Bodley-Bullock House

Teetotaler Minnie Bullock died in 1970. When trustees voted to allow alcohol in her house, the boardroom table glass cracked overnight.

The day after the board of trustees voted to allow alcohol at events inside the Bodley-Bullock House, staff walked into the boardroom and found a large crack running through the glass covering the table. Nothing had hit it. Nothing could explain it. They took it as a message from Minnie.

Minnie Bullock lived in this Gratz Park house from 1912 until her death in 1970. She was a Lexington civic fixture, a driving force behind the restoration of the Hunt-Morgan House next door, and a complete teetotaler who forbade alcohol under her roof. The trustees' vote in the boardroom fifty years later went directly against the terms of her original will. The cracked glass showed up the next morning.

The house itself is older than Minnie by a century. Samuel Long built it around 1814 for Lexington mayor Thomas Pindell. General Thomas Bodley, a War of 1812 hero and the court clerk who admitted Henry Clay to the bar, bought it for $10,000 shortly after. Bodley lost the place in the Panic of 1819, and during the Civil War, both Confederate and Union forces used it as headquarters at different times. The architectural showpiece is a cantilevered elliptical staircase, a graceful three-story spiral considered the finest in any Federal-style house in Kentucky. That staircase is also where Minnie most often turns up.

Wedding photographers have been the ones to catch her. Brides who book the house send their proofs back for review and find an unidentified woman, sometimes with a small child, standing on the spiral staircase behind them. Nobody was there during the shoot. The Blue Grass Trust for Historic Preservation, which runs the Gratz Park Ghost Tails and Tours, attributes the figure to Minnie, quietly horrified that her house is now a wedding venue.

The electrical system carries its own disapproval. During one reception, the foyer lights turned on and off four full times in a row, as if hurrying the last guests out.

The Bodley-Bullock House passed to Transylvania University when Minnie died, and the Junior League of Lexington restored it in 1984 into a house museum and event venue. It's one of about seven documented haunted addresses inside the three-block Gratz Park district. Minnie had every intention of being its last real resident.