JAN'S TALES...Della Barnes - WWW.GUARDIANTALES.COM

One goes...Della, a very beautiful woman of her time, was married to a very wealthy and extremely jealous man. There was a rumor that she turned to prostitution as an extra form of income for the family, (Which doesn't make since unless her husband never gave her any money of her own...I'm just writing what I heard, you be the judge...) Well, when her husband found out he killed her in a jealous rage, but before she was buried he cut off her ring finger and took back the wedding band. Her family had a statue constructed in her image to cover her grave, and legend had it that every year on the anniversary of the night she was murdered, she would drop the concrete rose that was in her hand, bend over, pick it up and cry until the sun rose. People have said they have visited the statue before her upper torso was stolen and said you could see where the corners of her eyes were eroded away from all the crying she done, and that there were fingers missing on her hand and bloody marks staining the pleats of her dress.

Another version goes something like this....Della was engaged to be married but a few days before the ceremony her fiance calls it off because he is in love with another woman and in great despair, Della kills herself. Her fiance comes to the wake held in her family home and demands the engagement ring back, but due to rigor mortis, he has to cut the finger off to retrieve the piece of jewelry. Della's father was said to have commissioned an Italian sculptor to make a life sized statue of her to put over her grave, but only a day after they erected it the fingers fell off of her ring hand. The statue was repaired several times over, but the fingers kept falling off. They said at night you could see the blood running from her fingers down her dress.

The last rumored story is something of a different nature, (And I will have to try and search the local newspaper archives to try and verify if this is true or not...stay tuned...takes a lot of time....) According to the Paducah newspaper at the time of her death, she was unmarried, not engaged, was not stabbed to death or had her hand cut off. She was reported as dying from an overdose of powdered morphine.