Wickland Mansion

Bardstown's Wickland housed three governors. Its most present ghost is Waleta, an enslaved cook who died of TB and still keeps the kitchen.

The historian Dixie Hibbs has been leading tours through Wickland since 2009 with a pair of twin mediums, and the same ghost shows up for them in the same spot every time. Her name is Waleta. She was an enslaved cook at the house in the 1860s, died of tuberculosis, and spends her afterlife where she spent her working life: in the kitchen, hair pulled back under a scarf, sleeves pushed up over arms scarred by cooking burns. She is friendly. She likes when visitors ask questions.

Wickland sits on the eastern edge of Bardstown, Kentucky, a Georgian-style brick mansion built between 1825 and 1828 and known locally as the Home of Three Governors. The Wickliffe family produced two Kentucky governors (Charles A. Wickliffe in 1839, and his great-grandson J. C. W. Beckham from 1900 to 1907) and a Louisiana governor (Robert C. Wickliffe, 1856 to 1860), all of whom lived at Wickland at one point or another. That is an unusual political resume for a single brick house on a country road.

One of the ghosts Waleta talks about most is a boy named Sam. Sam was six years old and had been told to wait in the first-floor hallway while his father was doing business in the office. A white cat led him up the staircase instead. Somewhere between the second floor and the landing, Sam slipped off the railing and broke his neck. Waleta was the one who found him. When the mediums first reached him on a tour, Waleta said he was a "new face," which is a strange thing to say about a boy who has been dead at Wickland for more than a century, and a clue about how time moves for her.

Waleta is the most encountered spirit, but she is not the only enslaved person who still shows up at Wickland. Tour accounts reference a second enslaved woman from the same era who is heard more often than seen. Both were people whose work held the house together and whose names, because of how the country kept records of people it owned, are only partially preserved. Waleta at least is known as Waleta.

The Spirits of Wickland tour runs regularly, and the mansion does self-guided history tours as well. The owners put more weight on the supernatural than on the political inheritance, which is probably smart marketing: most people can name a dozen US senators and not one cook who shaped a household over twenty years. Waleta's kitchen is a good correction to that ratio.