In Brief
The Old Talbott Tavern in Bardstown, Kentucky keeps its most famous ghost on the upstairs landing. A bookkeeper watched a man in a long old coat laugh and vanish there, then spotted his face on a TV program about Old West outlaws and named him: Jesse James.
The Full Story
The Old Talbott Tavern in Bardstown, Kentucky has a ghost on its upstairs landing, and the people who saw him say they only worked out who he was off a television screen, later. A former bookkeeper and a cook watched a man in a long 19th-century coat standing there. He laughed and vanished. The bookkeeper saw a photo on a program about Old West outlaws and recognized the face. It was Jesse James.
James is the tavern's most famous spirit, and the story goes he left a physical mark here long before he ever turned up on the stairs. Upstairs there's a mural of a French garden, birds and flowers and trees, painted around 1797 by the exiled Louis-Philippe of France and his entourage during a stay. It was hidden under plaster for over a century, rediscovered in 1927, and put on display, riddled with bullet holes. Tradition says James shot at the painted birds while drunk. The tavern's own history names a different culprit, a local sheriff who did the same after drinking. Either way, someone fired into the wall.
The building has been open since 1779, billed as the oldest western stagecoach stop still running in America, and James kept good company there. The guest book over the years reads like an index of American history: George Rogers Clark, Daniel Boone, Andrew Jackson, a young Abraham Lincoln, John James Audubon.
George Talbott bought the place in 1886, and within two years six of his children died inside its walls. One daughter, the story goes, hanged herself over a lost love. A child fell down the stairs. Mrs. Talbott herself is said to drift through the tavern in white, floating up the staircase, and some think she's the Lady in White that guests report: thin, with long brown wavy hair and a long 1800s dress. One couple fled their room mid-night after watching her hover over the bed, then float out the window.
There's the rest of it, too: keys that disappear from the front desk and turn up down the hall, a piano that plays, footsteps, a door that opens and closes, heaters and televisions switching on by themselves.
A fire tore through the second floor in 1998 and gutted the mural room and the Jesse James room, the one guests book first. The tavern reopened the next year. The French garden mural, with its bullet holes, was never restored. It's still up there, twice ruined.
