When my niece was a little child, my sister was startled to hear her laughing and talking to someone when only the two of them were at home.
“Who are you talking to?” Kim asked as she burst into her daughter’s bedroom.
“That lady there in the window,” Kamille answered. “She’s waving to me.”
There was no one at the window.
Kim and her husband, Stan, who were newlyweds, had moved into Stan’s grandmother’s house in Winchester after she died. Kamille never knew the woman that her older cousin Kelsey called Great Ma.
Sometime after the incident at the window, Stan’s mother, Ruth, was showing the family some old photographs and asked Kamille if she recognized anyone in a group picture.
Yes, the little girl said, pointing to her great-grandmother and telling Grammy it was the lady who had visited her that day at the window and made her laugh.
“That’s Great Ma,” she said.
I don’t believe in ghosts. But there are things I can’t explain.
When I lived in Nicholasville many years ago and was editor of the town’s newspaper, there was an elderly woman who lived next to my apartment who would sometimes ask me to take dictation for her whenever she wanted to write a letter to the editor because her hands shook.
Like many children, I had grown up with ghost stories. My mother’s family, who were tenant farmers, lived in a huge antebellum farmhouse with outbuildings that had once been slave quarters. Sitting around the old coal stove or the kitchen table, they would tell “true” stories.
One day after work, as the sun was going down, I was sitting with her in her living room surrounded by her memories as she showed me pictures and talked about the people in her past.
I patiently hoped she would get on with dictating the letter when I happened to see a young woman in a long dress walk past the doorway in the darkened room behind us and vanish.
I was startled, and my elderly neighbor noticed. Her ancient eyes shone knowingly as she asked, “Did you see someone in there?”
“I thought I saw a woman,” I said.
She just smiled and offered no explanation, and I never saw nor heard the mystery woman the rest of the time we were there.
Like many children, I had grown up with ghost stories. My mother’s family, who were tenant farmers, lived in a huge antebellum farmhouse with outbuildings that had once been slave quarters. Sitting around the old coal stove or the kitchen table, they would tell “true” stories. Once, for example, my cousin had come into the house and heard footsteps above the kitchen. But no one used that upstairs room because the only access to it was by an outside staircase that had been torn down many years before.
That old house terrified me. I’d have dreams that I was floating from my bed toward empty rooms where I didn’t want to go.
My parents, however, assured me there was no such thing as ghosts, and I believed them. I was taught in the holiness church I grew up in that the spirits of loved ones are no longer with us, but demonic spirits sometimes disguise themselves as spirits of the dead.
A few years ago, I interviewed a Catholic demonologist who had participated in exorcisms, and he told me something similar. Sometimes ghosts are allowed to return briefly from purgatory to deliver messages or ask for prayers, he said, but usually what people think are ghosts are evil spirits.
And I recall that the Bible warns against conjuring the dead and that King Saul had a medium conjure the spirit of the prophet Samuel. But another biblical verse says that “the dead know nothing … for the memory of them is forgotten.”
That seems ambiguous to me.
Just before Halloween in 2014, I participated in a spirits tour of Wickland, the old Bardstown mansion that was home to the Wickliffe family that produced two Kentucky governors and a governor of Louisiana. The group gathered in the basement as the medium passed around copper dowsing rods so that the guests could ask questions of the ghost of a slave boy, Antoine.
I didn’t participate because, as a reporter, I was there as an impartial observer.
Besides, I don’t believe in ghosts.
Never miss a thing with our FREE weekly newsletter.
Later, however, when I was transcribing the digital audio recording of the guests laughing and asking Antoine questions about whether someone was going to have a baby or get a job promotion, I heard a ghostly whisper that sounded like someone had spoken directly into the microphone, though no one had been seated that close.
I played it again and again to make sure I had heard it.
The words sounded like “an quoi” (which isn’t a phrase in any known language) or “ask why.” Or maybe “Antoine.”
It was the kind of spectral voice you only hear in a horror film, and it made chills run up my spine when I heard it on the recording, because I didn’t hear it when I was actually there in the cellar.
Later, when I shared the recording with Dixie Hibbs, the former Bardstown mayor who was the curator of the museum at the time and led the spirit tours with Katie, the young medium, she wasn’t surprised. There had been other recordings of strange phenomena in the old mansion, she said.
As I’ve said, I don’t believe in ghosts. But I wouldn’t stay overnight alone in the basement of Wickland.
This story is adapted from a column Randy wrote for The Kentucky Standard of Bardstown and was originally published on Halloween of 2014.
