Liberty Hall

Margaretta Varick died at Liberty Hall in three days in 1817. The Gray Lady at the foot of the back bedroom has been documented ever since.

Margaretta Varick came to visit her niece in Frankfort in July 1817 and was dead before the week was out. She was seventy-three. The cause has never been recorded. She had been in the house for three days. Sixty-three years later, a young woman named Mary Mason Scott woke up at Liberty Hall three nights in a row to see a tall woman in gray standing at the foot of her bed. The bedroom was the same one Aunt Varick had died in. The bed was the same bed.

Mary Mason Scott told the story, and other women in the family started telling it, too. The Gray Lady of Liberty Hall is the oldest documented ghost in Kentucky, and one of the very few anywhere with a clear paper trail back to a named, historical, dated human being. The Brown family wrote her sightings down. Their descendants still do.

Liberty Hall itself is a Federal-style house at 202 Wilkinson Street, built between 1796 and 1800 for John Brown, one of Kentucky's first two U.S. Senators. His wife Margaretta Mason Brown ran the household for decades, raised their children here, and hosted presidents, the Marquis de Lafayette, and a generation of Kentucky political life on the back lawn. The house stayed in the Brown family for more than 130 years. In 1937 it was deeded to the Colonial Dames and opened as a museum.

Aunt Varick was Margaretta's aunt from New York. She made the long trip to see the Browns in the summer of 1817. She arrived on July 25th. She died on July 28th, in the back bedroom, and her body was buried in Frankfort because the trip home was impossible in the heat. The family kept that version. The house staff tell it on tour too, because it's the only one supported by letters in the Brown family archive.

The Gray Lady's first major sighting came in the 1880s, when Mame Scott was sleeping in that same back bedroom as a teenage guest. A tall woman in a gray veil stood at the end of her bed on three consecutive nights. Mame didn't scream. She told her aunt in the morning, and her aunt told her it sounded like Aunt Varick. A generation later, Mary Gunn Brown, married to one of John Brown's grandsons, saw the same figure in the same room. Docents still give that bedroom tour in hushed voices, not for theater, but because their guests keep asking what the hair on their arms is doing.

Liberty Hall has two other reported ghosts, and both are in the garden. One is said to be a Spanish opera singer named Madame Rosa, who visited Frankfort from New Orleans in 1805, attended a party at the house, stepped into the garden for air, and was never seen again. The other is a Civil War soldier, identity unknown, sometimes seen walking a fence line that no longer exists. Neither has the documentation the Gray Lady does, and staff are careful to say so. Some visitors still feel both.

The Kentucky Historical Society and the Dames take care of this property with serious rigor befitting a 220-year-old house museum, and they run a Liberty Hall Ghost Hunt every October where paranormal groups do their work inside the building overnight. Nobody from the organization will tell you what the investigators found. They will tell you which rooms the groups ask to be left alone in after midnight, and it's always the back bedroom.

Aunt Varick died on July 28th, 1817. Mame Scott saw her in 1880. Somebody else will see her next October, or the October after. The house keeps the letters, the staff keep the story straight, and the woman in the gray veil keeps coming back to the foot of the bed in the room where she was still a living guest for three days.