The Carneal House

The oldest house in Covington, this 1815 mansion was built by Thomas Carneal, an early Kentucky land speculator and businessman. The elegant home witnessed nearly two centuries of Northern Kentucky history.

The Carneal House, Covington's oldest brick structure, harbors one of Northern Kentucky's most enduring ghost legends: the Gray Lady. Built between 1815-1820 by city founder Thomas D. Carneal as a "show house" to attract residents to the fledgling town, this Federal-style mansion with its distinctive two-story Palladian portico has witnessed two centuries of triumph and tragedy along the banks of the Ohio River.

The most persistent legend claims the Gray Lady met her end during the Marquis de Lafayette's 1824-1825 American farewell tour. According to folklore, the Southgate family hosted a grand ball in the French hero's honor, where a young woman in a gray chiffon dress asked Lafayette to dance. When the 67-year-old Revolutionary War hero—who walked with a severe limp from a broken femur—declined her request, she reportedly hanged herself that very night, devastated by the rejection.

However, local historian Karl Lietzenmayer, senior editor of Northern Kentucky Magazine and Kenton County Historical Society board member, has thoroughly debunked this romantic tale. After examining the Southgate family papers acquired from the University of North Carolina, he discovered that Lafayette never actually stopped in Covington—a town of merely 600 people at the time—as he was "anxious to visit Cincinnati, the namesake of his revolutionary society." The Southgates did host a party for Lafayette, but at Adeliza's parents' home in Lexington, not Covington. No suicide was ever reported at the Carneal House.

If a Gray Lady does haunt these halls, Lietzenmayer believes she is Adeliza Keene Southgate herself, wife of Congressman William Wright Southgate who purchased the home in 1835. Adeliza's life was marked by profound tragedy: her husband died in 1849, leaving her pregnant with their thirteenth child and caring for eleven others. She would outlive ten of her children over the following decades, enduring heartbreak after heartbreak. Adding to her suffering, she was eventually evicted from her own beloved home when a son-in-law no longer desired her presence there. Adeliza lived until 1892, dying at age 84 after nearly seven decades of loss.

Guests and visitors have reported unmistakable signs of the Gray Lady's presence: heavy footsteps echoing through empty rooms, doors slamming shut on their own, sudden dramatic drops in temperature, and most famously, a rocking chair that sways back and forth with no one sitting in it. The apparition herself is always described wearing the same gray dress, drifting silently through the mansion's elegant rooms. When the house operated as a bed-and-breakfast (most recently in 2001), overnight guests reported unexplained noises and objects moving on their own.

Today, the fully restored Carneal House remains a featured stop on the Ghosts of Covington Haunted History Tour, led by Chris Code of River City Tours. Code identifies the spirit as possibly Eliza Keene, one of the original owners—though whether she is the romantic suicide victim of legend or the grief-stricken Adeliza whose sorrows were all too real, the Gray Lady continues her eternal vigil in Covington's most haunted mansion.