Old Talbott Tavern

The Old Talbott Tavern faces Court Square in Bardstown, Kentucky’s second-oldest town and the heart of bourbon country. Its eastern section, with stone walls two feet thick, is traditionally dated to 1779, which would make it one of the oldest buildings in Kentucky; a brick west wing and verandas were added in the early 1800s. It bills itself as the oldest western stagecoach stop in America, and it has been an inn and tavern almost continuously since the late eighteenth century.

Its guest list, real and legendary, is a roll call of the early republic. George Rogers Clark is said to have stored supplies in its cellars, Daniel Boone was summoned there to give a deposition in 1792, and young Abraham Lincoln is said to have stayed with his parents during the land dispute that sent the family to Indiana. Tradition holds that the exiled French prince Louis-Philippe and his brothers stopped there in 1797, and that members of their party painted the murals rediscovered on an upstairs wall in 1927. Alexander Walters, a co-founder of the NAACP, was born in the brick part of the building. Owners after the Talbotts included T. D. Beam, brother of Jim Beam, and the Kelley family, who have run it since 1964.

The tavern’s most famous story concerns Jesse James, who according to local lore visited a cousin in Bardstown and stayed at the inn. A dozen or so holes in the plaster of the mural room are said to be his – fired at birds he thought were moving in the paintings – though another account blames a hard-drinking county sheriff. The ghost stories gathered by staff and guests are more intimate: a former bookkeeper and a cook described following a man in a long coat along the upstairs landing until he turned, laughed and vanished, and the bookkeeper later said she recognised his face in a picture of Jesse James. Others describe a thin woman in a white nineteenth-century dress in the Audubon dining room.

On 7 March 1998 an electrical fire destroyed the roof and most of the second floor and badly damaged the murals. The tavern was rebuilt and reopened in November 1999. Its rooms are each named for a famous guest – and, the tavern notes, for the spirits said to linger in them.

Staff and guests describe a man in a long coat on the upstairs landing, a woman in white seen in the Audubon dining room and hovering over a guest bed, coloured orbs of light, footsteps and knocking in empty rooms, a piano playing by itself, clocks chiming late at night, televisions and heaters switching on, and small objects moving.

The upstairs landing and halls (the Jesse James sightings), the mural room with its bullet holes, the Audubon dining room and several of the named guest rooms. Many reports come from staff working early or late.

The Talbott Tavern is a fixture of Bardstown ghost walks and Kentucky haunted-hotel lists, and its bar is one of the oldest bourbon bars in the state. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places (1973) and lies within the Bardstown Historic District.