, but she didn’t have a suitcase. My mother’s brother did have one. This lady told him that if she could borrow his suitcase, she would lend him a ring that she had as collateral in case something happened to the suitcase.
Well, he didn’t get it back, so he took the ring and put it on his little finger. Well, one night through the week they were sitting at the fireplace just minding their own business and just doing regular chatting. It was dark. Well, a light came out of the corner of the window and lit on the ring. Of course, they were very amazed at what the light was all about. They had no inkling of what it could mean, but the next day they got word that the lady had died.
Some people say that her ghost can be seen moving around through the house.
167. “Whistling Sounds”
Nicholas County
My mother told that back around 1920 she had older brothers, and one brother was married and had three small children. They had just moved from Fayette County back to the home farm in Nicholas County…. They hadn’t put everything away. They just sort of moved some things onto the back porch behind a door.
Well, one Sunday they heard a whistling sound coming from behind this door that went out onto the porch. They moved things and closed the door. Later, they opened the door and rearranged things to try to stop this whistling. There was no wind blowing, nothing. But there was this constant whistling sound.
Later in the day, one of the little nephews got very ill and they found out by questioning this child that he had gotten into some rat poisoning that had been stored in these things that hadn’t been put away. Mother told me that back at that time, some rat poison came in containers like a toothpaste tube. He had eaten some of this rat poisoning, and eventually the child died. When he died,
the whistling went away. They never heard it again.
168. “A Ghost Looking for Treasure”
Robertson County
My mother had some experiences when we were growing up on a farm here in Robertson County on Central Ridge Road. We lived in an old house that is approximately 200 years old. It’s a frame house built around a couple of large log pens. I can remember my mother telling me that when she was alone in the old house, she would hear footsteps going up or down the stairway and then walking across the floor upstairs above the downstairs area where she was at the time. Of course, all old houses had creaks and noises.
There was a family named McDowell that lived there about a hundred years ago. The husband supposedly died in the house there. There is a story that he had stashed some treasure somewhere on the property. So I guess his ghost was back guarding the treasure. [Laughter]
169. “A Felt Presence in a Bedroom”
Robertson County
My mother, Mary Christine Duncan, had this experience that was extraordinary at the old house here in Robertson County. When no one was home but her, she was in an upstairs bedroom one time sitting on the edge of the bed. She was either getting up, or was going to bed. She felt the bed give like somebody else had sat down on it. She looked around, and nobody was there. But it sure did scare her!
170. “Ghostly Music in a Church”
Robertson County
This happened here in the Mt. Olivet Baptist Church, a church that was erected in the early 1900s. I’ve had two experiences! Nobody believes me but my dad, but I truly believe it. This past Christmas, I was decorating up there about 10:30 at night. Everybody else had left who were helping me decorate. I was the only one there.
There’s a door that goes between the baptistry and one of the little rooms there that’s kindly like a closet. The doors slide; don’t have hinges. It was very quiet in the church, but I know that that door opened and then it shut. Sounded just like it opened and shut. It got me a little scared.
Well, this past Sunday morning, I was opening up the church—turning on the lights, unlocking the doors. It was a little nippy, so I turned up the furnace in the hallway between the Sunday school rooms. Just as I did that, the organ played one note. It was like “beep, bee, bee, beep.” Well, just that one note was played, so I thought that someone is here just messing around with the organ. Well, I looked out there between the doors, and the organ cover was down, but the organ itself was turned off.
Well, I thought that was really weird. And everybody just kept telling me that it was probably a car that passed by and its horn beeped. But I thought, “No, it didn’t sound like that.”
171. “The County Line Haunted House”
Mason County
This is a very old house where Mason, Fleming, and Robertson counties meet. It s in Mason County, but I don’t know when it was built. Well, out in the yard there was an oak tree that had a horse bit on it. That’s where they tied up the horses back then.
I haven’t had any ghostly experiences, but my family members have. One day during the winter, my dad was sitting in his chair. Well, the lamp shade beside him there on the end table moved up a few inches and then it moved upward the other way. Then it just come back down.
Another time, the water turned on in the kitchen while he was in the living room. He had to go in there and turn it off.
My brother’s bedroom was upstairs. There was a door between my parents’ room and the hallway. He had to go through there. One night when he opened the door there was this blue light—a light that was something like three feet tall that he saw at the bottom of the stairs. It stayed there for a while, then all of a sudden it just disappeared. Needless to say, he didn’t go upstairs that night. Didn’t want to pass by where that weird light was located. He slept downstairs!
One night when he was upstairs in his room, he had this old alarm clock that set in the middle of his end table. He happened to just look over at the clock, and all of a sudden it just slid off the table and hit the floor.
There were always two rooms in that house that were really cold. They were located right above each other. One of them we called the blue room. It was always blue, so we used it as a storage room. Well, one time we had a cat that would go in every room except for that one. The cat could sense things.
Charles Fowler died there in this house years ago. After we moved out and other people moved in and completely remodeled the house, they’ve not had things like that to happen to them.
172. “Ghostly Footsteps on the Stairs”
Mason County
I’ve heard my brothers talk about this for years. I was too young to remember. They said that one night they were all awakened by these footsteps coming up the stairway in this really old house, located in the Tangletown community of Mason County. They said they could hear these steps cracking, coming up the stairway. They all looked toward the noise, but none of them said anything to each other. They could see this glowing figure of a head coming up the steps. It came up, but they were all just dead silent looking at it. Whatever it was looked around at each one of them, then walked back down the steps real slow like.
They whispered to each other, “Did you see what I saw?”
I’ve heard them talk about that many times, and they were dead serious.
173. “The Sulphur Wells Country Store”
Metcalfe County
“The Sulphur Wells Store has been in operation since 1898, when it was opened as the Brown Store. But that building burned in 1924 and the current structure was built at the same spot. That one was run by Ross Lambrith and his wife, Mary. Many years later, she married Gobel Hurt. Actually, Mary ran the store there in Sulphur Wells from 1907 to 1958. Six years ago, my wife and I bought the store and the house next door and moved into the house. Now, I don’t believe in ghosts, but some strange occurrences have taken place there in the store.
One day my wife was in the store, and she sat her coffee cup on the counter. Then it disappeared. She and Weldon Edwards, a regular customer at the store, were trying to find the cup when I walked into the store. They were searching everywhere. I said to them, “Is this the cup that you’re looking for?”
The cup was sitting right where she had first left it on the front counter. She and Weldon could not believe that it was there, as they had looked there and everywhere for that cup.
One morning, a jar of Sanka Coffee fell off the shelf to the floor and the lid broke. The seal did not break, though, so I set it under the counter. About four or five months later, a customer came to the store and wanted to buy a jar of Sanka, and all I had left was the one under the counter. I told him that it had a broken lid but an unbroken seal, so he bought it. Nothing happened during those four or five months, but the next day after the coffee had been taken from the store, Mary Hurt’s ghost did one of her favorite things. Now, I say Mary Hurt’s ghost because this ghost seems to have a good sense of humor and is not scary. Anyway, she turned the light off on me in the back room. I think that Mary felt bad because she had broken something. She didn’t bother us for a while, but just as soon as the coffee was sold, she was back to her regular tricks.
I guess my first experience with Mary Hurt’s ghost was when my wife and a customer whose name is JoAnn were sitting at the back table and I came walking down the aisle from the front of the store. I was talking to my wife when an ashtray on the table between us jumped up past the silver napkin holder, did a flip in the air, landed on the table, and rolled around a bit. The sound distracted me. My wife and JoAnn saw what happened and they still talk about it.
On another occasion, I was making biscuits when I got a feeling that I wasn’t alone. I looked up and around, then caught the glimpse of someone in the store. It was a man walking up and down the back aisle stopping and looking at stuff on the bottom shelf. The man had on a cap that snapped down in front, and a coat with leather elbows on the sleeves. When I asked him if I could help him, he didn’t answer. I looked at my biscuits, th
en back toward him, but he was gone. I went to the door but it was still locked. I was telling what happened to a lifetime resident of Sulphur Wells, and he told me that I was describing one of Mary Hurt’s relatives that used to come down from Louisville to visit. He was deaf and dumb, and all he did while he was here was walk up and down the aisle.
I was at the sink one evening after I had closed and locked the doors. The sink is kinda low, so I was leaning over the sink washing pans. I felt someone was there, so I looked under my arm and saw a woman’s dress, a black or blue print dress, with a slip hanging out pretty long beneath the dress. She had on soft, dark shoes like a nurse’s shoes, and her stockings were bagging down. I turned and looked over my shoulder then, but I didn’t see anyone there.”
The store owner mentioned what he had seen to one of the customers, Weldon Edwards, and Edwards told him that he had described how Mary Hurt always looked. The store owner had never seen a photo of her, or heard how she was dressed.
Donna Chasteen, an employee at the store, provided the following account of her encounter with Mary Jane’s ghost: “I had worked at the store for about a year, and one day I was making a milkshake. I had taken the container of ice from the refrigerator, sat it on the counter, and made the milkshake. When I turned around from mixing the milkshake, I reached to put the ice cream up, but it was gone from the counter top. I looked in the refrigerator but didn’t see it anywhere. When the owner’s wife came into the store, I asked her if she had seen the ice cream. She told me that she hadn’t. We looked again in all the freezers and still didn’t find it. Four days later, the owner was making breakfast, and when he reached into the freezer for the sausage, there was the ice cream there on top of the sausage. He asked me when I got to work that morning why I had put the ice cream on the sausage. I told him that I hadn’t. I told him of how his wife and I had looked for it and never found it. Then he said that he guessed it must have been Mary Hurt’s ghost. Now, that sure was strange.”
Haunted Houses and Family Ghosts of Kentucky Page 26