Psychic Tour of Wickland

Ever been to Bardstown's historic Wickland house? Well, maybe tonight's the night you should check it out: A Visit With the Spirits of Wickland, billed as "a psychic tour of the 1826 Plantation house with a small group" is being held this very evening at 7:30pm sharp.

Then again, apparently they do this every Friday.

I'm not really sure what a psychic tour entails. Since it's implied - well, no, heck, it isn't implied, it's actually stated that you'll be visiting with spirits - is this going to be some sort of seance kinda thing? Or, like 1,001 lame TV programs with soulless scammers like Sylvia Browne, is the host going to close his/her eyes at some point and start channeling "Ozmo, the Fifth Ascended Celestial Angel Guide from the Great Magellanic Cloud"? I'd rather go back to 1942 and hang out with Madam Brent behind her beaded curtain and get some phrenology.

It says on the Visit Bardstown site: "Take a 90 minute paranormal family-friendly tour which includes the opportunity to interact through a psychic medium and the friendly spirits who once lived there." Click through that link if you have a strong stomach for fried baloney and hogwash - it runs down a detailed list of the characters, with a highly detailed "backstory" for each of them. I don't know whether it makes me angry or just sad. Both, maybe?

Ask yourself: if you had psychic abilities, would you use your God-given supernatural powers to help mankind, or would you host "ghost tours" of an allegedly haunted house in a small town in Kentucky for a $15 admission price?

Say what you will about Edgar Cayce, but even if he was delusional, he at least loathed the idea of making money off his alleged psychic gifts.

I'm not carping on this because I'm a skeptic - I'm carping on this because I know there are such things as ghosts and psychics and hauntings and channelled entities, and I don't like seeing them presented as goofy tourist attractions. I've had some "psychic" experiences myself, and you don't see me even talking about it, let alone hyping myself as a medium, let alone claiming it's something that can be repeated with guaranteed results, every Friday, week after week, year after year.

Those who say don't know, and those who know don't say.

Okay, okay, I hear ya, "Don't be so wedged, Jeff, it's just all in good fun", right? Fine. Go, have a great time, give yourself some spooky shivers, and tell 'em I sent you by. Reservations are required, so call 502-507-0808 to make yours.

Kentucky's Radio Station for the Blind

I'd never heard of the Central Kentucky Radio Eye service until I happened upon this Herald-Leader news story tonight:

Last Monday, the management at Central Kentucky Radio Eye, the Lexington-based reading service for those physically unable to access the printed word, was informed that the network which provides the satellite feed for the majority of CKRE's 7 p.m. to 8 a.m. broadcast was to cease all service Sept. 30.

Margarget Chase, executive director at CKRE, immediately sent out letters to her 80 area volunteers explaining how devastating this will be for the blind and disabled across the country who depend on the InTouch Network, a service funded by the Jewish Guild for the Blind for 32 years.

Determined not to have any dead air over CKRE's airways, Chase and her staff created a plan to continue 24-hour service to the 3,000 customers they serve in Kentucky.

"What we are going to do is step up our own programming," Chase said. In the beginning, some shows might have to be repeated, she said.

"I have lots of ideas for new programming," she said, some of which will be heard Oct. 1.

I find it fascinating that such a specialty radio station has existed all these years and I never even knew about it. CKRE broadcasts on a closed-circuit frequency, and to receive it you need their special pre-tuned radio, which they are happy to supply. (CKRE requests a one-time $25 user fee, but if you're unable to afford it, there's a good chance they'll just give you one anyway!) The CKRE broadcast can be heard in an approximate 80 mile radius outwards from Lexington, reaching as far as Owenton in the north, Berea in the south, Bardstown in the west, and Beattyville in the east.

You might ask, isn't all radio sort-of ideal for the sight-impaired? Well, what's super-special about CKRE is that they broadcast people reading local and national newspapers. Listeners can hear readings from such publications as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Readers Digest, Christian Science Monitor, etc. Pertinent info from local papers like the Lexington Herald-Leader and the Louisville Courier-Journal are also read aloud for listeners.

They also provide a live internet streaming broadcast - listen to it here. Since they're looking to fill all that time with their own self-generated programming, I wonder if they'd let me bring back my old "Late, Late Show" radio program and play stuff like Henny Hendrickson's Louisville Serenaders and Cornelia Froboess records?

Dowsing in Kentucky

The art of dowsing, also known colloquially as "water-witching" or "doodlebugging", is an ancient tradition brought to America by its early European settlers. And it's alive and well in Kentucky.

The Tri-state Dowsers are an organization uniting dowsing-rod experimenters across Indiana, Illinois, and Kentucky. Member Duane Walter was interviewed in the Evansville Courier Press awhile back, and said he's actually rarely been called upon to use his divining gift to find water. Most times, he's asked to help locate unmarked graves.

"I don't encounter mistrust very much, but it happened this one time in Owensboro (Ky.). This church was planning to move their cemetery, and they wanted to make sure all the bodies were accounted for. There were a few people who stood at the window and watched. Didn't want to come outside. Called me a warlock. Didn't scare me off, though. I did the job I was asked to do."

While Walter has a toolbox full of dowsing tools and pendulums, he's just as likely to use a simple "L-rod" that can be fashioned from a coat hanger.

He and his wife, Phyllis, live in a log cabin built in the late 1970s. Their 80-acre farm has been in the family for five generations.

"At first I was skeptical," Phyllis Walter admits, smiling, "but when he went to two cemeteries, and I watched him find some long-forgotten graves, I became a believer."

Dowsing is often attributed not to any special gift of the dowser, but to Ley Lines. This phenomena may indeed aid a dowser at certain points, but I don't think that's the whole of the story. Dowsing seems to work just about anywhere, anytime, not just near alleged Ley Lines or power-points on the Earth's grid. And then there's also Telluric Currents, Morphic Fields, Bruce Cathie's World Grid, Songlines, and the "Dragon Currents" of Feng Shui.

According to a 1978 study by Z.V. Harvalik, dowsers respond to a 60hz electromagnetic field but this response supposedly does not occur if the kidney area or brain are shielded. I would posit that it isn't the kidneys that are involved in the abdomen, but the gut brain, the literal second brain that humans have which was only discovered a few years ago and was unknown in 1978.

Far less credible to me are those are claim to use dowsing rods as ghost detectors. Someone calling themselves Whistling Owl tells a story of entering the haunted Talbott Tavern in Bardstown (see page 194 in your copy of Weird Kentucky) with a divining rod and asking out loud, "are there any ghosts present in this room?". Supposedly the divining rod swung around and pointed behind the dowser, who also claims that when they got home and listened back to a tape recorder left on in the room, a ghostly voice was clearly heard whispering "behind you!"


Famous dowsers in recent history include:

Thomas Charles Lethbridge, who authored many paranormal-themed books, including Ghost and Divining Rod in 1963 and The Power of the Pendulum in 1978.

Uri Geller, whose long career of self-induced paranormal phenomena included dowsing. Despite controversy and accusations of charlatanism by professional skeptics like James Randi (who has been accused of exaggeration, falsification, and charlatanism himself), his powers have been verified to some degree by Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ of the spooky Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International).

Karl Spiesberger, the German mystic best known for his pendulum dowsing, his theories linking it to The Odic Force, and his membership in the mysterious Brotherhood of Saturn.

Wickland and Wickland

There are at least two historic estates called Wickland in Kentucky - the first and most famous is the one in Nelson County, on the outskirts of Bardstown.

It was built in 1813 for Charles A. Wickliffe, a Whig member of the Kentucky House of Representatives who later became Governor of Kentucky. The house has also been lived in by Charles' son Robert C. Wickliffe,(who was governor of Louisiana from 1856 to 1860) and by Charles' grandson J. C. W. Beckham. Beckham, who was born at Wickland, also went on to become a Governor of Kentucky (from 1900 to 1907).


The Honorable Order of Kentucky Colonels have a barbecue here every summer, and the Wickland Corn Maze Halloween event is held on the grounds every autumn. You never know what sort of horrific entities will jump out at you when you walk the corn maze, and the proceeds go to the local Future Farmers of America chapter.


Wickland is vaguely listed by some as a haunted house, but if anyone's given any specific data about this, I've missed it.

Kentucky's other Wickland is located in Shelby County, and was (rather unimaginatively) named after the first one. Charles Cotesworth Marshall, built it in 1901 and named it in honor of his wife, Elizabeth Wickliffe, who was the daughter of the aforementioned Louisiana Governor, Robert C. Wickliffe and was raised at the original Nelson County Wickland.


Wikipedia says it's in Shelbyville, but the closest major town to it is clearly Simpsonville, and if you want to be perfectly old-school accurate about it, it's in Veechdale. Remind me to drive back out there soon and take a photo.

Lexington Dinner Train?

Wow! Just saw this story:

A dinner train with boarding at Lexington Center and an excursion train between Lexington and beyond Frankfort could be in operation as early as next year, with the potential for passenger service between the two cities later.

The announcement was made Thursday at the Lexington Center board meeting by Fred Mudge, chairman of the board of R.J. Corman Railroad Group, based in Nicholasville...

A dinner train from Lexington would most likely go to Frankfort, turn around and come back, Mudge said. An excursion trip might extend to Bagdad, a small community west of Frankfort, then return to Lexington.

The Lexington Dinner Train would be operated by the R.J. Corman company, the same folks who bring you My Old Kentucky Dinner Train in Bardstown (pictured above, thanks to flickr's thomas.merton).

Jesse James' Hallucination

The Talbott Tavern (right next door to the Jailer's Inn) in Bardstown is the oldest "stagecoach stop" tavern and hotel in the United States, built in 1779.

Although Jesse James’ ghost is claimed by some to walk these halls, I see no reason to believe that he should haunt a tavern just because he used to drink here. Ghostly activity predates his death, with numerous child ghosts said to be creeping around, plus the spirit of a waitress who committed suicide here by hanging herself.

By some accounts, Jesse James may have had a paranormal experience himself at the tavern: one night while sitting around drinking, he claimed that he saw the murals painted on the walls of an upstairs room coming to life, and shot the walls full of holes in his panic.

Then again, it may have just been the fact that he was three sheets to the wind. And maybe hallucinating on a bad batch of bourbon. Other accounts say he was merely shooting at a butterfly, either real or imagined.



The bullethole-riddled mural has always been a point of historical pride for the Tavern, but sadly was destroyed in a fire. It has been speculated that the fire was of supernatural origin as well.

The room was still in a charred shambles when I dropped in to take photos for the book, but they graciously allowed me to go in the locked room and snap a few shots of what was left.

The bullet holes don't all seem to follow the same trajectory, which I suppose could be explained if James ran all around the room when he did the shooting. I suppose.

Jailer's Inn

The Jailer's Inn, located at 111 W. Stephen Foster Avenue in Bardstown, is a bed and breakfast occupying the former Nelson County Jail building. Originally built in 1819, the building is still pretty much unchanged today, except that most of its rooms have been renovated into luxurious suites.

However, some cells have been left intact for historical display purposes, and one of the rooms available for rent still has a decidedly spartan cell-like quality to it (albeit done up with an Elvis/50s motif!)


The Jailer's Inn, like the Talbott Tavern next door (see page 194 in your copy of Weird Kentucky), is often reported as being haunted. The Travel Channel even named the Jailer's Inn on a list of the ten most haunted places in America, although I wouldn't go that far.

I haven't experienced anything creepy at Jailer's Inn myself, but certainly, it would make sense that it would be a potentially haunted place; after all, old jails would be a place of accumulated human misery and even death, just like old hospitals and asylums.

Of course, this isn't necessarily the kind of PR that every bed and breakfast wants, and so there's no mention of any hauntings on their promotional brochure. But they do take part in so-called "ghost hunter" events such as Patti Starr's "Ghost Hunting Get-a-way Weekend", which charges 500 bucks for a double-occupancy room, dinner and breakfast, a ghost-hunting seminar with Patti, and tours of Jailer's Inn and Talbott Tavern. If this sort of thing is your cup of tea, you can find more info here.

Bourbon Falls

We recently unearthed this antique bourbon bottle that, astonishingly, still has most of its label intact after its long strange meandering mission into time. The label has swipes of mud on it, suggesting it was recovered in a bottle dig, but also has "1.15" written on it in grease pencil, as if it's spent some time on a flea market shelf somewhere along the way.

Bourbon Falls? Never heard of the stuff, but thankfully, the Earth is populated by some hardcore whiskey historians who have many of the pieces of the Bourbon Falls puzzle easily retrievable online.

As you can barely read on the red ribbon graphic at the bottom of the bottle's label, Bourbon Falls was a brand name of Heaven Hill Distilleries, just up the road a piece in Bardstown. According to whiskeymerchants.co.uk:

1783 -- William Heavenhill is born "during an Indian raid which was being waged, under the cliffs near Rowan Creek" at the site of present day Heaven Hill Distilleries.

A group of Bardstown-area investors and the five Shapira brothers, David, Ed, Gary, George and Mose, found During 1934 Heaven Hill Distilleries, Inc., originally known as “Old Heavenhill Springs” distillery. The company had 12 employees at the time of its founding.

Barrel #1 was filled on December 13.1935 Bourbon Falls is the name on the company's first label.

kybourbon.com lists all subsidiary brands and lines of Heaven Hill, and sure enough, there's Bourbon Falls. But just because they're still the brandholder, does inclusion on this list mean they still make it, I wondered? I went to Heaven Hill's own site and noticed they have a section titled "Other Bourbons" that states:

Heaven Hill Distilleries, as the second largest holder of Bourbon in the world, also offers a number of other well-known and historic American Whiskey brands. Some of the larger labels include the Heaven Hill Bourbon family, Cabin Still, J.W. Dant, Echo Spring, Mattingly & Moore, J.T.S. Brown, T.W. Samuels, Kentucky Deluxe and Kentucky Supreme.

No mention of Bourbon Falls, but if they keep the flame alive on these other historic brands, even in microminimus quantities, there may yet be hope.

And then I found this. Looks like if you wanna get the real old-school Bardstown hooch, you gotta go to Japan. There's your global economy.

Hillbilly Hijack!

Hey, speaking of My Old Kentucky Dinner Train, now here's my kind of entertainment. For a mere hundred dollar bill, you can witness Hillbilly Hijack, a dinner-theatre murder mystery play held on a moving train in glorious Bardstown.

My Old Kentucky Dinner Train

My Old Kentucky Dinner Train got its start as part of the old Bardstown railroad branch, originally constructed by The Bardstown and Louisville Railroad in 1860. Over the next century, the line would change hands from B&L to L&N to CSX to R.J. Corman, its current owner. The Corman company developed the dinner-train idea in 1988, and it's been a huge success. I wish more railroad lines would take a cue from My Old Kentucky Dinner Train's lead.


The Dinner Train consists of three dining cars and a kitchen car. All the meals served on the train are prepared on board by the train's Executive Chef and his staff while you're sent on a journey through some of Kentucky's loveliest scenery, including passes by the antique Jackson Hollow Trestle, the Nazareth religious community, and the Bernheim Research Forest.