The Shinkle House

Sarah Shinkle hated the mansion her husband built. When she died in 1908 she came back to the Garrard Street house she actually wanted.

Don Nash had just finished making the bed in Sarah Shinkle's old room. He stepped into the bathroom. When he came back, someone had sat on the freshly smoothed quilt and left a deep impression in the shape of a body, as if whoever it was had been waiting for him to leave. His assistant had been in the adjoining bathroom the whole time.

This kind of story used to pile up at the Amos Shinkle Townhouse on Garrard Street in Covington, Kentucky, when it operated as a bed and breakfast in the 1980s and 1990s. The owner, former Covington mayor Bernie Moorman, and his partner Don Nash ran the place for years, and between them they collected enough stories to stock a decent podcast. The bed impression was the one they told most often. There was no breeze, no pet, no plausible explanation. Something heavy had sat down and gotten back up.

The house belonged to Amos Shinkle, a Covington coal and steamboat baron who also happened to be one of the most interesting Kentuckians nobody writes about. He bought the Garrard Street house in 1854. Shinkle was born dirt poor in 1818, arrived in Covington in the 1840s with one boat and a lot of stamina, and by the Civil War was rich enough to bankroll half the town. He served as president of the Covington and Cincinnati Bridge Company and provided both the money and the political muscle that got the John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge finished in 1867. He was a staunch Unionist, commanded a regiment of the Kentucky Home Guards, and quietly used the carriage house behind his home as an Underground Railroad station, sheltering people fleeing slavery until they could cross the Ohio to Cincinnati.

His wife Sarah Jane Hughes Shinkle loved that Garrard Street house. In 1869, Amos built a 33-room Second Street mansion to better advertise his wealth, and Sarah never forgave him for making her move. She died in 1908, sixteen years after Amos. Local legend says she came right back to the house she actually wanted.

The carriage house has a different kind of reputation. At a paranormal convention in Cincinnati, several attendees stayed the night in the old carriage house behind the main building. They came out the next morning pale and shaken, and described the same thing: a feeling of overwhelming grief, and a crowd of faces pressed against the upper-floor windows. Nobody told them in advance that the building had been an Underground Railroad stop. Whoever was there had not come to bother Sarah.

The house was sold in 2012 and is now a private family home, no longer open to the public. The Ghosts of Covington Haunted History Tour still includes the Shinkle House on its route, telling Sarah's story and the carriage house story from the sidewalk. Moorman and Nash's old guestbook, wherever it ended up, would be worth reading.