In Brief
The Carneal House in Covington, Kentucky has a Lady in Grey who hanged herself the night Lafayette refused to dance with her. A historian went through the family papers and found the legend never happened. The real woman is worse.
The Full Story
The Carneal House on East Second Street in Covington, Kentucky has a ghost called the Lady in Grey, and the story behind her is tidy. A young woman in a gray chiffon dress came to a ball held for the Marquis de Lafayette, the famous Frenchman touring America in 1824. She asked the aging general to dance. He declined. That same night, the story goes, she hanged herself, and she has walked the house ever since.
People report her, or the things she does. Heavy footsteps cross the upper floor. Doors slam in empty rooms. The temperature drops in the parlor without a reason, and on the stairway people feel a cold that has no source. A rocking chair sways with no one in it. The legend is the centerpiece of a Covington ghost tour that stops at the door and tells it just this way, and one of the guides softens it further, saying she did not hang herself at all but died of embarrassment.
Then a local historian named Karl Lietzenmayer went through the Southgate family papers, and the story came apart. Lafayette never stopped in Covington, a town of about 600 people at the time. "Lafayette did not stop anywhere in Covington," Lietzenmayer said, "as he was anxious to visit you know what, Cincinnati." The family's actual Lafayette reception happened in Lexington, at the bride's parents' home. And no suicide was ever documented at the house. There is no body, no record, no death to point to.
What he found instead was sadder than the legend. If there is a Lady in Grey, Lietzenmayer believes, she is Adaliza Keene Southgate, who lived in this house and never haunted anyone's story. She came from the Keene family that Keeneland Race Track is named for. She was widowed in the 1840s with eleven children and one more on the way. She outlived ten of the eleven. At the end, a son-in-law evicted her from the house she had filled with all of them.
"If there is a Lady in Grey it is Adeliza," he said, "and it has nothing to do with Lafayette."
The house was built around 1815, the year Covington was founded, and it is thought to be the oldest standing structure in town. The ghost story and the history share the address, and the tour still tells the version with Lafayette in it. They have never agreed on who is in the house.
