“In older folklore, similar lights were sometimes called will-o’-the-wisps and were believed to lead unsuspecting people away from safe paths.” There are places in eastern Kentucky where the mountains seem to swallow everything once the sun goes down. The roads wind through narrow hollers, the trees grow thick along the hillsides, and the darkness is…

“When he arrived, he found the grave, and lying beside the headstone was his coat.” There are plenty of backroads in Kentucky where you might think twice about stopping for a stranger, especially after dark. But there’s one road outside Tompkinsville where, according to local folklore, you don’t necessarily have to stop to pick up…

“His death became one of the most famous tragedies in American cave exploration” Mammoth Cave is so large that even after generations of exploration, people are still discovering where it goes. Passageways stretch for hundreds of miles beneath the hills of south-central Kentucky, opening into enormous chambers, narrow crawls, underground rivers, pits, and places where…

“That missing head eventually became part of the Bobby Mackey’s story.” For nearly fifty years, people walked into Bobby Mackey’s Music World in Wilder, Kentucky, for country music, dancing, drinks, and a ride on the mechanical bull. Plenty of them also went downstairs looking for something else. Beneath the dance floor was a dark basement…

“She dropped about eighty feet into the Cumberland River below.” Cumberland Falls is one of those places in Kentucky that doesn’t need a ghost story to make it memorable. The Cumberland River drops nearly seventy feet over a wide sandstone ledge, sending mist high into the air and creating the waterfall often called the Niagara…

“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…

“Sitting behind him was the body of a small child. It had no head.” Long before cars traveled the back roads of Adair County, people living around Campbell Ridge were already telling stories about something that wandered the hills after dark. Sometimes it looked like a child. Sometimes it appeared as a dog or a…

“The stolen gold was never recovered, and Nancy’s grave was never marked” Just outside Campbellsville, Kentucky, an abandoned railroad tunnel disappears into the side of Muldraugh Hill. Spurlington Tunnel stretches nearly 1,900 feet through solid rock, far enough that once you walk inside, the entrance behind you begins to shrink and the darkness ahead seems…

“After the storm, something strange was discovered: a silhouette of the girl’s face appeared, etched into the glass of the window near where she died” Beside Maple Grove Cemetery in Russellville, Kentucky, stands a little white house built around 1870. It was originally the home of the cemetery sexton, the person responsible for caring for…