True crime, murder and ghosts: New spooky tour links wild history to haunted buildings

Caitlin Zoeller has all the gory details about century-old murderers and hell-raisers, who once roamed downtown Shelbyville.

Or perhaps, they never left.

Before Shelbyville's Main Street was a charming district of cozy boutiques and restaurants, three different fires ravaged and reshaped the downtown skyline. Shootouts, revenge plots and Civil War-fueled disputes loomed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the kind of chaotic energy Zoeller says could inspire spirits to linger behind generations after they’ve died.

For the past couple of years, the Shelbyville native has visited with people who work in the businesses and offices, and she’s kept records of all the hair-raising unnatural things they’ve heard, seen, and sometimes even felt.

Then she consulted newspapers, history books and early Shelby County maps to figure out what the town once looked like and who, historically, lurked where.

“There is a connection between the paranormal and history because they go hand-in-hand,” she told me. “You don’t have one without the other. Every (instance of) paranormal activity that you experience has a historical base. There is a history to it. It came from somewhere."

Whether you're a history buff, a true crime fanatic, or a paranormal enthusiast, she has enough stories to dazzle you for an evening in her new downtown walking tour, the Local Community Spirit Walk.

Ahead of her inaugural tour on Sept. 1, Zoeller invited me to downtown Shelbyville for a sneak preview. Here's what I saw (and maybe felt).

Shelbyville ghost tour guide grew up in a haunted house

Zoeller greeted me at Stargazer Plaza at 612 Main St. with a 90s-era microphone headset, a stack of glowsticks for safety, and a story about how she became interested in paranormal investigation.

Now a mother of two, a social worker by trade, and a paranormal researcher, she was once a scared little girl who lived in a house where strange, spooky and unexplainable things often happened. Zoeller remembers hearing bumps in the night and odd movements upstairs when no one else was home. The smoke detector in her parent's house would go off erratically when nothing was around to trigger it.

One night while she was sleeping, the stick lamp near her bed tumbled on top of her and jolted her awake. When Zoeller opened her eyes, she saw an apparition of a man dressed in red and black lingering near her doorway. So she started doing research on her own, and in college, she joined a paranormal investigation group.

“Look, if I’m going to be scared of something — which I totally was, I was terrified — at least I’m going to know what I’m afraid of,” she told me.

After years of researching and piecing together stories, now she sees her hometown not only as it was in the past, but for all the figures who helped shape it into what it is today.

'Guns-a-blazin' shootouts in downtown Shelbyville

We left Stargazer Plaza and headed on foot about a block to just outside Tracy’s Home Furnishings at 604 Main St., which in its modern form, didn’t seem too spooky. But then Zoeller used her storytelling to take us back to 1865 when the Armstrong Hotel stood on this spot. The bar in its basement was a popular spot for former Confederate soldiers. One of the regulars was a guy named Ed Terrell, who committed a murder and then threw the body in a nearby creek. When he was caught, local officials sent him to the Taylorsville jail.

That didn't last long, though.

“The Taylorsville Jail did not hold him well,” Zoeller explained. “He busted out and blamed all the Shelbyville residents for locking him up. So, he comes back, running through town, guns-a-blazing.”

Terrell and his cousin returned to his favorite Shelbyville watering hole, and a posse went them at the Armstrong. Both men were shot in the chaos and eventually die.

That kind of unsettled energy can cling to the land, Zoeller explained. Even though the hotel burned down in 1944, some of the businesses have told her they've seen light anomalies, more commonly known as orbs, on their security camera footage.

From there, we walked a few doors down and stopped in front of a modern piercing store. Back in 1865, though, this was the historic Redding Hotel, and its owner was injured in the Terrell shootout. Mr. Redding didn’t die that day, Zoeller said, but her research shows those wounds killed him. When Zoeller went around collecting stories, the folks who work there today said oftentimes they’ll place an item on a shelf, and then sometimes it will crash to the ground inexplicably.

Then they’ll pick it back up, and it will fall again.

Of course, Zoeller can’t say for certain that those orbs on the security camera footage or the fumbling objects were the ghosts of Ed Terrell and Mr. Redding. But she reasons that as both men clearly had some strong, powerful energy in their lives, who’s to say they didn’t leave some of that behind in their deaths?

Shelbyville has a haunted police department

Throughout the tour, Zoeller told similar fiery and sometimes humorous stories as we walked about a half a mile loop through downtown.

Workers at the old Lawson’s Department store had tales of women being touched inappropriately by spirits, and she reasoned it might be an old tailor trying to do a fitting.

When we stopped at the sight of old jail, which sits behind the modern Shelby County Sheriff's Department, she didn’t skirt around the gruesome details as she shared the saga of a prisoner, who ripped out all of his stitches where his neck had been slit.

Another location on the tour, the Shelbyville Police Department, has so much unusual activity that in 2003, it was featured on several national news outlets, including CNN. Drawers fly open, people have felt touches, and some have seen apparitions. The station has a reputation for a lot of paranormal activity, but it wasn't always a place of the law.

Zoeller says her research shows that this is one oldest buildings in Shelby County and it initially operated as a boarding house in the 1820s.

“One floor for the girls, and boys on the other,” she mused. “So you can imagine young people, and they're split up like that, and maybe they don’t stay split up like that?”

You don’t have to be slinging guns to leave powerful energy, sometimes love and lust can have that effect, too.

“There's a lot of energy going on here,” she continued, tying the mood of the spirits to the claims of the officers. “A lot of people in and out. A lot of fun activities. So, that would be my best guess at what would be happening here, that what would bring that kind of energy.”

By the time we finished the hour tour, I’d walked the same ground where a lieutenant governor had been tried for killing his girlfriend in 1937 and heard an unbelievable tale of a corpse that was seemingly dragged up Main Street. I learned how one of the spirits in downtown Shelbyville used a group of paranormal investigators’ recording equipment to request a piece of the charcuterie board they’d brought as a snack.

Whether I believed in the ghosts we talked about didn’t really matter because the history Zoeller applied is documented and true. But if you do believe in them, perhaps we can take the same comfort Zoeller did when she first began digging into the spirit world all those years ago.

“I think doing the research and connecting the history to it normalizes it, and it makes them not so scary,” she told me before we said goodbye. “This is what happened. This person died here. It's probably just them. … If it's a human spirit, it's just a person, and you’re not afraid of people.”

Features columnist Maggie Menderski writes about what makes Louisville, Southern Indiana and Kentucky unique, wonderful, and occasionally, a little weird. If you've got something in your family, your town or even your closet that fits that description — she wants to hear from you. Say hello at mmenderski@courier-journal.com or 502-582-4053. Follow along on Instagram and Twitter @MaggieMenderski.

Want to go?

WHAT: Local Community Spirit Walk, a walking ghost tour rooted in Shelby County history.

WHEN: Fridays and Saturdays in September and October. Tours begin at 7 p.m. and 9 p.m.

COST: $15

DETAILS: To purchase tickets and learn more, visit lcswtours.com. For more information email lcswtours@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Local Community Spirit Walk is new ghost tour in Shelbyville, KY