Interview transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Clay Wallace, WUKY
I am standing in the gardens behind Liberty Hall Historic Site in Frankfort, Kentucky. It's from these gardens that, for over 150 years, people have caught glimpses of a Frankfort ghost known as the Gray Lady.
I'm here with John Walker, Curator of Collections at Liberty Hall Historic Site. John, what can you tell me about Liberty Hall's Gray Lady?
John Walker, Curator of Collections at Liberty Hall Historic Site
So the the Gray Lady is probably Kentucky's most famous ghost. In fact, if you go on any search engine and you type in 'Kentucky ghost,' she is gonna be the top hit every time.
Our Gray Lady story begins in 1817 when a grieving mother was waiting for her aunt to arrive from New York to help her get her house back in order. The aunt arrived and she passed away within three days, and through that unfulfilled mission and loss of purpose, within a generation a spirit-form starts haunting this home - a very benevolent ghost, one that wants to help take care of the home and help people within the home.
The sightings began well within the early 1840s and there have been at least one or two sightings in every generation since then. We embrace the story of the Gray Lady here at Liberty Hall, and many people here in Frankfort know of her and have had sightings of her from the famous window.
Clay
To describe where we are right now, the historic site backs up to the Kentucky River. Forward to the street, there's two brick homes: there's Liberty Hall, which was the home of John Brown and his family, built in the... late eighteenth century?
John
Yes, in 1796.
Clay
And then we're also behind the Orlando Brown House. So, from the street, there are two brick houses across this whole block.
John
Yeah, I think you could even more accurately describe them as two brick mansions of their time period. I always call them 'stately homes.'
Clay
Give us some context to these homes. John Brown was an early U.S. Senator who was foundational in Kentucky becoming a state. Can you speak a little bit about that family?
John
Yes. So, the Honorable John Brown, as his official title would have been at the time, was Kentucky's first senator. He was the first of two because of a short straw competition.
When Kentucky became a state in 1792, we needed two senators to send to the Congress. It was between him and another man, and he just happened to draw the right straw to become the first one. But it wasn't just because of that; he wasn't just some man. He was, before that, our congressman as a representative for us when we were a county of Virginia. He worked tirelessly for eight years from 1783 to 1792 to help make us a state, and that was really his sole purpose.
He spent the majority of his public life not in Kentucky. He would retire to this home more than he would live and work in it. And in that way, I think that's one reason John Brown was somewhat forgotten about. A lot of Kentuckians have never heard of him but, without him, we would not have had the connections to the Jeffersons and Madisons and Washingtons and Hamiltons. He brings Kentucky a relevance in early American history that we would not have had otherwise.
Clay
When John Brown moved here before Kentucky was a state, why was this where he and his family decided to settle?
John
So interestingly enough, it wasn't. He was living out of taverns and inns like everyone else. No one wanted to build a home of any size because no one knew what was going to happen.
We were still in deep conflict with the Shawnee and Mingo tribes along the Ohio River, and we were also a new territory. It was an unknown world.
He actually ends up living in Kentucky in different places on different farms and inns in Danville and Stanford and Lexington for twelve years before he even breaks ground on this site. Liberty Hall comes about when Frankfort is decided to be the capital in 1793. We are a place where anyone who was going to be in power was going to set up shop. Even other governors and plantation owners and stately men, as you might say, who had their farms elsewhere had some sort of residence in Frankfort, because this is where power was. If you were going to be our senator, John Brown thought that he should be available to the public and be in the place where the state was centered, and that was this capital of Frankfort.
Three years after we became a capital is when he starts to build his home, which is 1796.
Clay
So where into this family does the legend of the Gray Lady sit?
John
It's within a generation of them coming here. What happens is his wife, Margaretta, moves down from New York with a one-year-old and pregnant with their second. She would have three children that survived infancy, but one of those children, Euphemia, was seven years old when she passed away.
It was a very tragic death. Euphemia was sick. They gave her a medicine that essentially killed her while they were trying to help her. It was contentious among the family. Margaretta, like any mother would, goes into a deep grief and a deep melancholy, and everyone is worried about her. They're writing to her family back east that they need help.
At this point, the Browns have been in Kentucky for a minute. They are a founding family of the state, but there's still these support networks that don't exist here. Their foundations are still back east, so when Margaretta's aunt comes across the mountains, Kentucky is at a point where it's more founded and operational. It's a place people go to go west. So, the aunt comes and it kind of starts this whole new chapter within the family.
Clay
Standing in the garden right now, there's a famous image that is used on a lot of the materials featuring the Gray Lady looking out a window. What window do people see her from?
John
A lot of Frankfortians will tell you that she's in the Palladian window. A Palladian window is that long, tall window that has curvature on the top side of it. These are windows that you would see in big houses like Monticello and different others around the country, Mount Vernon, even. But I deep down say that that's not the window.
I think that's the window for a lot of our local neighbors because it's the one you can see from your car, so it's really fun to point out and it's opulent to have in a home like this, but, actually, the Gray Lady's window is in the back of the home.
If you're in the gardens - we have four acres of gardens in the back - and you're looking up to the back corner of the house, and you are looking at the window that is to the northwest, that's the window.
Clay
Inside the house, what does that window correspond to?
John
That would be Mame's room. Mame was the nickname for Mary Mason Scott. She was the last living descendant of the Browns, and she lived in the home until she passed away in 1934.
Mame had the most substantial sighting of the Gray Lady. This was in the late 1880s. She was home from boarding school, and she was staying in this room.
It was just her, her mother, a widow, and her two aunts, who were also widows. So there's three widows who were sisters and Mame.
Mame has three nights of sightings of this woman in some sort of gray dress or a gray cape. She has this opaque form, and [Mame] goes to her aunt and asks who it is, and they know the story. No one had seen the Grey Lady in a while, and so it just had never come up for Mame.
That's the room that you're looking up at. It's the room where it seems as though the Gray Lady has some sort of presence. We think it might also be the room she died in, which is why she may haunt that specific area of the home.
Clay
Liberty Hall offers historic tours all year round that center on the life of the Brown family and the early history of Frankfort, who these people were and the lives that they lived. But every October, there are the Gray Lady tours. Can you talk a little bit about how that's different than the standard tour that people will come to Liberty Hall and take?
John
Absolutely. Over the years, we've evolved in how we tell the story of the Gray Lady, and many people have memories of different formats.
First, it was in the garden. It was a garden walkthrough tour.
Then, there was a play for a while; a lot of people remember the play in the yard.
Recently, we've moved away from costumed interpretation, and what we really wanted to do is dissect the culture of death in history. If you come to our Great Lady tour today, you're going to hear three ghost stories, because we actually have three ghost stories that are associated with the site - two in the gardens and one in the house.
You will also hear more about the historic nature of how death was dealt with in that time period. We really want guests to walk away learning something, and also seeing the house in a way it's not usually seen, which is how it would have been during a funeral or right after someone was being mourned.
I think the best part about these tours is you get to see the house in an ambiance that you don't normally do. The entire home is lit with electric candles. It's nighttime. We have no overhead lighting. This is what a home at night would look like, which is really rare. This is the only time of year you get to go in during that time and see it under those conditions.
We do Gray Lady tours on Wednesday nights throughout October, and one Saturday. There are two tours a night. You can go to our website - libertyhall.org - to book those.
There's one at 6 pm and there's one at 7.30 pm. As we move through October, they will become darker and darker, so if you're coming earlier and you want a dark experience, I recommend booking at the later time.
Clay
How recently have people spotted the Gray Lady?
John
We have people who have lived in the apartment that is on this site and, in the past 10 years, there have been sightings. There definitely have been some in this generation. And there have been one in every generation going back to the 1840s.
The Gray Lady's not always out and about just because we want her to be, but she definitely makes sure that each generation remembers that she's there.