Old State Capitol Building

Goebel was shot on the lawn in 1900, the only US governor ever assassinated in office. His portrait falls off walls. Conjure Chest downstairs.

A security guard walked past William Goebel's portrait on the anniversary of his assassination, and the portrait fell off the wall behind him. The nail was still in place. The wire hadn't snapped. The painting had just decided to come down. Goebel, in case his portrait is new information, is the only sitting US governor ever murdered in office. He was shot on the lawn of the Kentucky Old State Capitol on January 30, 1900, sworn in from his deathbed a day later, and died on February 3. He served the shortest governorship in American history. Four days.

Frankfort's Old State Capitol served as Kentucky's seat of government from 1830 to 1910. Gideon Shryock designed it in Greek Revival at the age of twenty-five, and it still has the self-supporting stone staircase that made his name. Goebel's assassin fired from the old State Journal building next door. The shot came from a second-story window, passed through a maple tree, and hit Goebel in the right side, piercing his lung. Nobody was ever convincingly convicted of the killing. Secretary of State Caleb Powers did nine years before being pardoned. The trial took four separate proceedings to close. The real shooter has never been publicly named.

The building is now a museum run by the Kentucky Historical Society, and the staff have a stock list of ghost stories they've given up trying to debunk. Goebel's portrait falling is the best-documented one. Another involves a staff member walking through the second-floor House chamber alone after hours and hearing voices in the room that changed direction as he walked, like a crowd moving with him. He went back for his keys and never finished the rounds that night.

The weirdest object in the building isn't in the main hall. It's downstairs, in a display case, and it's called the Conjure Chest. The chest is a plain mahogany veneer trunk, built in the early 1800s for the Burton family in Shelby County. According to family oral history, the carpenter, an enslaved man named Hosea, was beaten to death by Jeremiah Burton before he finished the piece. Hosea's mother placed a curse on the chest, with the help of a conjure woman named Mary Ann, that would kill anyone who folded their clothes into it. Seventeen Burton-family deaths over four generations were eventually attributed to the chest. A fifteen-year-old named Melvina Burton Smith had it removed from the family home in 1942 after two more children died. It's been at the Kentucky History Center and then the Old Capitol ever since. A descendant, Virginia Cary Hudson Mayne, wrote the family history book that made the chest famous in 1976.

Staff at the Old Capitol report that the air around the display changes temperature visibly on some days. Security cameras occasionally pick up motion in the case at night. Nobody who works in the building wants to be the one to open it. It's been sealed for decades.

Then there's the arsenal. There's a small brick outbuilding behind the main capitol that was used to store war artifacts. Staff have reported hearing gunshots from inside it when it's locked and empty. One account, from a security guard in the 2010s, describes hearing what sounded like a single rifle round go off in the building while he was walking the grounds. He called backup, unlocked the arsenal, and found nothing out of place.

The Frankfort Ghost Tour stops here every night in October. Their guide stands on the steps where Goebel was shot and tells the assassination story straight. The tour doesn't embellish. It doesn't need to. You have a murdered governor on the lawn, a cursed chest in the basement, and a portrait that keeps finding reasons to fall. The building has kept all its own secrets, which is more than most state capitols can say.