09/08/2024
Old house lovers! 🏠
I had to share this experience with you all! This is not WLH related.
Yesterday, we visited the historic Octagon Hall in Franklin, Kentucky. This property is just outside of Bowling Green. Octagon Hall is a historic home built in 1847. It is the only surviving octagon style home left in Kentucky. The home itself is in excellent condition considering the age and materials used. There are three levels with the same blueprint on each level.
The museum asks for a small donation to explore the home, grounds, and to speak with the on-site historian. Naturally, we were eager to learn about the original family and the preservation process. We ended up getting more than we bargained for.
We spoke to the historian for about 20 minutes before we set out to explore the house on a self guided tour. He told us about the family and the dark history regarding confederate soldiers, slavery, and the horrific deaths of some of the owners children. Octagon Hall has been visited by over 500 paranormal teams and is regarded as one of the most haunted houses in the south.
I started taking a few pictures as we went. The furnishings are not original to the house, but helped us visualize what it may have looked like back then. On the second floor to the left of the stairs is the nursery. This room is decorated with children’s toys as it would’ve been then. I went all through the room and looked through the closet. The closets are huge for this time period! I remembered the historian said one of the children, Mary Elizabeth, caught her skirt in the fireplace and was so severely burned they had to put her in the nursery bed. She passed away in the room a week later. Her picture was hanging above the bed. After we left this room, we kept walking in a clockwise direction through the second floor rooms. We stopped to admire the master bedroom, closets, and architecture. Some of these rooms had trap doors and hidden staircases to hide confederate soldiers and family members from the Union Army. It was very interesting!!
As we turned the corner back to the staircase landing, we noticed an orange ball in the middle of the doorway to the nursery. It was not there before, as we had just been through the room and walked out. We would’ve tripped over the ball had it been there. I was the last one out and knew it was not there. I immediately went back through my pictures to the one I took before entering the room. The ball was nowhere to be found. I did pick the ball up and rolled it back. Shawn was so disturbed by it that he told me we needed to get out. He said he wouldn’t have touched it.
We ended up finishing the self guided tour by exploring the basement, which had a kitchen, library, storage, and tack room. It needed some TLC. When we came to the first floor, we noticed the historian speaking with another couple visiting the house. I asked him if he had been in the house or upstairs while we were there and he said no, as he was speaking with this other couple during that time. I showed him my pictures and asked him about the ball. He was excited and said some guests have reported that balls roll on their own in that room. They believe it’s Mary Elizabeth playing 😳. Shawn practically ran to the car after that.
Needless to say, this was not the experience we went there to get! I do highly recommend visiting though. It’s such a unique house!
