If there’s something strange in your neighborhood, who ya gonna call?
Forget Ghostbusters. Call David Dominé if your ghost is in Old Louisville, one of the country’s largest historic preservation districts that some say is the most haunted.
Dominé, an award-winning Louisville author and historian, has written several books about supernatural encounters in his former stomping ground, where flickering gas lamps cast an eerie glow on Victorian mansions. He won’t “bust” your ghost, but he might add it to the cast of dearly departed characters on his Old Louisville Ghost Tour.
The gleefully ghoulish 90-minute walking tour stops at several architectural wonders, where shadowy figures flit in the windows of turrets, and gargoyles grimace in the moonlight.
Dominé started the tour 20 years ago because he had his own ghost when he moved into the Widmer House on Third Street in 1999. The previous owner warned him to try to get along with “Lucy,” a poltergeist who disliked pictures hanging on a wall in the butler’s pantry. Dominé disregarded this piece of advice and hung his pictures.
They never stayed there for long. The pictures would come crashing down in the middle of the night, no matter how securely they were affixed to the wall.
Furniture rearranged itself in the wee hours, and Dominé’s dogs and cats sometimes became inexplicably agitated, as though a stranger had entered the room when nobody was there.
He wasn’t alone. Half the neighborhood had a story about an unsettling experience or knew someone who did.
The place was a hotbed of paranormal activity. Some of Dominé’s friends who embrace the metaphysical offered a theory that the homes retain energy and imprints, making it possible for memories to be “played back.”
Dominé is a skeptic despite his encounter with Lucy. To get to the bottom of the creepy goings-on, he meticulously researched the history of the neighborhood and its previous residents. He uncovered a treasure trove of stories and decided to share them through his books that include Ghosts of Old Louisville: True Stories of Hauntings in America’s Largest Victorian Neighborhood and Voodoo Days at La Casa Fabulosa: An Unconventional Memoir.
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The ghost tour—a hair-raising mix of fact, fiction, folklore and true crime— brings Old Louisville’s colorful past to life (or, more to the point, back from the dead).
“On the tour, we don’t try to convince anybody that the ghosts are real,” Dominé said. “We use the stories as a vehicle to talk about the history of the neighborhood.”
Whether you are a believer or not, it’s fascinating to see the palatial houses where Kentucky’s tobacco titans and bourbon barons lived like royalty during the Gilded Age.
You don’t have to believe in ghosts to get a spine-tingling chill at the “murder house,” a key stop on the tour.
In Dominé’s latest book, A Dark Room in Glitter Ball City: Murder, Secrets and Scandal in Old Louisville, he reveals that, while house hunting, he toured the brooding mansion on South Fourth Street before it became infamous citywide. He admired the majestic mahogany staircase, leaded glass windows and, most of all, a vast wine cellar that could house a large collection.
Dominé didn’t buy the 11-bedroom home and put it out of his mind until it became a news sensation, the site of a gruesome crime that rocked the city in 2010. A drag queen, kinky sex and illegal drugs weave a story that is stranger—and, in this case, scarier—than fiction.
When police responded to a domestic dispute at the residence, a terror-stricken Jeffrey Mundt said his boyfriend, Joseph Banis, tried to murder him. Then he made a chilling accusation: Banis had murdered before, and the body was buried in the basement wine cellar.
The couple had met drag queen Jamie Carroll on a gay adult website and got together for a drug-fueled orgy that ended with Carroll shot and stabbed. Mundt said he was forced to help bury the entertainer.
Dominé’s dream wine cellar had been transformed into a nightmare reminiscent of an Edgar Allen Poe tale. Even though the body wasn’t there when Dominé toured the house, it still gives him the heebie-jeebies to think about it.
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Not every house has such a sordid past.
The Pink Palace (which appeared on the March 2022 cover of Kentucky Monthly), a landmark mansion on St. James Court, is home to Mr. Avery, the benevolent ghost of a former owner who lived there in the 1890s. He’s a harbinger of danger to living residents and warns them when something sinister is afoot.
One of the best-known stories of Mr. Avery involves him startling a woman while she was in the bathtub, but he was no peeping Tom. He was there to save her life. The sight of the apparition caused the woman to jump out of the water, and, seconds later, vandals sent a concrete block crashing through the window and into the tub where she had been having a relaxing soak moments before.
This stop contains another mystery: Why does a flamingo-hued mansion loom over the elegant red-brick and gray-stone houses in this mecca of Victorian splendor? It doesn’t exactly blend in.
Dominé explained that the 1890 structure was once a red-brick gentlemen’s club and casino, where well-heeled businessmen gathered to woo Lady Luck and sip bourbon. When the Louisville chapter of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, an organization that opposed alcohol and gambling, moved its headquarters into the Chateau-style building in the 1920s, it tried to purge its sinful past by painting it pink. It’s now a private residence.
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At the First Church of Christ, Scientist, Dominé recounted the story of the Lady on the Stairs, a tear-jerker that casts a melancholy shadow over its listeners. Local lore has it that an apparition in white waits eternally on the church stairs for her fiancé to make her his bride, unaware that he was one of hundreds of soldiers struck down by the influenza epidemic of 1918 at Louisville’s Camp Zachary Taylor. The bride soon died, too, perhaps going to her grave believing she had been jilted by the love of her life.
The tour group shuffled through the carcasses of fallen leaves littering the sidewalk until arriving at the Witches’ Tree, which is gnarled and knotted, its bare branches resembling skeletal hands. If the malicious Whomping Willow from Hogwarts had a sibling, this would be it.
According to folklore, it was once the site of a beautiful maple tree beloved by a coven of witches, who used to have clandestine meetings beneath its lush branches.
When the tree was cut down by the city for an 1890 May Day celebration, the outraged witches put a curse on Louisville, warning its citizens to “Beware the 11th month.” Exactly 11 months later, they unleashed their wrath through a powerful tornado that killed dozens and caused widespread damage. A lightning bolt struck the maple’s stump, and the next day, the misshapen tree appeared in its place.
Today, the tree is adorned with a bizarre collection of beads, dolls and other tributes meant to appease any modern witches.
Dominé no longer lives in Old Louisville, but he joked that he might return in the afterlife.
“When I’m gone, I plan on coming back and haunting the neighborhood to make things more interesting for future tour guides,” Dominé said with a laugh.
Ghost Encounter
On the Victorian Ghost Walk held Oct. 18-20, tour-goers are guaranteed to see otherworldly apparitions. The spooky fun starts at the Conrad-Caldwell House Museum, a three-story grand dame on St. James Court, and moves on to several privately owned homes, providing a rare chance to peek inside. At each location, costumed actors portray a ghost that refuses to cross over.
Meet Lucinda, an insane, grief-stricken woman who proclaimed herself “Queen of America,” and the influential businessman who, according to legend, was murdered by his scorned mistress.
The two-hour tour departs every 15 minutes starting at 6 p.m. For tickets and more information, visit louisvillehistorictours.com/victorian-ghost-walk.
Louisville Historic Tours offers several tours of Old Louisville, and not all of them focus on the paranormal.
The Old Louisville Walking Tour and the Secrets and Scandals of Old Louisville Walking Tour are popular. For a full tour list, visit louisvillehistorictours.com.