In Brief
A security guard at Buffalo Trace Distillery near Frankfort, Kentucky kept seeing an older man in worker's clothes watching him through the elevator door, then walking off. He checked the video each time. There was never anyone there.
The Full Story
At Buffalo Trace Distillery, in a valley bend of the Kentucky River north of Frankfort, a security guard named Zack Evans stepped off the elevator one day and found a man waiting. Older, with a grey moustache and grey beard, dressed like a worker. The man stood looking at him through the door, then walked off. Evans checked the video. No one was there.
He says he saw the same man every day for a week.
The man most people land on is Colonel Albert B. Blanton. He was hired here as an office boy at 16 in 1897, worked through every department, and was president by 1921. When Prohibition shut the country's distilleries, Blanton secured a government license to keep producing "medicinal whiskey," one of a handful permitted to stay open. He ran the place for decades and died in 1959 at Stony Point, the hilltop mansion he'd built overlooking the grounds. Visitors and staff report a figure in the window of the room where he died. A PR manager once told a reporter that a colleague had seen the face of a thin, gray man looking out from that building early one morning, and afterward couldn't bring herself to work there alone.
The sightings cluster hardest in Warehouse C, built in 1885. Tour guides describe a figure at the end of a hallway and the sound of boots walking the floor above when the warehouse is locked and empty. Tyler Adams, who runs the visitor experience, says some guides won't go in there alone in the evening anymore.
In 2011, the Ghost Hunters team filmed an episode there called "Distillery of Spirits." Inside Warehouse C, two of the investigators heard a voice and footsteps overhead, one of them heard a loud thud, and one said something pinched him. Two others said they fell when a black mass moved toward them. A crew member later said they'd recorded more activity at Buffalo Trace than anywhere else they'd investigated.
The distillery doesn't hide from any of it. Every October it runs a ghost-themed walking program, 21 and up, and gives away a night inside Stony Point to whoever wins the draw.
The strange part is how kind everyone says it all feels. Staff describe the figures as protective, never aggressive, watching over the place rather than haunting it. The man Zack Evans saw never came closer and never spoke. He only stood at the door and watched the guard work, then walked off down a hallway where no camera could find him.
