“Voices or chanting carried on the air, when the arch appears completely empty”

Along the Cumberland River in Russell County sits what remains of Creelsboro, a Kentucky town that was once busy with steamboats, merchants, travelers, and families. Today, most people pass through on their way to fish the river or visit the Rockhouse Natural Bridge. The boats are gone, most of the people are gone, and old houses and buildings remain where a small but active river town once stood. Creelsboro didn’t disappear completely. It simply became a ghost town.

The community took its name from Elijah Creel, whose family settled in the area in the early 1800s. Creelsboro developed along the Cumberland at a time when rivers served as highways through Kentucky. Before paved roads connected these rural communities to larger towns, moving people and goods by water was often faster and easier than traveling overland.

When steamboats began traveling the Cumberland, Creelsboro found itself in the right place. Boats stopped there with passengers, supplies, and news from communities farther along the river. Farmers from the surrounding countryside brought livestock, crops, tobacco, timber, and other goods into town to be sold or shipped elsewhere. Stores and other businesses served the people coming through, and for a community whose population never grew much beyond fifty permanent residents, Creelsboro could be remarkably busy.

The river that helped build Creelsboro couldn’t keep it alive forever. Transportation changed. Roads improved, automobiles became common, and people no longer depended on steamboats to reach communities along the Cumberland. As river traffic declined, businesses closed and families moved away. Houses were abandoned, buildings emptied, and the little commercial center along the river slowly became the quiet place people drive through today.

Some of those old buildings are still standing, and that is where Creelsboro’s reputation as a ghost town becomes a little more literal. People passing through have reported seeing shadows moving around abandoned buildings and figures that appear to be people standing inside old homes that should be empty. Sometimes the movement is caught only from the corner of an eye. Someone appears to cross a window or move through a doorway, but when the building is examined more closely, no one is there.

It isn’t difficult to imagine people moving through these buildings when you know what Creelsboro once looked like. These weren’t always abandoned structures sitting beside a quiet road. People lived in these houses. Merchants opened their businesses in the morning. Travelers arrived from the river, and families from surrounding farms came into town to buy what they needed. A place that now feels nearly empty once had people constantly coming and going.

A few miles away, the road leads to something much older than Creelsboro itself. The Creelsboro Natural Arch, usually called the Rockhouse, is an enormous limestone formation shaped over millions of years. Long before Elijah Creel arrived or the first steamboat stopped along the Cumberland, Native Americans were using the area around the Rockhouse. The top of the arch has also been associated with Native American burials, adding another layer of human history to a place that already feels ancient.

Stories around the Rockhouse include sounds that don’t seem to belong to anyone visiting the site. People have reported hearing what they describe as Native American voices or chanting around the formation, sometimes when no one else appears to be nearby. Others simply describe the feeling that the Rockhouse isn’t empty, even when they are the only people standing beneath the enormous limestone arch.

Creelsboro and the Rockhouse are tied together by the same landscape and the same river, but they represent very different pieces of Kentucky history. People were using the Rockhouse long before Creelsboro existed, and Creelsboro rose and faded within only a small part of that much longer story. One place was shaped by nature over millions of years. The other was built by people and nearly emptied when the way people traveled changed.

I originally came through Creelsboro on my way to the Rockhouse, just as people still do today. Driving through, the abandoned houses and old buildings are what caught my attention. They are reminders that this wasn’t always somewhere people simply passed through. At one time, Creelsboro was the destination.

Now the road carries most people straight through it.

But every once in a while, someone looks toward one of those empty buildings and swears somebody is still inside.