The Jackson Ghost Removal Program

Last week my partner Susi and I went to Kentucky to meet my good friend Katherine Osburn (a historian at Arizona State) and her husband Charles. We had agreed to stay at a bed & breakfast, which turned out to have been the home of Governor Thomas Metcalfe (Kentucky's tenth exec) and a frequent stopping point for Metcalfe's friend Andrew Jackson. The owners took quiet pride in this; the guests were politely unimpressed.

The night we arrived, Katherine slipped on the front stairs and busted her face. She wound up in the ER in Paris and needed several stitches. She concluded that the ghost of Andrew Jackson was haunting the inn and stalking Native Americanist historians, and burned some sage to try to drive off his spirit. No luck. The next afternoon I became violently ill and experienced stabbing pain in my upper abdomen. My petite amie took me to Bourbon County Hospital, where the staff diagnosed me with blocked bile ducts and pancreatitis. Old Hickory had struck again. 

That evening, as I slept in a dilaudid haze, Susi again assailed Jackson's ghost, playing Beyonce music in every room of the house. That did it. No-one else got sick. Jackson's ghost returned to whatever spectral waste had spawned it.

Do not mess with Bey.

(The image above is the Cane Ridge Meeting House in Paris, KY, about ten miles from our B and B. Photo by the author.)