Actual Court House Building

This is a guest post by Tim Cornett. Tim is a amateur Kentucky historian and author.
Tim has worked as a reporter, publisher, editor and photographer.
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Over the years I have actually been involved in some ghost "sightings." Here I'd like to tell you about one of the earliest ones.

Back in the 1980s I was Supervisor of Bell County Dispatch which handled telephone and radio calls for the Bell County Sheriff's Department, the Pineville Police Department and the Bell County Volunteer Fire Department. At that time Dispatch was located in the basement of the Bell County Court House.

The person who worked the midnight shift, from 12:00 midnight to 8:00 a.m., was a lady named Pat Whitt. Pat had told me that two or three times during the last month or so she had heard someone on the upper floors opening and closing doors. There wasn't supposed to be anyone else in the building during those hours except for the state police troopers who had an office next door to dispatch who would come into the building occasionally to do paper work.

I discussed this with Bell County Volunteer Fire Department Chief Earl BeBusk, who also had office space close to dispatch. We decided to have a group of volunteers on stand-by and the next time Pat heard the doors opening and closing she was to call me and we would search the building from top to bottom.
 

A few weeks went by before I got the call from Pat - at about 2:30 a.m. Within thirty minutes we had all of the volunteers assembled at the court house. Our game plan was to lock down the elevator and position someone in the stairwells on each floor and at each entrance to the building so that no one could enter or exit without being seen.

With the volunteers in place Debusk and I started on the second floor, checking doors. We found all the offices to be secure and the doors that didn't lock, such as the bathrooms and supply closets, revealed no one. We moved down to the first floor. While we were checking those doors we heard doors opening on the floor above. We went back to the second floor for a recheck and while doing that we heard doors opening on the first floor.

We checked and rechecked both floors several times and during each check we would hear doors above or below us being opened. And no one had been seen using the stairwells or entering or leaving the building.

We finally gave up and returned to dispatch.
Pat said, "Well? Did you find anyone?"
Knowing their had been rumors for years that the building was haunted, I told Pat this and jokingly said, "Pat, it has to be a ghost"
"Oh. That's O.K. then if it's a ghost. I just didn't want a live person in here that I didn't know about," Pat replied.

~Tim~

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