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Historic haunted places in Lexington, KY. Each page gives the ghost story, whether visitors can go, and a link to the site the story came from. The stories are folklore, not documented fact.
5 listings shown.
KENTUCKY / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
Statesman Henry Clay died at his beloved estate in 1852. His apparition, white-haired and in a black frock coat, has been described leaning on the mantel of the room now presented …
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
KENTUCKY / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
The hotel occupies the 1920 former Lexington Clinic, and its ghosts are believed to be former patients. Guests describe a little girl called Annie laughing and moving dolls on the …
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
KENTUCKY / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
Two apparitions are linked to this Federal-style mansion. John Wesley Hunt, who died of cholera in 1849, is said to move with purpose through the ground-floor rooms, and the nursem…
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
KENTUCKY / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
Ghost hunter Patti Starr's team investigated this restored 1922 movie palace for her book Ghosthunting Kentucky. They reported a full apparition of a man in a tan jacket, white shi…
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
KENTUCKY / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
Visitors and staff at Mary Todd Lincoln's girlhood home have reported a faint figure of an older woman that local accounts identify as Mary herself. The story echoes her documented…
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
Explore verified haunted attractions and ghost tours in nearby cities.
Lexington's ghosts work ground that was famous before Kentucky existed. The city's Wikipedia article records the documented frame: Lexington, the consolidated city-county seat of Fayette County, had a population of 322,570 at the 2020 census, the second-most populous city in Kentucky after Louisville, and is known as the Horse Capital of the World. It was named in June 1775, seventeen years before Kentucky statehood, when a party of frontiersmen led by William McConnell, camped on the Middle Fork of Elkhorn Creek, heard of the opening battle at Lexington, Massachusetts, on April 19, 1775, and named their site for it — the first of many American places to take the name. In December 1781 a caravan of some 600 pioneers from Virginia, remembered as the Travelling Church, arrived in the area; the town of Lexington was chartered on May 6, 1782; and around 1790 Peter Durrett, a preacher enslaved by Joseph Craig, founded the First African Baptist Church — the oldest Black Baptist congregation in Kentucky and the third-oldest in the United States.
The city's documented catastrophes are the ones its night tours still walk between. The article records that a cholera epidemic in 1833 devastated the growing town: 500 of its 7,000 residents died within two months, including nearly a third of the congregation of Christ Church Episcopal. It records, too, the morning of February 9, 1920, when a mob gathered outside the courthouse during the trial of Will Lockett; Governor Edwin P. Morrow massed National Guard troops alongside local law enforcement, the Guard opened fire as the mob advanced, killing six and wounding fifty, and some 1,200 federal troops held martial law in the city for two weeks.
Downtown's scholarly anchor is older than the state. Transylvania University's article records that it was founded in 1780 as Transylvania Seminary — the first college west of the Allegheny Mountains, and Kentucky's oldest university — moved to Lexington in 1789, and built Old Morrison in the early 1830s under the supervision of Henry Clay, who taught law there, to a design by pioneer Kentucky architect Gideon Shryock. Old Morrison, the central image on Lexington's city seal and a National Historic Landmark since 1965, served as a hospital for Union and Confederate soldiers during the Civil War, was gutted by fire in 1969, and was renovated and reopened in 1971. It also holds the tomb of Constantine Rafinesque, the university's professor of natural science from 1819 to 1826. A few streets away in Gratz Park, the Hunt–Morgan House article records Hopemont: a Federal-style residence built in 1814 by John Wesley Hunt, the first millionaire west of the Alleghenies, where his great-grandson Thomas Hunt Morgan was born in 1866 — the first Kentuckian to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine — and whose threatened demolition in 1955 called the Blue Grass Trust for Historic Preservation into being to save it.
Two great houses carry the domestic history. The Mary Todd Lincoln House article records that the fourteen-room house was built about 1803–1806 as an inn and tavern, called "The Sign of the Green Tree," before Robert Smith Todd bought it for his family; the museum's own history adds that the Todds moved in in 1832, that Mary Todd lived there until she left for Springfield, Illinois, in 1839, and that she brought Abraham Lincoln to visit in November 1847. After Robert Todd's death in 1849 the house's contents were auctioned and the house itself sold in 1852; it passed through uses as a boarding house, a grocery store and a brothel before ending as storage by the 1950s. Restored under Beula C. Nunn and the Kentucky Mansions Preservation Foundation, it opened to the public on June 9, 1977 — the first historic site restored in honor of a First Lady. South of the city, Waveland's article records a plantation built on land Daniel Boone surveyed for his nephew Daniel Boone Bryan, who settled it around 1786; the place was named Waveland for the look of its grain and hemp fields in the wind. Joseph Bryan built the Greek Revival Big House about 1844–1848 — its main doorway an exact replica of the north entrance of the Erechtheion in Athens — and held thirteen enslaved people there, three women and ten men, whose labour ran the house and the farm. His son Joseph Henry Bryan, a notorious gambler, lost over a million dollars in under seven years and sold the house at auction to pay his debts; the Commonwealth of Kentucky bought Waveland in 1956, and it has operated as a historic house museum since 1957.
This section is folklore — reported by the tour operator, the university's own student traditions and the local press, and never asserted as fact here.
Lexington's signature legend belongs to a professor. Constantine Rafinesque's documented facts, from the university's anchor article, are strange enough without embroidery: professor of natural science at Transylvania from 1819 to 1826, and buried in a tomb inside Old Morrison, the administration building. The legend the ghost-tour operator retells around him is the curse: Lexington Ghosts links Old Morrison to "the legendary Professor Constantine Rafinesque" and to "stories surrounding his infamous curse," and retellings of the tale hold that Rafinesque cursed the school after his dismissal. The anchor records the professorship and the tomb; it does not record a curse, and this guide reports the curse as operator-retold legend. What the university itself documents, in the same article, is how its own students keep the professor's memory: a week-long Halloween celebration called Raf Week, a lottery in which four students win the chance to spend the night in Rafinesque's tomb, and the steps of Old Morrison lined with carved pumpkins for Pumpkinmania. A documented student tradition of sleeping in a tomb needs no curse to be the best story on this page — and the operator's other Old Morrison claims, strange footsteps and whispered voices, are reported here as the operator's, exactly as it prints them.
The operator's two house legends are told the same way. At Hopemont, Lexington Ghosts says the house "carries tales connected to Confederate General John Hunt Morgan and a devoted nursemaid whose presence is still frequently discussed," with stories of mysterious figures and unexpected sightings; the anchor confirms the house, the builder, the general's family and the 1955 rescue, and records no nursemaid — she belongs to the tour's telling, and is labelled as such. At the Mary Todd Lincoln House, the operator reports "an elegant woman in period clothing and unexplained activity"; the museum's own website, checked for this guide, publishes no ghost lore at all — its legend arrives entirely from the tour that stops outside it, and its story below says so. The house's documented unusual history needs no ghost in any case: its anchor article records that from 1879 the building housed a bawdy house run by Jenny Hill, where Belle Brezing worked — Brezing, who became a madam in her own right, is widely credited as the inspiration for Belle Watling in Gone with the Wind. That is history, sourced and strange, and it stays in the history column.
Waveland's reports are the most specifically sourced in this city, because a newspaper collected them. The Kentucky Kernel's October 2018 coverage of the premiere of History Alive, a television program about haunted Kentucky places whose first episode visited Waveland, records testimony rather than atmosphere: park manager Charla Reed said, "A door slammed behind me"; other staff and visitors told of being shoved, of seeing chairs move across a room, and of a painter whose ladder was moved to the side of the fireplace he was about to paint; and David Underwood of the Lexington Paranormal Research Society, which had investigated the house, said, "You hear voices." The program's believed ghostly residents, as the Kernel reports them, were Mrs. Bryan, wife of Joseph Bryan, and Moses, a butler who was enslaved at Waveland. Every one of those claims is attributed here to the people the Kernel quoted, about a house whose documented history — a slaveholding plantation, a Confederate supplier who fled to Canada, a son who gambled the estate away — is set out in the history section above. The state park's own page for Waveland, collected for this guide, publishes no ghost lore; the reports live in the press coverage, and that is where this guide leaves them.
Hountix lists 5 places in Lexington, KY. Seasonal attractions keep their own open dates, so check each business's own site before you go.
The Mary Todd Lincoln House is the museum of the three, and its own website tells a domestic story with no interest in ghosts. The house, at 578 West Main Street, was the family home of Mary Todd, future wife of the sixteenth president; the museum describes her as sophisticated, educated and versed in politics, and her life — in its own summary — as marked by tragedy. It is the first historic site dedicated to a First Lady, holds period furniture, family portraits and original artifacts from the Todd and Lincoln families, and offers self-guided and guided tours, a small garden and a museum store. Its own visiting facts, as collected: open March 15 to November 30, Monday to Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. with last entry at 3 p.m.; admission $15 for adults self-guided and $20 guided, $6 and $10 for youth; the house can be reached at (859) 233-9999.
Its own About page supplies the chronology the anchor confirms and extends: built between 1803 and 1806 as an inn, the Todd family home from 1832, Mary in residence until 1839, the Lincolns' visit in November 1847, Robert S. Todd's death in 1849, the auctions of contents in 1849 and of the house in 1852, and then the long decline through boarding house, grocery store and brothel to storage, before the Kentucky Mansions Preservation Foundation — led by Kentucky's First Lady Beula C. Nunn — restored it and opened it in 1977, on a 99-year lease of Commonwealth-owned property. The outbuildings of the Todd era, the museum notes, included an outdoor kitchen with slave quarters, a wash house, a smoke house and stables; no evidence of them remains. On ghosts, the museum is silent, and this story keeps its silence intact: the museum's own site publishes no ghost lore — no resident spirit is claimed by the house itself. The haunting attached to its name comes from the ghost tour that stops outside, whose reports of an elegant woman in period clothing are recorded, as the operator's reports, in the legend section above. What the museum sells is the documented life — a First Lady's girlhood in a slaveholding household, told by the house she grew up in — and on its own presentation that is haunting enough.
*Website: http://www.mtlhouse.org/*