174. “Electricity or What?”
Metcalfe County
About eight years ago, a neighbor who lived across from my aunt Pearl’s house called me late one night. Aunt Pearl had been dead for four to five years at that time. The neighbor that called said, “There’s a ghost in Pearl’s house.”
She said she could see a light going off and on. I checked the house for the meter, but there was no meter. No one had lived in the house for several years and there was no meter. I then checked for an extension cord to make sure someone wasn’t pulling a prank, but there was nothing leading to the house to indicate the possibility of electricity. By this time there were about twenty people gathered outside the old house.
I went back home and got a ladder and climbed to the outside bedroom window of Aunt Pearl’s bedroom. I was pretty scared about what I might see when I got to the last rung of the ladder. The light in the bedroom was bright but did not appear to come from the bulb. I yelled down and said I didn’t see anything but the light. Someone said, “Check the closets.”
But, now, I didn’t want to go into that house, so I just called the electric company, and a man came out. After looking, he said that he couldn’t find any way that electricity was hooked up to the house. But he said that they had seen where new houses under construction would sometimes do this, and found it to be where lightning struck the wiring and the lightning would run back and forth between two wires with a switch at both ends. Eventually, the light would die out. That’s the only thing he thought it could be.
The light eventually quit. I don’t know what caused that light in Aunt Pearls house but I do know it was a mystery and nearly everyone in Sulphur Wells saw it.
175. “The Lady in White and Other Ghosts”
Washington County
The house stands, dilapidated and unassuming, atop a hill on Long Run Road. It looks like any other abandoned house. But it’s more than that.
It has been a link for six generations of the Cocanougher family. It has also served as a link to something else, something more mysterious than a family bond.
Over its existence, which spans nearly two centuries, the two-story house has also been home to several ghosts. A lady in white, thought to be a family ancestor, a Civil War soldier, and various other ghosts and odd phenomena have made their presence known at the house.
Built in 1838 on land acquired by Jacob Cocanougher in 1797, the house has been abandoned for around half a century. The last family to live there, Bill and Ruby Cocanougher and their four children, have seen and heard the ghosts. Bill Cocanougher, now deceased, never tired of telling stories of the ghostly lady in white, according to relative Mike Crain. “Bill says, being alone in the house, he would hear a noise, go check and find a woman dressed in white … standing at the top of the stairs or on the stairs,” Crain said.
Bill’s son Bruce also saw the ghost, according to sister Connie Johnson. “My brother had just come home from school, and he heard a noise. He opened the door and saw a female going up the steps in a solid white dress,” Johnson said.
All the sightings confirm that the ghost was a young woman who wore a white dress. That much is clear. However, what is not clear is who the ghost is. “They have all commented on how pale she looked and that her white dress looked like a funeral shroud,” said Bruce Cocanougher. “Her vision only lasts a few moments and then she disappears.”
Many believe that the ghost is Mattie “Matt” Cocanougher. Matt was Bill’s aunt. Her family lived in the home in the late 1800s. Her grandfather had built it.
The haunted Cocanougher House. (Photo by James Roberts)
Matt grew ill with fever, and doctors could do nothing for her. She died nearly a year later at the age of seventeen. The year was 1878. Presumably, she died in the house. But it doesn’t end there.
According to Johnson, there was no shortage of odd occurrences in the house. “There were all kinds of things that went on,” she said. “All these years, that house was supposed to be haunted.”
The haunting may have begun when Jacob Cocanougher, the original landowner, began to sow his garden. “From the moment his plow point lay the first furrow in that chosen field, he realized he had disturbed the site of an ancient Indian settlement and most likely their sacred burial ground,” Cocanougher said. There have been hundreds of Indian artifacts found on the land. Some also claim to have heard sounds like the beat of war drums off in the distance. Others have heard the sounds of heavy footsteps and dragging chains on the stairway. Cocanougher says this could be sounds of the ghosts of slaves. “It is said that slaves who disobeyed or misbehaved were severely punished in the north upstairs room.”
On October 7, 1862 a regiment of Confederate soldiers came to the Cocanougher house looking for water in the midst of a drought. They were directed to a limestone spring where they drank the water and filled their canteens. One soldier left a cup as a token of appreciation. The next day 7,500 soldiers died in the Battle of Perryville. Since then, the ghost of a Confederate soldier has been seen in the house. “A Confederate soldier has been seen in the old house as recently as June 1954 when one of my sisters awoke and saw him at the foot of her bed,” Cocanougher said.
But not all of the supernatural goings-on at the house can be explained. In the late 1920s, Bill Cocanougher and his brother Herman were working on the highway crew. They had to get up early enough to walk the four and a half mile trek to the work site. Awaking one morning to daylight and noting that the clock had apparently stopped at 3:00 A.M., the two men rushed to get ready.
As they began walking down the road, they noticed a bright glow like a fire below the house. As they grew nearer, the glow began to fade until it was gone. It was now totally dark outside. The two stumbled back to the house, realizing that the clock was indeed right and that the glow had fooled them into thinking it was morning. The next day they investigated the area where the light was and found everything was completely burned and scorched black. Bill, Ruby, and their children moved out of the house in 1958 and into one just below it. No one has lived there since.
Shortly after the move, daughter Scotty Cocanougher Clenney and a sibling returned to the old house to get some things left behind. They had left the front door open. The floor beneath it was swollen and the door could only close if it were forced.
While the two were upstairs, they heard the door closing, scraping the floor along the way. Because of the force required to close the door, Clenney knew that the wind could not have done it. Thinking it was the ghost, the two ran out of the house quickly. Their father returned and found nothing.
Johnson remembers a similar incident. “We were eating one evening and we had the door open,” she said. “The door just slammed shut. That just couldn’t happen.”
The doorway, incidentally, stands adjacent to the stairway on which the lady in white was often seen.
The house has fallen into disrepair now. It is empty save for a few family relics and, appropriately enough, a small black cat.
The house is probably unsafe to enter, Johnson said. Therefore it is likely that as the house slowly erodes, so will the legend of the lady in white and the other ghosts in the Cocanougher home.
“We intend to keep the farm in our family throughout our lifetimes and will probably put it in a family trust and at our deaths, allow it to return to the wilderness it was when Jacob Cocanougher first saw it in the late 1700s,” Cocanougher said.
176. “The Haunted Trailer”
Carter County
Back about 1976, my husband and I, along with our six children, lived in a mobile home in a Carter County hollow called Greasy Creek. We had heard about another mobile home that we could buy cheap, and in a better condition than the one we lived in. My husband went and bought it. We parked it up in the hollow above us just a short distance from a hog pen where we kept a couple of hogs.
The first unusual incident would always occur when my husband went to feed the hogs. He would hear the sound of a l
arge object falling in the trailer, but when he would go to look, everything was in its place.
We took an iron bed out of the new home and put it in the old trailer in which we were still living at the time. Three of our girls slept in this bed. One of the girls said she didn’t want to sleep in the bed anymore because it woke her up every morning around 5:00 A.M. by shaking, and the covers would come off of her body. We thought it was just her imagination, so we continued the same sleeping arrangements.
During the day when the kids were all in school, except for our youngest, I would notice that the bed was working its way from one side of the room to the other. Several times during the day, I had to go shove the bed back in place. I told my husband about this and suggested we have our home checked to make sure it was level. He and a neighbor friend of ours put a level on it but it was level.
Our daughter who was not in school yet loved to watch a certain television show. While she did, I decided to lie down on the bed to get a few moments of rest. I had barely closed my eyes when I felt the bed sink down real easy. I smiled to myself, thinking she was trying not to wake me. So, smilingly I reached out my hand to touch her, but no one was there. I immediately rose up in bed to look around, and I saw a fog in the hallway, something like a white mist. Well, I got up to look for Missy, and there she sat right where I had left her there in front of the TV.
A few days later I told the kids that we were going to the laundry mat and to go ahead and get into the car. On the way out, I stopped in the bathroom to make a finishing touch on my hair. I then heard what I thought was all six kids jumping on the bed. I was angry, so I threw down the hairbrush and stormed around the corner, saying, Til whip everyone of you kids for jumping on the bed. You know better than to do that.”
When I looked into the room, no one was on the bed. I raised the bottom of the spread to see if they were under the bed, and no one was under there either. I ran hysterically out of there and threw myself into my husband’s arms. The kids were there in the car and had been all along. Well, we took that bed down.
My mother didn’t believe in ghosts or anything, so she said, “Bring the bed down to my house and I’ll use it.”
I went down to her house about a week later and saw that the bed was gone. I said, “Mom, where s the bed we gave you?”
It had been in my brother’s room. He spoke up and said, “We took it down because it wouldn’t let me sleep past 5:00 A.M.” He knew nothing of what had happened in our home. He went on to say that the bed would shake until he woke up. We found out later that the trailer had been owned by a man who had been murdered in it. Mom put the bed out in the smokehouse, and that building burned down.
We always thought that the smokehouse was robbed before it was burned. I’ll always wonder if somebody took that old bed, and what happened to them if they did.
We sold the trailer before we ever lived in it because Mom was hard to convince. She wasn’t afraid of anything, so she stayed all night and camped out in the haunted trailer with the kids. The next morning, she came down and said to my husband, “Thanks for knocking on the door all night and keeping us awake.”
My husband told her that he had not been out of our home all night. That’s a true story.
177. “Ghosts in the Pretty House”
Monroe County
My uncle Heck and his wife Blanche lived in this fairly large, old, white, part-log house that was located in Monroe County just across the state line from Clementsville, Tennessee. They always called their home the Pretty House. My uncle was one of the early Church of Christ ministers in that area.
Wonder if a ghost still lives in the Pretty House? (Photo by the author)
Back when they lived in the Pretty House, it was a commonly accepted belief that it was “hainted,” to use the word they always used. My uncle always said that a man died in that house after he had been “bled with leeches” all over his body for medicinal purposes.
My daddy had not married at that point in time when my uncle and aunt lived there. Because of the tales they always told about haints, Daddy said that he slept with his head completely under the cover every night. When they told these old scary tales, he didn’t know what to think or what to do. Even in later years when I personally heard my uncle tell these scary tales about the Pretty House, I was also scared. Everyone that lived around there back then believed that the house was really haunted, probably by the man who lay a corpse in the house after he died from the bloodsucking worms.
One of the happenings my uncle and aunt always talked about was the time when they were sound asleep that a big ball of dough fell from the ceiling onto their bed. When they lit the lamp to see what it was, there was nothing there to be seen.
They’d also hear chains being dragged along the upstairs floor and throughout the entire house. Their innocent dog Queen always got the blame, when in reality, she was not in the house and nowhere in sight.
They claimed that after dark, they would often hear “every dish in the house breaking,” but when they’d strike a match to get some light, they didn’t see anything strange. They say that they used up all their matches that night trying to investigate the noises and other strange happenings. They ran out of matches, though, as times were financially rough and matches were hard to come by.
Once a family member was near the clothesline in the back yard, and something “fought him hard.” And numerous other times, chairs could be heard or seen rocking there in the house, but no one was near them.
On another occasion, Aunt Blanche put a button on a door, due to her inability to keep it closed. The “haint” situation caused her to use two nails instead of just one as typical. I suppose she thought the extra nail would take care of the problems caused by the ghost.
I guess the worst thing to ever scare them was the time a big, hairy monster-like thing was looking into the house through a window. Then it disappeared, but not until they both had seen it. But that’s not much worse than the floating hands that all family members claimed they saw several times after dark. The ghostly hands would suddenly disappear if and when someone tried to reach out and touch them.
After hearing these stories about dark one night, my sister, who was two and one-half years older than I and full of mischief, hid behind the backdoor where we lived. She was scared, but she knew that I was really frightened after the ghost story session. At that point in time, Mama sent me into the old, dark house to get a bucket of water. I had it full and could hardly carry it. My sister jumped out on me, and I threw the bucket of water into the air. It came down on both of us. She was wet but I was soaked! So in an effort to avoid getting into trouble and being filled with panic, she had me to take off all my clothes. She turned on the oven and tried to dry my clothes. Well, she scorched my clothes while drying them. Naturally, Mama didn’t think that was funny, nor did I!
My daddy and Uncle Heck had two other brothers, Jim and Joe, who were going to be “tough fellers” and stay in that house all night to check it out. Well, I guess they took all they could take from the ghostly things that night, for they got up and left there at midnight!
Uncle Heck and Blanche lived in the Pretty House for about a year, 1924-25. That was about the longest anyone lived in that house after that man had died because of the bloodsucking worms. Their son James lived there with them, but he died as a child soon after they moved. Their first daughter, Ora, was born in that old house. Another daughter, Mary Addie, remembers hearing a lot of talk about things, and especially that is was referred to as the Pretty House. And Ernest, the youngest child, recalls hearing his daddy tell about a white hand that appeared one night on the bed, lying there between their heads. They both saw the hand. Ernest also recalls hearing sounds on the stairway, as if someone is shackled, going, “thump, thump, thump,” down the steps.
After they moved out, the old house was finally torn down because nobody wanted to live with the “haints.” I’ll never forget all those scary things that Uncle Heck and Aunt Blan
che always told as realistic happenings there in the old Pretty House.
Corky, who was another son of Heck and Blanche, still wonders if his father became a preacher because of the weird things that happened in that house. He claimed that his daddy probably did a lot of praying because of all those spooky things that happened while they still lived there.
When Uncle Heck and Aunt Blanche moved from the haunted Pretty House, they thought they were leaving the ghosts behind forever, even though they didn’t move very far from there. It wasn’t long until strange, unexplained events began to take place in their next house, too. Lots of noises and lights were heard and seen there, and always without reason.
They soon left that house, too. After they moved away from there, a woman who was a midwife moved into that same house. One day as she was leaving to go deliver a baby, something fell from a big sugar tree there in the front yard, making a mournful, moaning sound as it fell to the ground.
The author and I interviewed the current owners of that second house, Mr. and Mrs. T.D. Wilson, who permitted us to take pictures and visit the old deserted house and yard. The Wilsons feel that there is an explanation for the strange things that took place on this property. They said that a Ms. Mabery was the last person to live in that house, and that she died inside. That happened before they purchased the property.
One of the Wilsons’ family members tried to spend the night upstairs in that old house a few years ago, soon after they had bought the place. Unexplained lights and noises were so scary that he was too frightened to spend the night there, so he got up and left in the middle of the night. Even though the Wilsons claim that they don’t believe in ghosts, they offer no answers; just questions.
In conclusion, let me say that Uncle Heck and Aunt Blanche moved from this second house to a third house, all within the same neck of the woods. Their third house was located astraddle the state line, so believe it or not, they ate their meals in Kentucky and slept in Tennessee.
Haunted Houses and Family Ghosts of Kentucky Page 27