Speed Art Museum

Kentucky's oldest and largest art museum was established in 1927 by Hattie Bishop Speed as a memorial to her husband J.B. Speed. The museum houses over 13,000 works spanning 6,000 years of human history.

The Speed Art Museum, Kentucky's oldest and largest art museum, was established in 1927 by Harriet Bishop Speed — known as Hattie — as a memorial to her beloved husband, James Breckenridge Speed, a prominent Louisville businessman and art collector. Hattie was a high society woman, concert pianist, music teacher, and tireless promoter of music and the arts in Louisville, and she poured her considerable energy and resources into building the museum and its collection. She donated many of the pieces she and her husband had collected together and maintained a perfectionist's oversight of every detail of the institution. Hattie died in 1942, but employees of the museum have long maintained that she never really left.

The most dramatic encounter belongs to a security guard who fell asleep at his station outside the Native American Gallery in the basement. He awoke suddenly to find the figure of a woman in a white dress standing before him, staring at him with an expression of concern. Her cloudy form has been picked up on security camera monitors on other occasions — a spectral figure floating through the galleries after hours, pausing before the artwork as if conducting her own private inspection of the collection.

Hattie was known in life for wearing rose water, and that distinctive floral aroma continues to permeate the museum, particularly in the Kentucky Room, which was her favorite space. Staff and visitors detect the scent regularly, even when no logical source can be identified. The Kentucky Room appears to be her primary domain, the place where her presence is most consistently felt.

Some of the most telling incidents involve Hattie's apparent jealousy of Cora, her husband's first wife. The museum displays a portrait identified as Cora, and the label identifying the painting has been found peeled off the wall repeatedly when no one was around. On at least one occasion, the portrait of Cora itself has reportedly been moved from its position — as if Hattie, even in death, cannot tolerate sharing her museum with the memory of the woman who came before her.

During the installation of the Supernatural America exhibition in October 2021, a bottle of "spirit water" created by artist J.B. Murray seemed to jump on its pedestal in front of a startled guest, an incident that spread rapidly through the museum that evening. In 2012, during preparations for a major renovation, two office workers arrived to find a file cabinet blocking their door, pushed four to six inches inward with no apparent explanation for how it moved. Staff have also reported elevator doors opening without anyone present, labels falling off walls during installations with no logical cause, and shadowy figures moving in peripheral vision.

Employees have learned to coexist with Hattie's ongoing presence, greeting her with casual humor: "Come on in Hattie, it's fine." Some speculated that the museum's major 2016 renovation might have disrupted or resolved the supernatural activity, but reports continue. The museum sits adjacent to the University of Louisville campus and is free to the public, inviting visitors to browse one of the finest art collections in the region — under the watchful, approving eye of its founder, who has apparently decided that eternity is best spent doing what she loved most: looking at great art.