In Brief
At Liberty Hall in Frankfort, Kentucky, the family kept seeing a tall woman veiled in gray at the foot of the bed. They knew who she was: Margaretta Varick, an aunt who arrived to visit in 1817 and was dead in three days.
The Full Story
Liberty Hall is a Federal brick mansion on Wilkinson Street in Frankfort, Kentucky, and the woman who haunts it has a name, a date, and a death certificate. They call her the Gray Lady. She is reckoned the oldest documented ghost in the state.
In July 1817, Margaretta Varick traveled down from New York to visit her niece, Margaretta Brown, the lady of the house. By most tellings she came to comfort the family after the death of a Brown child. Three days after she arrived, on July 28, she died in an upstairs back bedroom. She was in her seventies, and no one could ever say what killed her. The theories that survive are a heart attack, acute indigestion, the sheer exhaustion of the journey — nothing the doctors would commit to.
She did not stay buried quietly. In the 1880s, a great-granddaughter named Mary Mason Scott, the last of the Browns to live in the house, was sleeping in that same back bedroom when she woke to a tall figure veiled in gray standing at the foot of her bed. It happened three nights running. Mame Scott was not frightened of her. She later wrote, in a letter, the phrase the family would keep for generations: "our beloved ghost."
That is the strange thing about the Gray Lady. The family did not run from her. They wrote her down, and they tended the story across descendants. Over two hundred years the sightings kept coming, into the present day — on the front staircase, at the Palladian window, the only one of the house's ghosts ever reported indoors. There is even a 1965 photograph of the front staircase that is said to show a vaporous figure standing on the steps, taken after a fire, or during a renovation, depending on who tells it.
The Browns built this place between 1796 and 1800. John Brown was one of Kentucky's first U.S. Senators, and the house is cited as one of the finest examples of Federal architecture in the country, modeled on what he had seen in Philadelphia. Over the years it held James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, the Marquis de Lafayette. Most of the furniture standing in it today is the family's own, down to their manuscripts and letters. It has been a museum since 1937.
Each October the staff run tours led by costumed guides, and Frankfort children dress as the Gray Lady for Halloween. The current director frames her gently. "Her energy is very loving and matriarchal," a staff member told a reporter. A woman who came for a three-day visit, and never got back on the road north.
