Maple Hill Manor

Maple Hill Manor wears many hats - it's a historic home, a Bed & Breakfast, a craft store, an orchard, a nature preserve, and an alpaca/llama farm. But it's also a haunted house. William Lynwood Montell, in his book Haunted Houses and Family Ghosts of Kentucky, includes a chapter devoted to Maple Hill's ghosts.

The house was built in 1851 by slaves, who took three years to painstakingly cut all wood by hand and make the bricks on-site from scratch. The original owners were Thomas McElroy and his wife young enough to be his daughter, Sarah Maxwell. Of their seven children, four of them died in the house at a very young age. Thomas and Sarah both eventually passed away in the home as well.

All of these family members have been cited as possible sources for the spirits, but there's more: the Battle of Perryville was fought in 1862, and left wounded and dead laying all over the area for miles. Many of the troops were brought to nearby Springfield homes, including Maple Hill, to recover and regroup. Some died on the premises.


Aspects of the hauntings that have occurred here have taken on a number of forms: knocks on doors with nobody there, sounds of footsteps coming from empty rooms, associated cold spots, inexplicable perfume odors, odd lights showing up in photographs, and prophetic lucid dreams experienced by some guests who have slept here.

Maple Hill Manor is located at 2941 Perryville Road in Springfield. Even without the fascinating ghost rumors and history, it's a delightful place to stay - check it out!

The Simpsons Connection

The exact location of The Simpsons has always been a deliberate source of mixed signals by the show's producers. Various locations for their town of Springfield have been given across the show's run, but in at least one episode - "Behind the Laughter" - their home state is given as being Kentucky.

For years, Kentucky's Springfield was highly regarded among fans as being the most likely candidate, because the citizens of Springfield in The Simpsons have a rivalry with another city called... Shelbyville.


And for bonus irony, very close to the city of Shelbyville, we have Simpsonville!


So, one might have thought Kentucky would be a shoo-in when 20th Century Fox held a contest in 2007 to determine once and for all which of our nation's Springfields would become "in canon" with the show. Not so. Springfield, Vermont won the contest. Since Springfield, KY had the lowest population of any of the competing cities, it seemed a bit unfair just to leave such an important decision to the masses.

It doesn't really matter anyway, because now that the hoopla of the contest is over, the show doesn't really seem to be acknowledging Vermont as its setting. Even in The Simpsons Movie, which the contest was designed to promote, Flanders comments that the city of Springfield sits at the four-way border crux of Ohio, Nevada, Maine and Kentucky. Simpsonian topography, therefore, will clearly never be able to be matched with our world.