Ghost stories with footnotes

Local lore says

The Leestown Witch

Local lore says that in 1913, a young Franklin County woman was found dead at home a few weeks after losing her baby. When her mother cleared out the house, she found what she took for signs of witchcraft inside her daughter’s pillow. According to the museum’s podcast, it was stockings.

The family and their neighbors went looking for whoever had cursed them, and the podcast gets into the rituals they hoped would unmask the witch. No one was ever named, and the witch, if there was one, didn’t strike again. The Capital City Museum found the story in a 1913 State Journal article. Now one Witches Night Out guest each year is crowned the Leestown Witch, which is a much nicer thing to be called than it was in 1913.

Sources: The State Journal, Sept. 28, 2025 · Kentucky Deceased, “The Leestown Witch” · City of Frankfort Podcast, Oct. 8, 2026

A family legend, 200 years running

The Gray Lady of Liberty Hall

Before she was a ghost, she was Margaretta Varick, aunt of Margaretta Brown of Liberty Hall. She came to visit in the summer of 1817 and died three days into the trip, on July 28, at 73. The cause is unknown.

The best-known sighting came in the 1880s. Mary Mason “Mame” Scott, home from finishing school, woke three nights running to find a tall figure veiled in gray standing at the end of her bed. When she told a family friend, the reply was, “Old Aunt Varick at it again.” Other Browns said they saw her on the stairs and in the back bedroom where she died. Staff and visitors still mention the stairs, and the big Palladian window.

Liberty Hall is refreshingly honest about its two other ghosts, an opera singer and a soldier said to haunt the garden: it says neither has any historical basis. The Gray Lady, though, was a real woman. The museum even keeps a 1799 letter she wrote to her niece, whom she called “my beloved girl.”

Sources: Liberty Hall, “Haunted History” · Liberty Hall, “Education Station: Aunt Varick, ‘The Gray Lady’” (2024)

Stories people tell

The Old State Capitol

The real history comes first, and it’s grim enough. On the morning of Jan. 30, 1900, in the middle of a disputed governor’s race, William Goebel was shot as he walked up the lawn toward the Old State Capitol. He was sworn in from his bed at the Capital Hotel and died on Feb. 3. What’s left of that hotel is now part of the Capital City Museum.

The ghost stories followed. A Kentucky Historical Society staffer told Spectrum News 1 in 2021 that a security guard once saw Goebel’s portrait fall off the wall on the anniversary of the shooting, and that people have reported hearing shots in the small arsenal building behind the capitol. He said he once heard voices moving through the empty building himself and never found anyone.

Then there’s the Conjured Chest, a chest of drawers in the KHS collection. In one family’s written account, it was made around 1830 by an enslaved man named Remus, who died after being beaten by the man who ordered it, and the other enslaved people on the place cursed it in return. The family tied 18 deaths to it over the generations that followed, and in 1976 a descendant gave it to KHS, where it would be kept away from anyone who might use it. The curse is legend. The cruelty it starts with is not.

Sources: KHS, “William Goebel: The Man Behind the Statue” · Spectrum News 1, Oct. 2021 · KHS, “New Details About the Cursed Chest”