The Conjured Chest

A hand-carved chest held by the Kentucky Historical Society since 1976, which one family said carried a curse laid after the enslaved man who made it was beaten to death.

The Kentucky Historical Society tells the story as the family handed it down. Jeremiah Graham, preparing for his first child, had a hand-carved chest made by Remus, an enslaved man. Graham was unhappy with the work and beat Remus, and Remus died of his injuries. The family story says other enslaved African Americans put dried owl blood in the drawers and cursed the chest to avenge his death. The chest went into the baby's nursery, and in the family's telling tragedy followed each time someone stored clothing in it.

Virginia Cary Hudson Cleveland, who died in 1954, heard it in childhood from her grandmother Eliza and wrote it down in a letter to Virginia Cary Hudson Mayne, her daughter. It was printed, with the names changed, in Flapdoodle, Trust & Obey, a collection of Cleveland's letters that Wikipedia dates to 1966. Every account in these sources comes from the family that kept the chest. None comes from the enslaved people.

The Kentucky Historical Society received the chest from Mayne as a gift in 1976 and says it had haunted her family for generations. In 2015 it went to Las Vegas for the first season of the Travel Channel series Deadly Possessions, where Zak Bagans looked for proof that it could no longer do harm and interviewed Beverly Mayne Kienzle, Mayne's daughter, about why her mother gave it away.