Old State Capitol Building

This National Historic Landmark served as Kentucky's Capitol from 1830 to 1910, designed by Kentucky's first professional architect, Gideon Shryock. The building witnessed the assassination of Governor William Goebel in 1900 - the only sitting governor ever assassinated in U.S. history.

Kentucky's Old State Capitol Building in downtown Frankfort, designed by architect Gideon Shryock and completed in 1830, served as the seat of state government for eighty years through some of the most turbulent chapters in American history — contentious debates over slavery, the Civil War, and the violent political struggles of the Gilded Age. The building is now a National Historic Landmark, but it is best known for two things: the only assassination of a sitting American governor, and a cursed chest that has been linked to eighteen deaths.

On January 30, 1900, William Goebel was walking toward the Capitol to observe the recount of a bitterly contested gubernatorial election when he was shot by an unknown gunman. Despite his mortal wound, Goebel was sworn in as governor from his deathbed and served for four days before dying on February 3, 1900. He remains the only American governor ever assassinated while in office. The crime was never conclusively solved, and the political violence surrounding the 1900 election scarred the state for a generation.

Goebel's ghost has never left the scene. His apparition has been reported pacing alongside the building, retracing the steps of his final walk toward the Capitol. On the anniversary of his assassination, a security guard witnessed Goebel's portrait suddenly fall from the wall — despite being securely mounted — landing with a crash that echoed through the empty building. Mysterious gunshots have been heard from a small arsenal building at the rear of the Capitol, though no source is ever found. Guides working alone in the building have reported hearing disembodied voices that move and change location throughout the structure. Greg Hardison, a specialist with the Kentucky Historical Society, has described personally hearing voices while alone in the building, noting that the sounds seemed to shift from room to room.

Inside the Capitol sits the Conjure Chest, a mahogany veneer chest hand-carved around 1830 by an enslaved man named Remus in Meade County, Kentucky. According to the documented account, Jeremiah Graham commissioned Remus to build the chest for his firstborn child, then rejected the finished work and beat Remus to death. In retaliation, other enslaved workers on the property placed a curse on the chest, sprinkling dried owl blood inside its drawers and declaring that anyone who stored clothing within it would die.

The curse delivered on its promise across generations. Jeremiah's infant child died. Jonathan Graham's son was stabbed by a servant on his twenty-first birthday. Subsequent owners and their family members suffered a devastating catalog of premature deaths: accidents, illnesses, suicides, a polio infection, an ether overdose during surgery, a fall through a railroad trestle, and a fatal gun accident — eighteen deaths in all, tracked meticulously by the families who passed the chest from generation to generation.

The curse was reportedly broken by a woman named Sallie, a longtime family maid who performed a ritual involving a dead owl, boiled willow leaves, and a jug buried under a flowering bush with its handle facing east. Sallie herself died the following September. Owl feathers remain in the chest's top drawer to this day to maintain the neutralization. Virginia Cary Hudson Mayne donated the Conjure Chest to the Kentucky Historical Society in 1976, and it appeared on the Travel Channel's Deadly Possessions with Zak Bagans. The detailed curse history was published in Beverly Kienzle's 2017 book The Conjured Chest: A Cursed Family in Old Kentucky. The Old Capitol is open to the public and is a featured stop on Frankfort ghost tours.