visit one more time.
Paul later told me that when his parents bought the building and starting renovating it for a bed-and-breakfast, there used to be a door in the wall where the man had passed through. They decided to close off the door to make it part of the wall. Maybe what the guest witnessed was a previous jailer making his rounds to secure the jail. In some of my investigations where I get reports of ghosts walking through walls, I have found through research that at one time there was a door there. The spirits seem to continue to use the old portal.
Once when an employee was cleaning an upstairs bathroom at the Inn, she leaned over to scrub the sink and happened to look up into the mirror. She gasped at the sight she witnessed: a big man with a decayed face standing behind her. She screamed and ran out of the room and back downstairs. The next day she did not show up for work. She had quit her job.
In the early years of justice, lawmen didn’t always imprison the right man. It wasn’t common, but every once in a while they would accidentally hang the wrong man. The cell would be full of criminals. When the officials would come to get their man for execution, sometimes all of the men in the cell would point to the nervous one in the corner. They would grab him and hang him only to find out later that they’d hanged the wrong man. It is believed that this mistake may have happened at one time or another at this county jail. Maybe the employee had seen one of those men that had been hanged by mistake.
Since my first investigation of the Jailer’s Inn, Paul has continued to let other ghosthunter groups come to his inn to investigate for ghosts. All of us continue to find more spirits. During our annual Bardstown Ghost Hunting Get-A-Way Weekend in November my group buys all the rooms at the Jailer’s Inn and The Old Talbott Tavern, and it is amazing how much evidence of spirit activity we get over this three-day weekend. We have found children who speak to us through EVPs. We capture children’s faces in photos and see apparitions of children. Why would we get children’s spirits coming through in a jail, you might ask. When the jailers and their families lived there from 1874 until 1987, many children were born and died there. It would stand to reason that we would find children’s ghosts there.
A good friend of mine, Frances Etienne, heads a group of ghosthunters called Afterdark Paranormal Investigations. She told me about an amazing investigation her group conducted at the Jailer’s Inn. At about 1:00 A.M., Frances and her team were sitting in the courtyard with their audio cassette recorder on. Since this was the area where the hangings had occurred, they were hoping to get an EVP that would be significant to the history of the executions. When they went inside the Jailer’s Inn and rewound their recorder, they were shocked at the EVP that came through. It was a man in a deep voice that said, “May the Lord be with us.” Imagine a criminal standing on the gallows with the black bag over his head and the rope pulled tight around his neck just seconds away from a horrible death. The priest walks over to the subject and says, “May the Lord be with us and have mercy on your soul.” This EVP was a great piece of evidence of such a scene.
Even though I can see why the Jailer’s Inn was named one of the ten most-haunted places in America, it now offers another unique and more luxurious way to do time. The courtyard offers a private, sunny garden where you can sit and relax while listening to the birds and breezes that blow through the trees. Each guest room is decorated with antiques and heirlooms. The breakfast is bountiful in flavor and Southern pizzazz. It is the perfect place to be incarcerated after being found guilty of having so much fun and relaxation.
CHAPTER 8
Kentucky Theatre
LEXINGTON, FAYETTE COUNTY
FOR TWO YEARS JEFF WALDRIDGE, one of my GCI members, Chuck Starr, my husband, and I planned the future of ScareFest, a horror and paranormal convention to be held in Lexington, Kentucky. Since the historic Kentucky Theatre was going to show the movies that featured the ScareFest horror stars, we thought the theater would be a good place for the fans to have a ghost investigation.
I met with Fred Mills, the manager of the Kentucky Theatre, to talk to him about the history and hauntings of the theater. The theater was in pristine form the day I entered the ornate Italian Renaissance lobby. Its rich, golden colors and magnificent marble floor were stunning. I had never before seen such a luxurious movie theater. While talking with Fred, I learned that he had been with the theater since 1963. He told me that the theater opened in October 1922, with a special feature that made the Kentucky Theatre stand out from all the other theaters in Lexington: a house orchestra and a Wurlitzer symphonic organ that played before every movie. Could you imagine being seated in such a luxurious and elegant theater as the curtains opened to a musical overture played on the Wurlitzer organ? As you looked forward you saw lyrics flashed upon the huge white screen as everyone joined in to sing “My Old Kentucky Home” before the movie started. As they say, “Those were the good ol’ days.”
“Over the years the theater became one of the most popular places to go in the evening for entertainment,” Fred said, “since there were no cable TVs, VCRs, Internet, Netflix, and so on. Back in the 1970s we started to offer the midnight movies hosted by WKQQ radio. We called it the “Double Q Midnight Movies,” and it became a popular social event. Later we brought in the Rocky Horror Picture Show, which became a cult movie with a huge following. Even today it still brings a good crowd.”
“In all the years that you have worked here have you had any experiences with ghosts?” I asked. Fred thought a moment and then said, “I have heard stories from some of the employees, and they seemed to think the theater is haunted. The mostoften-talked-about experience among the staff is the apparition of a man sitting by himself in the lower seating area of the old theater. The ones who saw him said that he always sat in the number-two chair. One day, when one of the guys was telling this story, RT Baxter, the projectionist at the time, laughed and told us that he knew who the ghost was. He was a former projectionist who worked at the theater for many years. One evening he died of a heart attack while running a movie up in the projection room. RT told us that after this guy started the movie he would go down into the seating area and sit in seat number two to make sure the sound was good. He didn’t want anyone to complain about the sound being too loud or too low. After a few minutes he would get up and go back to the projection room. RT told everyone not to be afraid of him and to go on about their jobs.”
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