Spurlington Tunnel witch legend

The Spurlington Tunnel witch legend is a Kentucky ghost story tied to the abandoned railroad tunnel near Spurlington in Taylor County. Regional radio station websites, travel-feature sites and the local newspaper have retold it many times.^[1][2][3][4]

The story

In the usual telling, Jesse James and his gang were hiding stolen gold and silver in or near the tunnel when a local woman, Nancy Bass, came upon them.^[1][2][3] To keep her from going to the authorities, the outlaws are said to have killed her and buried her above the tunnel with the treasure.^[2][3] WBKR's version adds that Bass already had a reputation among neighbors as a witch who put curses on crops and homes. After her death, the story goes, her spirit cursed the buried treasure and anyone who tried to dig it up.^[2] The legend holds that the treasure is still hidden somewhere in the tunnel.^[1] OnlyInYourState's 2023 retelling adds that no grave marker has been found and no one has recovered the loot.^[3] Some versions say the gang had robbed a train, while others point to the 1872 robbery of a bank in Columbia.^[4]

Transmission

WKDQ describes the tale as local lore handed down through Taylor County families.^[1] WBKR's 2023 retelling credits Only In Your State, Kentucky Educational Television (KET), and a "Haunted Kentucky" Facebook group as its sources.^[2] OnlyInYourState's article draws its photographs from the same Haunted Kentucky page.^[3] Visitors quoted in these pieces talk about strange noises in the tunnel and an uneasy feeling inside.^[2][3]

The story also has older local roots. Writing in the Central Kentucky News-Journal in 2023, Virginia Graves of the Taylor Regional Archive Center said tales of Nancy Bass had been told, repeated and embellished since the mid-1800s. A newspaper story on the "Spurlington witch" ran on 24 July 1974, illustrated by a Campbellsville High School graduate.^[4] The historians Steven Wright and Betty Jane Gorin transcribed stories that Gobel Spurling heard from his grandfather, Charles Wesley Wright (1806–1863), a contemporary of Nancy's.^[4] In these family stories the "witchery" is more mischievous than frightening. A field of oats is cut and bundled overnight, a hunter who refuses her a chew of tobacco comes home without a single squirrel, and cat hair turns up all over the meat in a meat house. The Spurling family sometimes called her "Aunt Nancy".^[4] By Gobel Spurling's account she died at Wright's place, saying that someone was "drivin' a nail" in her, and was buried on the hill behind what was then Ralph Chapel's house.^[4]

The historical Nancy Bass

According to Graves, Nancy Bass was a real person, although documented facts about her are scant. The 1850 census suggests she was born about 1808 in Kentucky. She first appears by name in an 1827 lawsuit over her great-grandfather Josiah Bass's land on Pittman Creek. She is on the Green County tax list in 1828 and on Green, Taylor and Marion County tax lists through 1855.^[4] The 1850 census lists her, aged 42, with two daughters, Polly and F. A. Bass. No marriage or death record has been found, and she appears in no Taylor or Marion County record after 1855.^[4]

Graves therefore concluded that Nancy Bass almost certainly died before the 1860 census. The tunnel was under construction from 1867 to 1874, after her death, so the versions that link her to the tunnel and the James gang cannot be true. If the tunnel is haunted, Graves wrote, it is "unlikely to be Nancy Bass".^[4] None of the radio or travel retellings offers documentary evidence of a Jesse James connection or of a killing at the site.^[1][2][3]