OLD BYRON PLANTATION
Location: Located in Adair County, Kentucky, the Old Byron
Plantation rests along the west bank of the Middle Prong Big Creek where the
Cumberland Parkway splits across its northern boundary. Once part of the Adair
Springs community north of Sparksville, the isolated property is now accessed
from Highway 80 by way of a dirt road along the creek running south under the
parkway from nearby Columbia, Kentucky, sixty miles east of Bowling Green.
Description Of Place: Previously known as Twin Oaks Plantation, the
two-story Greek Revival-style mansion was built sometime in the 1790s with
sections of a pre-existing house being dismantled in Virginia. Twenty-foot long
Dorian columns, a section of an heavy mahogany staircase, brass fixtures,
thirty-five windows, doors, frames and other sections were delivered to Adair
County and trucked up a hillside by cart and integrated into an older possibly
1750s-era farm house to create a mansion looking out over once was fifty acres
of tobacco. The final structure had a circular entry hall ascending to a round
second floor landing and ending at a small attic door to the attic servants
quarters as well as a trap-door into the enclosed Widow's Walk on the roof. The
first floor included a library, parlor, kitchen, dining room and smoking room
along with six second-floor bedrooms and an upstairs exterior balcony over the
front door linking two front bedrooms. Although mostly intact, years of neglect
have paid a price on the house and its furnishings resulting in warped floors,
stained walls and foliage creeping in and taking over the entire north end of
the house. The grounds, now heavily wooded and choked with tall grass,
obscures several out buildings including a barn, old servant quarters, a shed
and the old community cemetery.
Ghostly Manifestations: As one travels westward along the Cumberland
Parkway in Southern Kentucky, one is likely to see several of the rolling hills
between woodlands and farmlands in this area where Union Soldiers once raged war
against Confederate soldiers. There are several exposed bedrock faces where
highway engineers blasted through the hills to lay a perfectly flat highway
through the region. Near Columbia, one might noticed a cliff edge with enough
space for a vehicle to pass. One end of this precipitous forgotten wagon trail
has been lost in the name of progress while the other end ends up beyond the
tree-hidden high grounds descending into a remote plantation that has seen
better days. Through those variety of oak, maple and cypress tress growing
unrestrained in this frequently flooding property is the outline of what looks
like a deserted antebellum mansion lost in time. Its white exterior is dirty and
decrepit, and although the windows are boarded up, a few of the black shutters
have blown away and are missing. The roof looks intact until you notice birds
flying in and out from under roof tiles. An old Seventies Ford pick-up with four
flat tires deep into the ground and dirty windows rests in what was once a
circular driveway now overcome by weeds and long grass. A pack of cigarettes
still rest on the cracked dash, and an old jacket lays what might be a tool box
in the passenger seat. Peeking inside from the front doors of the decaying
mansion, it looks like an interior restoration is underway. Scaffolding still
reaches up inside the foyer along with two sawhorses for cutting lengths of
wood, but another glimpse shows what looks like layers of undisturbed dust. Did
something disturb the men restoring the house, and why did they not return for
their tools and equipment?
This is the setting of at Twin Oaks, now known as the Old Byron Plantation, but you won't find anyone who knows the structure exists unless you know who to ask. It's a structure frozen in time belonging to a family that no longer exists. Its former residents rest in a cemetery a thirty-minute walk away, but if one believes the stories, someone... or something... is still making itself to home here.
From the diary of Adam Luther Byron, dated June 13, 1899: "In order to tell you the story I am about to begin, I must first tell how it started because every story needs a start whether you believe it or not. I was born the son of Methodist preacher James Michael Byron, a God-fearing man, an honest man, and an American man. My mother was Sara Matilda Morse-Byron, also a Methodist, but the daughter of a politician, and that's all I will tell you about that side of the family. My father served in the Union Army and fought at the Battle of Nashville and the Battle of Stones Creek, and that's all I will tell you about that because there's nothing else to tell. My father left to fight with his brothers a holy man with a Bible in his pocket, and came home a nervous tired man with a bullet in his leg and a fever that took him to his grave.
"In the late summer of 1865, I was a boy of twelve hunting with my father through the holes and hollows of the county for rabbit or deer or anything else that could be made into stewing meat. It was a hot day, but we had the shade, and as the evening darkness advanced we finally saw what looked like a large bird perched in the branches of an oak tree we had seen several times before. It wasn't the kind of bird we had seen before, but it was as large as a small man and staring at us with nary a movement as we raised our guns. Our shots exploded almost simultaneously and we watched it fall down to the ground, but when he ran over to get a better look at whatever he had hit, he could not find a single trace of whatever it had once been.
"Shortly after this incident, I was out hunting the same way with my brothers, Johnathan and Samuel, not far from the old familiar oak. We bagged a squirrel or two, a rabbit and even came close to some wild bird, but Samuel repeated the exact same story I had told him maybe a week prior. He had seen what looked like a strange white bird in the same familiar old oak, but he said it was watching him with two burning red eyes of ember. Shooting at it, he said it once again seemed to fall to the ground where it instead spread out two large wings, large enough to wrap around a man, and suddenly take to the sky where it quickly vanished amidst the branches of the hollow. We never saw it again past that date nor did we want to see it.
"It was a following night after this incident that our sister, Sara, shared her own experience, but this time her witness appeared in the house of Twin Oaks. She was traveling down the staircase in the house to meet father's company in the parlor when she noticed a strange girl about her own age dressed in white and sitting in the rocking chair of the sewing room at the top of the stairs. It must have only been an instant for her, yet, as she turned and looked back, the room was empty with the chair still barely rocking by the window. It might have been a breeze through the window, but as Sara noted, it was already evening and the window would have been closed. Plus, as I realized that evening, there was no wind or even a breeze that balmy night.
"Isaac, the family overseer, also told of a story of seeing such a girl. He described seeing a girl walking along the length of the creek as if she were coming to the house, but as he approached her, she disappeared from right in front of him. My mother saw her sitting on the ground outside the house and called to her by my sister's name, but this strange young lady never responded. She just raised herself up and walked behind the large oak next to the house as if trying to hide from my mother who walked out to confront my sister and found no one behind the tree. Sara at the time was coming back to the house by carriage with Patricia and Catherine."
The diary goes on to describes weeks and months of strange noises in the house. Tapping sounds echoed from the first floor that moved from the parlor to the dining room and then to the upstairs as Adam's father searched the house with a loaded hunting rifle. On some nights, loud pounding and knocking at the front entrance would wake the entire residence, but no one would ever be found. The rude knocking even started mere seconds after locking the door back up. Eventually, the brothers started staying up to guard the house. On windowless nights, something rattled at the windows of the second floor followed by sounds of invisible rats scurrying across the floors. By winter, the family was hearing voices from empty rooms swelling into whole vague conversations. As weeks went by, the disturbances became even more unnerving, and the lack of sleep made everyone short and bad tempered to each other. No rational explanations could cover all these problems. On Christmas, James Byron was welding a Bible by the hand and preaching a sermon to exorcise the unclean spirits from the house. A Baptist minister he knew from nearby Paducah even came and blessed the New Years Dinner, and the family had peace for what seemed like a month until one night a huge crash rocked the house as if "the roof and all the windows had been shattered all at once, creating a terrible noise that resonated in the family's ears with fear and panic for several days."
"Both Sara and Catherine felt their bed sheets ripped from off of them as they slept, and if they tried to fight against invisible hands, they felt something strike their faces hard enough to leave them red and bruised. Members at church thought Old Jim was abusing his family, but in those days, his fever left him sick in bed for several days and only able to eat meager amounts of bread and butter with water. Patricia and Catherine married quickly by that Spring to move away from Twin Oaks, but Sara stayed around for another two years. During that time, she looked as if she was going mad, describing a girl in white sitting and watching her sleep in her bedroom at night."
From 1895 to 1900, the activity frequently abated and returned with a vengeance like a battery using up its energy to waiting to build it back up to a pitch. At unpredictable moments, objects would fly across rooms, and loud footsteps would stomp down the steps from the attic. Voices echoed from upstairs and downstairs, windows slammed open with such force to shatter the glass. One night, Sara Morse-Byron screamed to see a face staring in through a second floor window would feel something pulling at her hair or biting her arms. If she tried staying with friends, the activity followed her until no one wanted her as a guest. The smell of rotting flesh would also drive everyone out of the house. By time she was of legal marrying age, young Sara looked almost as old as her mother.
During a period of improved health, Old Jim formed an informal committee of close friends, neighbors and allies in order to delve to the source of the haunting that was plaguing his family. Adam writes that the activity definitely showed signs of having an intelligence by distracting men keeping watch on the property with strange lights and shadows as other activity such as poltergeist activity occurred inside. Doors slammed shut and struck family members trying to enter rooms, a the spectral girl in white re-appeared several times, either sitting in chairs or standing on the stairway. The family members who witnessed her presence described her as ghastly and cadaverous with black openings where her eyes should be.
William Savage, Old Jim's brother-in-law, reportedly tried sneaking up on the presence sitting on the top steps of the front foyer. Sneaking up the back stairs from the kitchen, he had quietly glided across the second floor landing where the figure remained and then spread out a blanket to capture her, but as he netted the blanket over the specter, it started giving off an odor later described as “the most offensive stench (he) had ever smelled.” Overcome by the pungent attack to his senses, Savage dropped the bundle and dashed out of the house for fresh air and returned later to locate the blanket where he had dropped it. The odor reported stayed with the blanket for days as it was left over a nearby fence, but it was eventually destroyed in a bonfire.
Adam stayed at Twin Oaks until 1873 when he left Kentucky to work for the railroad, but he returned in 1879 to help his brother Drew get the farm out of debt. In his absence, his father had passed away in 1875 from the yellow fever that had bothered him on and off for his life, and his mother departed with Sara for parts north. No records are really known about their fates, but by now, the activity had seemingly run its course. A guest one night woke to see a female presence standing over him in bed that then turned and walked through the closed bedroom door. Objects vanished and turned up on odd places. Drew recalled his Sunday shoes vanished from his closet one day before church and turned up placed on top of one of Sara's old dresses on the bed in her room which had not been used since her departure. His sons, Drew Jr. and Jesse, often felt as if they were being watched from the top of the stairs, but nothing was ever there. Even Adam felt several times he had to step aside for something invisible passing him on the staircase.
Eventually, activity spurred up again between 1881 and 1889. As Adam reports: "The time had come to start simplifying the house and giving up the relics and possessions of relatives long gone. We were starting to feel crowded with the combination of old furniture and new furniture. Patricia wanted the old dining room set in her Nashville home, and Jonathan had a desire to possess our father's old desk and set of hunting rifles, but as we started packing up grandfather's old library of books, we started getting loud screams and sounds of bellyaching from the old study the likes we had never heard before. The doors would slide back and forth striking each other all night long and screams would wail up the stairs and down again through the night, pausing and starting up again from the first floor to the attic and down again before pausing and starting moments after. We also noticed that boxes we had carried out to the front hall ended up back in the study while books we had sure we had packed had ended up back on the shelves in their original places. I wondered if Old Paw was against us taking away his books, and we put them back. Afterward, we had moments of peace. Little Katie (Drew's daughter) then started telling stories of seeing an old man with wild white hair sitting in that corner chair under the window near the books. Eventually it dawned on us, she was seeing Old Paw's ghost. He had been gone for fifty years yet she described him perfectly without ever seeing an image of him."
During the cleaning out, Sara's room was left untouched, but every time, a book was removed from the house, the screams would start until it was returned. The huge collection stayed preserved behind glass doors ever after, but servants trying to clean the glass were often surprised or shocked by the reflections of an old man in the glass standing behind them. Footsteps continued to scamper through the house, and the sound of an occasional chain rattled from empty rooms. Faces and figures were oft seen at times on and in the property toward the end. Drew Byron Jr. was the last family member to live in the house in 1912, but his will failed to leave the property to his cousins or progeny. It appears no one wanted it.
According to the county archives, interest in the deteriorating property remained stagnant until the county claimed custody in 1973. The transfer of the deed was signed by Sarah Katherine Byron, who if she was the "missing" sister would only have been 97 years of age but was possibly most likely Adam's grand-daughter. Nevertheless, plans to restore the house were stuck in perpetuity for the next twelve years. "Rediscovered" after construction of the parkway through the property in the Early Seventies, the June 17, 1985 edition of the local "Bluegrass Courier" has a short and brief article of the once impressive house and the plans to restore it into a landmark, but by that winter, work had been delayed and stalled at least seven times for unknown reasons.
Local Columbia resident, P. T. Barnes, a retired Army specialist, is one of
the last known descendants of Old James Byron living in the area. According to
him, he heard this story from a friend of a friend who worked on the house's
interior: "According to the story I had heard, the crew on the house didn't
want to work on the house through the winter so they locked it up tight before
the first snowfall and made plans to start on it again in the spring. I guess
they had too many local jobs to keep them busy than to risk getting stuck
driving up the creek to get to the house otherwise they had to reach it
from the more risky cliff-side path in the opposite corner. Anyway, we had a bad
snowfall here that year, and the contractor decided to risk the creek to check
out how the place was holding up from the snow. It's worse than a dirt road to
get to it, it's a wide path of round rocks washed up over the years by the creek
overflowing its banks, but as he got back to Twin Oaks, the story goes that he found this house which he had known to have locked up tight
personally is now standing wide open with the front entrance way full of snow blowing
into the front hall. Now, naturally, you know, he's gotta think its a
homeless person or whatnot coming in to get warm, but there's no one in the
place. I expect he walked through the house looking for someone, but the place
was
empty, and why shouldn't it be? At the time, no one has lived there for forty to
fifty years, and the place isn't exactly popular or easy to get to. However, as
he's going out, he sees the imprint of a small hand, I suppose a woman's hand
given the stories, in what was the fresh paint of the foyer outside the old
library, only its dry... suggesting someone was there the night after they
locked the place up. He also notices a trail of footsteps going out of the house next to his
coming in the house in the snow going down the front porch, following the old
driveway several yards and then vanishing into the tree line past the familiar old
oak and, guess what? According to my grandfather, that's the exact same pathway
to the old Civil War cemetery next to the property."
History: Not much is known about the house. It was originally built
as an isolated farmhouse around 1750, but it was massively renovated into its
current style in the 1790s. It was rumored to have been used as mortuary and
funeral home, but those claims are unable to be validated. Adam Byron claims in
his diary it was built by his great-grandfather, Luther Bell, in 1795,
completely ignoring the previous structure. He reportedly obtained the sections
and pieces he wanted for the house from a manor house in Byberry, Virginia whose
owner had defaulted on a loan. Originally a tobacco plantation, it later
developed into growing corn and potatoes.
Identity Of Ghosts: Except for James Luther Byron II, Adam's
grandfather in the library study, there are no identities for the ghosts at the
Byron House that cannot be speculated. The writers for "Celebrity
Paranormal Project" claims the ghosts are left-over angry spirits from its
time as a funeral home and mortuary, but these claims are contradictory with the
known history of the house. Perhaps, they were actually embellishing the years
that the Byron family allowed the residence to be used as a Civil War Hospital
by the Union Army. Possibly 200 to 300 soldiers were treated from maladies from
infection to dysentery to wounds from gunfire and hand-to-hand combat. In those
days, it was extremely common for over-worked doctors to amputate limbs from
wounded soldiers and often without the benefits of pain-killing drugs. Limbs
would be thrown from windows and hastily buried in shallow graves or tossed on
funeral pyres. However, this does not account for all the alleged sightings of
apparitions made in Adam's diary including the blonde figure in white, a
headless specter in uniform coming down the stairway, two dark-haired boys
dripping wet on the grounds or the grotesque face peeking into the house from
the outside through the upstairs windows.
Investigations: The Byron Plantation has had its fair share of both serious and amateur investigations starting with the short-lived VH1 television series, "Celebrity Paranormal Project," which featured actors and famous icons exploring the legends of obscure haunted sites, often with exaggerated or fabricated scenarios. In two episodes that failed to air before the series was pulled from the television schedule, the nearly inaccessible structure played host to Sammy Hagar, Anson Williams, Justine Bateman, Butch Patrick and Donna Derrico and then David Hasselhoff, John Ratzenburger, Erin Moran, Erin Murphy and Ace Frehley. In both episodes, both casts were more concerned about the structural stability of the place, particularly the stairway up to the upstairs cupola, but they did document strange noises like footsteps, creaking sounds and gasps from empty rooms as well as a sensation of being watched. However, it is hard to tell just how much was staged or just imagined by the surroundings which Ratzenburger himself confessed "was enough to make you imagine anything." The show's writers also perpetuated the story of an alleged exorcism on the property in 1875 to provoke atmosphere, but there is absolutely no validation for any such incident ever taking place here.
Another syndicated paranormal reality TV show, "Sinister Sites," eventually elected to have a more professional investigation exploring the house's reputation rather than its activity. Headed by team leader, Tom Rule, the group consisted of Greg Fisher, Simon McAllister and cameraman Neil Gonsalves. After wiring the first floor for sound and movement, they caught brief moments of footsteps and orb activity. Using an ovilus, a device for capturing words on the inaudible spectrum, they detected the names and words, "Howard," "Teddy," "gunshot," "hurt," "bed," "buried," "hello" and "battle," postulating opinions that the house was solely haunted by Civil War soldiers buried on the premises. Several efforts were used to contact former members of the Byron family, including James Byron in the library, but no contact was established. However, it is worthy to note that in their footage that Rule reviewed he noticed objects changing positions from early in the night to late in their investigation. A chair pushed under the table in the dining room appeared pulled out when Fisher passed through an hour later and the sliding doors to the library that were closed on arrival were open when Rule decided to try removing a few books to provoke Byron's spirit. When Rule decided to completely sketch the interior for a scene by scene proximity comparison of the furnishings inside, McAllister pointed out an entry-way portrait that vanished altogether from the wall.
The team also recovered bones from the
basement smokehouse used to cure meat. It was believed they were they remnants
of a small boy, but they actually turned out to be the remains from a cow, pig
and goat.
Source/Comments: Celebrity Paranormal Project (Episodes:
"Sara's Specter" and "Home Is Where The Haunt Is")/Sinister
Sites (Episode: "The Haunted Plantation") -
Activity based on the Old Bell Farm in Adams, Tennessee, Cragfont in Castalian
Springs, Tennessee, the Myrtles Plantation in St. Francisville, Louisiana,
Octagon Hall in Franklin, Tennessee, Tower Grove in Cedar Rapids, Iowa and
Fairvue Plantation in Gallatin, Tennessee.
"Sinister Sites" from "House of Bones" (2009)