One night in June, 1859, two citizens of Frankfort, Col.  J. C. McArdle, a lawyer, and Judge Myron Veigh, of the State Militia, were driving from Booneville to Manchester.  Their business was so important that they decided to push on, despite the darkness and the mutterings of an approaching storm, which eventually broke upon them just as they arrived opposite the “Spook House.”  The lightning was so incessant that they easily found their way through the gateway and into a shed, where they hitched and unharnessed their team.  They then went to the house, through the rain, and knocked at all the doors without getting any response.  Attributing this to the continuous uproar of the thunder they pushed at one of the doors, which yielded.  They entered without further ceremony and closed the door.  That instant they were in darkness and silence.  Not a gleam of the lightning’s unceasing blaze penetrated the windows or crevices; not a whisper of the awful tumult without reached them there.  It was as if they had suddenly been stricken blind and deaf, and McArdle afterward said that for a moment he believed himself to have been killed by a stroke of lightning as he crossed the threshold.  The rest of this adventure can as well be related in his own words, from the Frankfort Advocate of August 6, 1876: 

“When I had somewhat recovered from the dazing effect of the transition from uproar to silence, my first impulse was to reopen the door which I had closed, and from the knob of which I was not conscious of having removed my hand; I felt it distinctly, still in the clasp of my fingers.  My notion was to ascertain by stepping again into the storm whether I had been deprived of sight and hearing.  I turned the doorknob and pulled open the door.  It led into another room!

“This apartment was suffused with a faint greenish light, the source of which I could not determine, making everything distinctly visible, though nothing was sharply defined.  Everything, I say, but in truth the only objects within the blank stone walls of that room were human corpses.  In number they were perhaps eight or ten—­it may well be understood that I did not truly count them.  They were of different ages, or rather sizes, from infancy up, and of both sexes.  All were prostrate on the floor, excepting one, apparently a young woman, who sat up, her back supported by an angle of the wall.  A babe was clasped in the arms of another and older woman.  A half-grown lad lay face downward across the legs of a full-bearded man.  One or two were nearly naked, and the hand of a young girl held the fragment of a gown which she had torn open at the breast.  The bodies were in various stages of decay, all greatly shrunken in face and figure.  Some were but little more than skeletons.