In Brief
Wickland, the brick Georgian mansion outside Bardstown, Kentucky, is marketed as the Home of Three Governors. But the spirit its tours keep meeting is none of them. She's Waleta, the cook, always in the same kitchen, the strongest presence the mediums report.
The Full Story
Wickland is a three-story brick Georgian mansion half a mile east of Bardstown, Kentucky, and its marker calls it the "Home of Three Governors." The spirit the tours keep meeting was never one of them. They call her Waleta, the cook, and she is always in the kitchen at the back of the house.
Tour-tellers describe her the same way every time: a long grayish-brown dress, a bib apron, sleeves pushed up over arms scarred from cooking burns, her hair pulled back under a scarf. The accounts present her as the Black cook who ran the kitchen and died of tuberculosis. Of all the spirits the tours report, she is the one who turns up most reliably, and she never leaves the rear of the house where she worked.
The house earned its name honestly. Charles Wickliffe built it around 1815, generally dated to the mid-1810s though a few accounts place it a decade later, and went on to govern Kentucky. His son governed Louisiana. His grandson, born here, governed Kentucky too and later sat in the U.S. Senate. An architectural historian called Wickland a place of unique Georgian plan, and many count it the finest domestic Georgian house in the state. A cantilevered staircase climbs all three floors with no visible support, hand-carved, rounded at the corners, with tapered posts. That staircase is where the next story lives.
The tours tell of a boy named Sam, about six, left to wait on the first floor while his father did business. He followed a white cat up the steps, leaned over the banister, and fell. Waleta is the one who says she found him. She calls him "a new face," which is its own quiet horror, because the boy has been dead a long time.
There are others the tellers name. A shy three-year-old who holds up three fingers when asked his age, said to be a Beckham child who died of pneumonia and lies buried in the family plot in town. A yard worker named Antoine, dead of tuberculosis after a long, painful illness. Twin-sister mediums have led the way since 2008, working dowsing rods for yes and no, rods crossed for yes, apart for no, and visitors come back with orb photographs from the library.
None of it sits in a record. No census names Waleta, no newspaper logs Sam's fall, no certificate confirms the tuberculosis. The house is owned by the county and open for history tours and weddings; the ghost tour itself comes and goes. "All we really ask is come with an open mind," the Bardstown historian Dixie Hibbs has said of it, "and all we promise is entertainment." What stays is the arrangement on the marker. Three governors out front, and a cook in the back kitchen who keeps turning up long after everyone stopped writing her down.
