Stanford is a small town in central Kentucky with a total of maybe 3 stop lights it’s pretty easy to miss. While the town of Stanford may be small, its history dates back to 1775 when it was established as one of the first settlements in Kentucky. With a quiet main street, this little town is known for its cafe and local shops.
However, with a rich and long past also comes stories of apparitions and ghost of distant and long forgotten farmers, civil war soldiers, and, in many cases, your everyday person, who is still holding onto their unfinished business of their past life. One such place shrouded in ghost stories and folklore is a small old cemetery out Goshen Road. Goshen cemetery has said to be haunted for years now.
Driving out of the town the landscapes changes from blocky, generic main street buildings that you can find in any old town to rolling hills and stretches of farmland. The occasional stream slipped under the road only to lazily emerge on the other side.
Once we arrived, we took note of the surroundings. The sun was close to setting that time right between full daylight and pitch black when the sun turns the sky a deep bright orange. There was no wind, and I mean none. If a leaf was to slip off a tree, it fell straight to the ground. After taking in our surrounding, my friend and I set about taking pictures and exploring the area.
The newest headstone that we could find was 1965 with most of the headstones going back all the way to the early 1800’s. The first thing I noticed was the staggering number of headstones for children. Every cemetery has them but half of the headstones in this cemetery seemed to belong to children. As we went about our business, taking pictures and looking at the dated headstones, we began to notice what seemed to be another set of footsteps always just a few paces behind us.
The distinct crunch of leaves followed us throughout the graveyard and never from the direction of either of us. Being out in the country, the first thing I would assume would obviously be an animal, but this was not the sound a squirrel makes as it scurries along the ground, this was a distinct crunch, the kind that has a certain weight about it as it walked across the ground. Throughout the entire time, we were there, the wind never picked up to the pint to even push a leaf around.
Walking around my friend stopped in her tracks and turned towards me. She said she had this weird tingling in her body. She described it as that feeling you get when a cold chill runs through your body and then is quickly gone, except hers was not ending. I asked to stand in her place to see if maybe it was just a weird way the hills were funneling the wind, but when I stepped into her footprints, I could not feel a thing, the tingling sensation in her body also disappeared.
We traded spots one more time and she said the sensation was back. Shaking it off, we moved about the rest of the cemetery. Shortly after we both heard the distinct voice of a child repeating over and over “Mama! Mama!” this continued on for about a minute before another voice from a woman exclaiming “come here baby" in a gentle voice. However, this isn't the weirdest part. There are no houses around this cemetery for at least a quarter to half a mile. These voices were not a yell or a scream but a normal volume that an elementary school teacher would describe as an “indoor voice.”
As the night went on we noticed that my friend’s camera, a Canon T5i, which cost more than I could ever imagine spending on a camera, began shooting slower and slower. We changed out the batteries and swapped the SD card to an empty one and the problem still persisted.
This camera is a professional quality camera. It doesn’t just “slow down,” then we noticed that the camera would not focus correctly, random blurry photos, and then to the point of not being able to take a steady picture for several minutes. We found a flat headstone and sat the picture to take 5 pictures on a timer in order to force the camera to focus and be steady. While the pictures came our steady, and at first glance, there was nothing to see, but once we began to look closely we noticed that every single picture moved ever so slightly, from the camera, that was being touched, that literally couldn’t move on its own.
As we looked through the pictures, leaned ever so slightly on the flat headstone we had rested the camera, I heard footsteps from right behind my friend and I. Being the wimp that I am, I jumped first, and then realized that it could have just been my friend shifting her weight. I questioned her if she had moved her feet and she just looked at me confused. Then, as she was still looking at the camera, I watched the cemetery behind her and saw a piece of her hair get picked up and dropped.
Not like a lift from wind, but like someone had pinched her hair about halfway down the strand and lifted it up gently before letting it fall. At this, the cemetery was becoming pitch black as the sun set behind the hills around us. We, both being pretty shaken up, decided to go sit in our vehicle.
We regathered ourselves before getting out of the truck and walking towards the middle of the cemetery. We stood in the middle, taking in the scene, then suddenly I saw the face of an elderly man out of the corner of my eye. I am so confident in what I saw that I can still draw the outline of the man’s face. My friend questioned me on what headstone it was before then, obviously excited, stated: “that’s the headstone I felt the tingle in my body by.” We decided to walk by it and things got weird from there.
My friend, normally a timid girl, said she felt “comfortable” and “warm” and even said she felt that whatever was around there was trying to comfort her. She, uncharacteristically, asked if we could turn off all the lights. This was such a weird request that I decided to go along with it and every light we had was flipped off. We stood there in the uneasy darkness for minutes before I looked across the cemetery over to the black backdrop of the trees on the other side.
At this moment I saw a figure, that was all black, but not as black as the trees behind it, dressed in weird robe looking clothes. I got the feeling that it didn’t want us to be there but I shoved it took the back of my mind.
Surely, we wouldn’t stay more than a few more minutes. I looked past my friend and saw what I can only describe as a black fog, even to the point of it looking wispy, moving towards my friend. I thought it was an animal or a leaf so I flicked on my light, only to be surprised to find that we were standing in the one spot in the entire cemetery where the ground was completely bare of even grass. Between the figure and the fog, I was ready to leave and drug my friend back to the truck, away from her “comfort” spot.
We got back, and I turned on the truck and quickly reversed and started to drive off when my friend turned to me and said “did you see that?” the look of confusion on my face must have given away the fact that I had no idea what she was talking about. She broke down crying, and then went on to describe a black figure, that she knew wanted us out and to never come back.
When I asked her to describe what she saw, in order to see if it matched what I saw from across the cemetery, she stated that it was a slim figure, with the build of a woman, wearing dark “grim reaper.” Cold chills can’t even describe what went through my body when she described exactly what I had seen. I drove faster to get away from the cemetery and was fine with not going back for a long time.
Throughout the entire time, we were in the cemetery, I had left my phone to record in random spots throughout while we walked away to record the surrounding and just genuine curiosity of what it might pick up. The recording starts pretty normally, you can hear me and my friend talking as we walk away and then our footsteps fade and you can’t hear anything other than the occasional cricket.
Then after about 3 minutes of the recording, you can hear an all too common lub dub. The distinct sound of a heartbeat. I have no explanation of where it can come from but it occurs several times throughout the recording and then once in a completely separate recording over my own voice.
Whether you believe in lost spirits and haunting is up to you. I’m not trying to convince anyone to switch their stance on their but just to share my experience in interesting places across Kentucky. Whatever you may believe, I look forward to returning to Goshen Cemetery because of the mystery around it.
