A ghostly little footnote was left out of my story back in the summer regarding the pioneer cemetery that has been preserved in the middle of the Kentucky State Fair midway.
At that time I had not heard about the ghost of a baby.
During my first visit to the Oldham Family Cemetery, I noticed the names of several young children who are buried under the aged gravestones dating to the early 1800s. Samuel Oldham's plantation once occupied the land now covered by the Kentucky Exposition Center and Kentucky Kingdom. Many Oldham family members and slaves are buried in the small parcel of land that he made provisions for in his will.
"The first time that I remember hearing anything about the baby was from Tom Lee, a gentleman who had worked here for years and who has since retired and passed away," said Vickey Hypes, the fairgrounds horticultural supervisor.
Around 12 years ago, Lee, who had been operating a weed trimmer in the cemetery, told her that he had turned the machine off and heard what sounded like a baby crying. Somewhat concerned because there were no shows going on at the fairgrounds, no RVs parked in the lot surrounding the cemetery, and no place where a child should be crying, he began looking for the source.
"Then is when he said he actually saw the child," said Hypes. "He described it as wearing like a long christening gown, with a bonnet on, and that it was hovering straight up. Then he said it slowly moved toward a stone, and when it got to that stone it appeared like it went through it, and it quit crying and just disappeared."
Some time later, another trusted employee who has since died reported an almost identical encounter, again just after he had finished trimming weeds around the cemetery. "He described it the same way," said Hypes.
'I know what I heard'
However, Dennis Thorpe, the longtime grounds maintenance supervisor at the fairgrounds, had his own experience while working alone early one fall morning at the cemetery several years ago.
"I heard what appeared to be a child crying," Thorpe said. "At first I thought it might be a tomcat out prowling -- because I had heard them before in my neighborhood. I didn't pay much attention to it, but looked around and didn't see anything at all. But when I got to the other side, I distinctly heard a child crying again, and it was coming from the cemetery."
Thorpe did not see the form of a baby, and he has never heard the crying since then.
"But I know what I heard, and that was a child crying," he said. "The second time I heard it was for maybe 10 or 15 seconds, and it wasn't like a child in distress -- just kind of like a child that was lonesome."
Samuel Oldham's great-great-great-granddaughter, Dona O. Page, of Deer Park, Texas, said earlier this year that she was unaware of any ghostly tales associated with the cemetery at the fairgrounds, but that she was not surprised by the accounts. Ghost stories had been associated with another family plot in Jefferson County, she said.
Although Hypes has never seen anything unusual at the cemetery, she and a number of other employees say they have seen the ghostly figure of a man who appears in one of the fairgrounds greenhouses located on the other side of Interstate 65 from the rest of the fairgrounds.
"There have been multiple sightings of just one person back there, and everybody describes him exactly the same -- he's an older guy, wearing a fairly long coat and like a fedora hat," Hypes said.
"He goes through the greenhouse door and up through the greenhouse, and then he just disappears. One girl that was working at a desk saw him come in initially and asked, 'Can I help you?' And he just kept on walking. She said it was like a real person, but he just kept on walking into these cases of moss that we had stacked up maybe 6 or 8 feet tall -- and he just basically seemed to disappear as he went through the moss. ..."
Reach Byron Crawford at (502) 582-4791 or bcrawford@courier-journal.com. Comment on this column, and read his previous columns about the midway cemetery, at www.courier-journal.com/byron.
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