White Hall State Historic Site

An image of an enslaved woman was visible in White Hall's upstairs window for decades. In 2007 staff coated the glass and she finally disappeared.

For years, visitors approaching White Hall from the long driveway could see the face of a woman in an upstairs window. Not a reflection, not a trick of curtains. An actual image, in the pattern of the glass, of an enslaved Black woman in profile, turned as if watching the road. The image was there long enough that people stopped being surprised by it. In 2007 the staff applied a UV coating to the glass to protect the panes, and the woman disappeared.

The legend that had grown up around her held that a sheriff's posse once came to White Hall to rescue her and she refused to leave. Cassius Clay, the house's owner, had already granted her freedom. She stayed on her own terms.

White Hall is a 44-room mansion outside Richmond, Kentucky, on 14 acres of what used to be farmland. The original house was built in 1798 by General Green Clay, one of the largest landholders and slaveholders in the state. It was his son, Cassius Marcellus Clay, who made it famous. Cassius was born into slavery's money and spent his life trying to abolish the institution his family had used to build the house. He published an antislavery newspaper called The True American in Lexington in the 1840s, and the paper was so inflammatory his neighbors chased him into exile in Cincinnati to keep printing it. He defended his views at political rallies with a bowie knife and two pistols, survived multiple assassination attempts, campaigned for Abraham Lincoln, and was appointed Minister to Russia as his reward. He lived to 93. His nickname, which he earned, was the Lion of White Hall.

The Lion seems to be the one still opening the doors. Tour guides and curators at White Hall report shutters opening on their own, furniture moving in empty rooms, and the sounds of a piano and a violin playing music in a house where the instruments no longer work. The smell of burning candles drifts through rooms where nothing is lit. A rose perfume sometimes fills a single hallway and dies out a room later.

Staff have identified at least four distinct presences. A man many assume to be Cassius himself, moving room to room. A young boy in knee pants who likes to play hide and seek with visitors, appearing and vanishing between doorways. A woman in a hoop skirt walking the halls. And a baby, sometimes crying, sometimes gurgling happily, as if it were being attended by hands no one can see.

White Hall passed to the Commonwealth of Kentucky in 1968, opened as a state historic site in 1971, and is now managed by Eastern Kentucky University. The house hosts a Scandals and Ghost Stories tour that covers more of Cassius's drama than its hauntings (multiple divorces, a daughter born when he was 84, a series of duels and scandals that scandalized even Kentucky). Paranormal investigators have logged formal studies of the building. A man who spent his whole life refusing to be quiet was never going to pass quietly out of his own house. Cassius didn't.