Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill

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The Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill is said to be the country’s largest restored Shaker village. Its 3,000 acres contain 34 original Shaker buildings and perhaps a few ghosts, as well. It is said that ghostly babies can be heard crying at night around the pond.

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Geographic Information

Address:
3501 Lexington Rd
Harrodsburg, KY 40383
United States

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GPS:
37.8184609350613, -84.74272727922653
County:
Mercer County, Kentucky
Nearest Towns:
High Bridge, KY (1.4 mi.)
Burgin, KY (4.7 mi.)
Wilmore, KY (5.4 mi.)
Harrodsburg, KY (6.7 mi.)
Jackson, KY (7.0 mi.)
Salvisa, KY (9.2 mi.)
Nicholasville, KY (10.2 mi.)
Danville, KY (12.0 mi.)
Monticello, KY (15.9 mi.)
Versailles, KY (16.2 mi.)

Contact Information

Web:
http://www.shakervillageky.org/

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Comments (5)

  1. My dad and I saw bright glowing white eyes looking out at us from the attic of the guest building we stsyed in. They were slightly furthrler spread apart than a regular human face. It was pitch black outside so there is no way it could have been light reflecting off animal eyes, or something of that nature. The eyes disappeared after about 30 seconds. This was in the attic above room 572.

  2. the large building with the kitchen is the most horrible place I have set foot in. I will never go in a building on that property again. the further I went upstairs the more an old woman told me to get out, no one else seemed to notice it. you could physically see the hair standing up on my arms like static electricity and I began to get physically sick/sad. I tried to stay but The image of this old woman was very angry and wanted me gone! By the time I made it down to the ground floor I was almost hyperventilating, I had to sit on a bench outside for a while where I was in almost a trance. Thank goodness my family got me up and got me away from that place. I had a horrible headache the rest of the day and nightmares that night. I went there just for a nice day trip, I never expected something like that to happen. The only other time I have experienced something (almost) that bad was visiting moundsville state penn on a tour. Don’t take your children inside those buildings, its not safe! They don’t want us there!

    • I recently visited and had an awful feeling of dread as I went to the top floor. The whole place did not feel welcoming although the Shakers were to love everyone. I found out speaking to a lady who works there that a man jumped to his death from mental illness.

  3. My sister and I stayed in the East Family Wash House there a few years ago. We knew nothing about any ghosts and were not thinking about that when we went there as tourists. I will say that my sister has always been the “intuitive” one in the family, although I stop short of calling her a “psychic”. She takes after my father who was the same way. But when she says something is wrong and we need to get out of a place or situation, we all take heed. Too many times she has been proven to be right after the fact. We didn’t have anything strange happen during the day while we toured this beautiful place, except for what we called the “disappearing old man”. We drove down one of the onsite little roads there that led down to a trail head. We turned the car around and we’re heading back to the main village, when we saw an old man walking down the trail. He came out onto the road and was hiking behind us up the road. I was taking pictures so we were going slow, stopping and starting. My sister was driving so she just looked back now and then. I don’t know why but I pretty much kept eyes on him the whole time as he was right behind us until I happened to turn away just for a second. When I looked back, he was gone. We looked all around. There was no sign of him. I remember my sister and I remarked on where he could have possibly gone. There weren’t any other trails that we could see in the vicinity and how did he move fast enough to get out of our sight unless he was laying down in the tall grass. Who knows, but it just was something we thought was odd and remembered it later.

    The suite we stayed in was to the right of the stairs on the second floor. There are rooms below on the first floor that are visited by tourists but they were roped off and the rooms shut up at the time we visited. I believe there were guests staying in the rooms to the left of the stairs on the other side of the landing but we never saw or heard them in their rooms or on the stairs that I can recall.

    I will admit that I was spooked by the large bedroom that contained two twin sized beds as they were placed with the headboards against a wall that jutted out into the room and housed a door on each side. The door on the right had two outer steps before it and opened to a steep staircase that led up to a huge empty attic that had a single bare lightbulb that had been left burning. It ran the length of the entire building. That door would not stay shut no matter how hard we tried to keep it closed, so we placed a chair in front of it to keep it closed. My sister didn’t seem to feel anything odd at that time. She even joked about ghosts and called up the stairs in amusement that that they need not try to bother us. That was after I expressed unease that the door to the attic wouldn’t stay shut. She ran up the stairs and came back down stating the attic was empty. On the other side of the jutting wall that the headboards were up against was another door that we could tell led down another set of stairs to an outside door (which we discovered later) but that door was securely closed and locked.

    The first large room in the suite held a sofa and two armchairs, a wall table, a shaker dining table and four shaker chairs, and a few other scattered shaker style chairs.

    Something had me jittery from the beginning, I do have to say, but my sister did not seem uneasy, so I figured it was just me. I think what bothered me the most was that attic door that wouldn’t close. It was at the head of the bed I was supposed to sleep in. I found that I just couldn’t do it, so I told my sister that I was going to sleep on the couch. She just laughed and said okay. We sat up and talked for a while and never heard the guests across the landing come in. About ten o’clock we went to bed and turned out the lights. I had trouble going to sleep and did hear a large thump from what I assumed was the other guest suite a little while later.

    About 2:00 a.m., I awoke to the sound of weeping coming from the bedroom. At first I thought I had imagined it and laid very still and strained my ears toward the bedroom where my sister was sleeping. There was no door between the rooms (or at least It was open if there was one). Then I heard it again. Someone was sobbing. I sat up and called my sister’s name, thinking it had to be her although it didn’t sound like her. No one answered. The weeping sound came from the bedroom again. I got up and without turning on the lights started toward it, calling her name again. The sobbing stopped. Then I heard my sister say in a perfectly normal voice, “What?” I went in the bedroom and said “What’s wrong? Why were you crying?” I had the lights on by then. She frowned and said “I wasn’t. But I did have a really wierd dream.” I said “well, someone was sobbing in here.” I asked her if she could have been crying in her sleep and she said “I don’t think so”.

    She got up and we both went into the “living” room. She sat down in an armchair and told me that she had dreamed that two beautiful wolves came down the attic stairs and peered around the corner of the wall and looked at her with blue eyes. She said she did not feel fear of them at all. She felt peaceful. But then her dream changed and something grabbed her from underneath the bed and was holding her down. She said she was struggling against the arms that pinned her down when she heard me calling her name and woke up.

    Well, let me tell you, we were both freaked out. My sister does love wolves and even has a room decorated with them in her home, so I am really not surprised she had a dream about them, just that there were two of them and had come down from the attic was wierd. Something holding her down in the bed was too freaky. Was it her sobbing? I don’t know. She doesn’t think so.

    We both sat up discussing this and she would not go back to sleep in the other room. We talked about leaving right then in the middle of the night which shows you how spooked we were. She finally pulled the other armchair up and put her feet on it and we finally dozed off until daylight.

    The next day, we packed up our things and left. We were supposed to stay another night, but we just couldn’t do it. We asked at the checkout office if they ever had trouble with visitors having strange occurrences, ghosts, etc. We were told “No.”, but didnt believe that, especially not after finding a book about ghosts at Pleasant Hill. I read the book and that freaked me out even more. In this book (don’t recall the name) I found several references to people hearing wolves right in the village. One person stated that a wolf howled from behind the fence on one end of the village and that it howled again within a few seconds from the other end. Maybe it wasn’t the same wolf. Maybe there were two? Also, another guests’ husband had a similar experience where something had held him down on his bed. Just like my sister. Wow! I told her what I had read. Who was crying that night? Was my sister sobbing in her sleep? She doesn’t think she was and never has before, but who knows.

    We both agreed that even though it is a great historic beautiful place to visit, we would never spend the night there again.

  4. These are stories relayed to me by a tour employee at Shaker Village when I asked if they had any ghost sightings there. She told me that very early one morning, before they were open for business – about 7:30 a.m., she said, while exiting one of the buildings to the street she suddenly heard a loud choice start signing one of the Shaker songs. She explained that there is a choir the management sometimes pay to come and sing for the tourists but it is quite expensive so she couldn’t imagine why they would have paid the choir to show up and sing when Shaker Village was still closed to the public that day, When she turned in surprise, thinking to see this choir out there singing, even though the singing continued until the song was over there was nobody there, at all.

    Another story she told me involved a fellow employee – a security guard hired to work nights. He told her that one night, shortly after the started working there, he was upstairs in one of the buildings along the main street and when he glanced outside to the street he saw a man walking along it dressed in the Shaker garb. Since nobody was supposed to be on the property in the early hours of the morning he ran down to the street to find out who was trespassing.. Nobody was there so realizing it must have been a ghost from the past he panicked and quit work there as soon as his shift ended.

    I have been there several times but never had a bad feeling about the place as some posters have relayed.

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Disclaimer: The stories posted here are user-submitted and are, in the nature of "ghost stories," largely unverifiable. HauntedPlaces.org makes no claims that any of the statements posted here are factually accurate. The vast majority of information provided on this web site is anecdotal, and as such, should be viewed in the same light as local folklore and urban legends.