Frankfort Cemetery

A 1983 forensic skull cast suggests Kentucky dug up the wrong body in 1845, and the bones under Daniel Boone's monument may not be his.

Daniel Boone is buried in Frankfort Cemetery. Probably. Maybe. There's a decent chance the grave actually contains an enslaved African American man whose bones Kentucky officials took by mistake in 1845 and never gave back.

The cemetery itself is a landmark: Kentucky's first rural garden-style burial ground, established in the early 1840s, sitting on rolling hills above the Kentucky River, on the National Register of Historic Places. Governors, soldiers, and pioneers are buried here. The one tourists come for is Boone.

Boone died in Missouri in 1820 and was buried next to his wife Rebecca in a small family cemetery at Tuque Creek. Twenty-five years later, a Kentucky delegation rolled in and asked the Boone family's Missouri relatives for the body back. The relatives, in the Missouri version of the story, were irritated that Kentucky had ignored Boone in life and suddenly wanted him in death. They let the Kentuckians dig. And they apparently didn't say anything when the Kentuckians dug up the wrong plot.

The Tuque Creek cemetery was crowded. Enslaved people were buried there alongside the Boone family. The story that circulated in Missouri for generations afterward is that Kentucky took a stranger home and then threw him a parade.

In 1983, forensic anthropologist David Wolf examined a plaster cast of the skull that had been made before the Kentucky reburial. His conclusion was blunt: the skull probably belonged to a large African American man, not a seventy-five-year-old white frontiersman. The cast wasn't conclusive. But it pointed one direction.

In June 2010, Missouri finally stopped fighting. A document filed by the Friends of Daniel Boone's Burial Site conceded that some of Boone's bones had been moved to Kentucky in 1845, but only the "large" ones. Which solves nothing, because the small bones, the skull included, stayed in Missouri. Or didn't. Or were never Boone's to begin with.

Both cemeteries still claim him. Both have a grave.

The haunting, such as it is, follows from the confusion. The book "Haunted Houses and Family Ghosts of Kentucky" tells a story about a stormy night shortly before Henry Clay's death, when the ghost of Clay's friend Daniel Boone appeared to call on him one last time. Poet Arthur Guiterman imagined Boone's ghost tracking animals, real and mythical, across the Milky Way. It's the sort of ghost story that's less about sightings and more about the idea of a man who can't settle because nobody's sure where he is.

Frankfort Cemetery is worth visiting on its own merits. Nearby Liberty Hall Historic Site, a short drive into downtown, is separately haunted and worth the second stop. But the Boone monument is the one where people stand longer than they mean to. A stone with a name on it, and no one entirely sure whose bones it marks.