Ghosts of the Bluegrass

Introduction

Ghost stories have always been told. You may remember sitting on the front porch on a dark summer night, listening to someone tell ghost stories until you became overwhelmed with fear. Giving way to your fright, you ran home to the safety of a well-lit living room and comforting parents, but in the ensuing years, you have remembered the stories and perhaps even retold them. Growing up in storytelling homes, we both have always collected stories for retelling but had never before collected them as a written record until beginning this project. During a January term at Georgetown College, we decided to team-teach a course on interviewing techniques, using ghost and death lore of Central Kentucky as the vehicle for teaching these skills. The students were to learn interviewing styles and various methods of transcribing and relating their interviews: first-person narrative, third-person retelling, dialogue style, and so on. Twenty-three students enrolled in the course and were given the instruction to go into the communities of Central Kentucky and collect ghost stories and death lore. It was a very cold January, but the students were enthusiastic and proved adept at achieving their goal. The class met daily to share the information gathered. Although the stories included in this anthology are primarily about ghosts, there are some that relate strictly to death lore. Our project began to snowball, and as stories accumulated, the need to compile this material led to the present anthology. It is interesting to note that this is not the first time students of Georgetown College showed an interest in the supernatural. From 1905 to 1917, an orIntroduction 1  Ghosts of the Bluegrass ganization existed on campus whose members called themselves the “Mystic 13.” It is not clear what the participants’ specific interests were, but there are records acknowledging their existence. Various styles of recording are found in this collection, because stories were gathered by many different individuals enrolled in the class, and the students were given the freedom to transcribe the stories in the manner they felt best represented the narrator. Most of the stories are presented as first-person narratives in paragraph form. In these, the compiler quotes the storyteller verbatim. Some compilers were more comfortable presenting the story in the third person by telling what the storyteller had said but not quoting directly. Other stories seemed to work best when recorded in a dialogue style, much like a play script. Students were encouraged to try different styles to see which worked best for getting the story across to the reader. After word got around that we were “ghost busters,” we received several letters relating ghost stories and personal experiences. These have been printed in the form in which they were received unless editing for clarity or brevity was required. Our aim in editing was to preserve the flow and character of the interviews while making the stories concise and readable. We’ve shortened a few of the stories by omitting repetitive phrases and have not included every question and answer. The belief in ghosts or spirits existing after physical death is not new. Ghosts have been discussed throughout history, and their characteristics seem to remain similar. One can find references to spirits appearing to people in the Bible, in 1 Samuel 8: 7–15, for example, when King Saul asks a medium to contact Samuel from the dead in order to consult him on military affairs, or in this passage from Job 4: 15–16, written between the mid sixth and the mid fourth centuries b.c.: “Then a spirit passed before my face; the hair of my flesh stood up. It stood still, but I could not discern the form thereof; an image was before mine eyes.” Early instances of ghostly hauntings have been recorded in Egyptian hieroglyphics. The Egyptians believed that if a dead body was not properly cared for, then its spirit would leave the tomb and return to terrorize the living.1 Why ghosts appear remains a mystery. It may be that ghosts Introduction 3 come to comfort those who are left behind, maybe even to guard, protect, or warn them. Perhaps they come to inform about the circumstances of their deaths, sometimes even reenacting their deaths, or they may feel the need to complete a task. This raises the more fundamental question of why some people return as ghosts and others do not. We...