In Brief
At the Old Governor's Mansion in Frankfort, Kentucky, a woman called the Weeping Lady is heard sobbing through the empty halls. She's said to be a governor's wife grieving a dead child. The trouble is, no record of who she is matches the figure people describe.
The Full Story
At the Old Governor's Mansion in Frankfort, Kentucky, the ghost people tell you about is a woman they call the Weeping Lady. They never see her clearly. They hear her, sobbing somewhere in the halls of a house with no one living in it, and the story has her as a governor's wife mourning a child who died.
The house is the oldest official executive residence still in use in the contiguous United States. It went up in 1797 and 1798 on High Street, Federal-style brick the early residents nicknamed the Palace. Two of the men who built it, a bricklayer named Robert Letcher and a stonemason named Thomas Metcalfe, both later became governor and moved into the house they'd laid the stones for. Andrew Jackson dined there. So did Lafayette, and Theodore Roosevelt, and Henry Clay. A fire in the 1890s tore through the place and burned a great many of the governors' papers, but the walls held, and the house went on.
From 1798 until 1914, governors and their families lived there, more than thirty of them by the official count. They raised children in those rooms. Some of those children died in them. The Weeping Lady is supposed to be one of the mothers, still grieving in the only home that ever held her family, unable to leave a child she had to bury.
But nobody can say which one. Records show several governors' wives who lost a child in the mansion, and that should make her easy to name. It doesn't. None of them matches the woman people describe, the gown from an era long past, the figure that roams the halls. According to ghost-tour accounts, candlelight still flickers in the upper windows long after dark, the same windows a renovation enlarged in 1858. The mansion stopped being a residence in 1914, and the last governor walked out of it more than a century ago.
It's a museum now, owned by the state, shown only by appointment. No one sleeps there. The mansion is a fixed stop on Frankfort's ghost tour, and a local reporter who took it wrote that the group's meters began squealing as they came up on the building, a chill climbing the back of her neck, though she pinned it on a nearby electrical box.
So the chill on the tour has an explanation, more or less. The woman doing the sobbing does not.
