Each fall, Jill Morenz leads two-hour walking tours of downtown Covington, Kentucky, highlighting some of the city’s best- and least-known ghost stories. As she walks by the surface parking lot at the intersection of Pike and Scott streets, she casually mentions that the property — prime downtown real estate — has been vacant for a long time, partly because of a hidden and flooded space beneath the asphalt.

“There’s tunnels under there,” Morenz said in an interview after one of her 2025 tours. “You just walk across the parking lot and you’re like, oh, I wonder why nobody’s put anything here.”

The parking lot fits well into Morenz’s tour: it’s haunted by the ghosts of an old brewery and a failed hotel project.

She recalled when she first learned about some of the property’s history. Morenz, who now runs Aviatra Accelerators, was working for the Catalytic Fund. The lender, in turn, was working with a developer who wanted to build a condominium building on the site and there was one big stumbling block.

“[They] couldn’t get approval, and then it suddenly became clear why, because it’s just not stable enough to support anything big on there,” Morenz explained.

Morenz and others familiar with the site and its history of abandoned development bids tend to chalk up its longevity as dead space to the flooded cavern beneath the parking lot and the costs involved to deal with it.

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