Adaliza Keene Southgate
The Grey Lady of the Carneal House
One of the most famous ghosts to lurk among Covington’s residences may be the one that supposedly inhabits what is arguably the city’s most famous homes.
She is known as The Grey Lady and is said to walk among the sprawling confines of The Carneal House (pictured above), the oldest brick structure in Covington.
Lietzenmayer takes exception to some of the more common claims surrounding The Grey Lady. He also takes exception with naming the home The Carneal House, the namesake of Thomas Carneal, one of Covington’s founding fathers.
Though Carneal designed and constructed the home nearly two hundred years ago, he never lived in it. “Thomas Carneal lived in Ludlow. His house is still standing in Ludlow,” Lietzenmayer said. Instead, the home should be called the Gano-Southgate House for two families that actually occupied it.
William Southgate purchased the home in 1824 from Aaron Gano and moved in with his new wife, Adeliza Keene, whom he met while attending Transylvania in Lexington. Adeliza was a member of the Keene family for which Keeneland Race Track is named.
With William’s death in the 1840s, following a celebrated career as town clerk, US Representative, and creating Kenton Co. from Campbell Co., Adeliza was left alone with eleven children and another on the way, the first of a string of tragedies that would haunt the woman throughout the decades of the nineteenth century.
But who haunts the house?
Lietzenmayer claims that evidence disputes the common theory that the Marquis de Lafayette, during his farewell tour of America in 1825, attended a party at the Carneal House, even though the historical marker outside the residence posits such.
Lafayette, legend has it, was asked to dance by a young woman dressed in grey. He declined.
Later that night, the young woman in grey was found dead by an apparent suicide. Is she the one who causes doors to slam and creates a cold chill that lingers on the stairway?
No, Lietzenmayer insists, because there was no party for Lafayette at the Carneal House.
Oh, the Southgates hosted a party for Lafayette but at Adeliza’s parents’ home in Lexington, a truth discovered when the Historical Society acquired the Southgate family papers from the University of North Carolina.
“Lafayette did not stop anywhere in Covington which was only six hundred people as he was anxious to visit you know what, Cincinnati,” Lietzenmayer said, “the namesake of his revolutionary society.”
He believes earlier research was screwed up because of newspaper accounts that identified the Southgates as hosts. Also, Lafayette would have had a good excuse to decline a dance offer from a young woman regardless of how attractive and tempting she may have been. The French hero of the American Revolution was known to walk with a cane having broken his femur bone in France. He was sixty-seven years old and walked with a severe limp.
And there was no suicide ever reported in the Carneal, er, Gano-Southgate House.
So if there is in fact a Grey lady who haunts the estate, Lietzenmayer believes it to be Adeliza herself. She outlived ten of her children and suffered many heartbreaks in between, including her own eviction from the home when a son-in-law no longer desired her presence there.
“If there is a Lady in Grey it is Adeliza,” Lietzenmayer said. “And it has nothing to do with Lafayette.”
Lafayette is not the only famous “guest” to the home whose visit is disputed, however, despite also being noted on the historical marker outside the Second Street mansion.
“There is no evidence that (President) Andrew Jackson visited the home either,” he said. “The marker needs to be corrected but it takes two thousand dollars to do that.”
From an article in LinkNKY “Ghost Stories from Historic Spots in Covington and Newport”, October 30, 2017