Is Manchester Too Fat?

Clay County seems to be getting quite the bad rap lately, what with the Kentucky State Police Cockfighting Scandal earlier this year and the mysterious death of Bill Sparkman last year. Now there's a study that, according to The Atlantic, says the population of Manchester, KY is twice as obese as the national average.

Twice as obese. Twice as obese. How is that possible? Is that possible?

The Washington Post puts an especially sinister-sounding spin on it all, almost begging for a creepy soundtrack music cue and the gravelly-voiced guy on City Confidential:

The residents of this town of 2,100 -- 95 miles southeast of Lexington and deep in the Appalachian foothills -- indeed appear to celebrate the joys of community closeness. The bake sales, the volunteering. But it's what goes uncelebrated, and even ignored, here that has become Manchester's defining feature: In an increasingly unhealthy country, it is one of the unhealthiest places of all.

When I read these reports, I started racking my brains of everyone I know in Manchester - and I have to say, they're not morbidly obese by any stretch of the imagination. Is the statistic flat-out wrong, or are there just hordes of unseen fat people hiding in the bushes, out of sight like "the Others" in Lost?

The piece quote a local resident, Charles Rawlins, as saying: "The kids around here, they'll eat cornbread and taters for lunch. They'll get a 20-piece chicken meal. It's killing them."

I'm not so sure about that. My people back in Estill County are still in great health despite being born and raised on chicken, cornbread and taters.

I blame the processed junk they put in goods nowadays, like high fructose corn syrup, MSG, Nutrasweet, Splenda, partially hydrogenated oils, and genetically modified crap. I also blame cable, internet and especially video games turning America into a bunch of sedentary monitor-watching insensate food tubes who can't spell, can't talk, can't socialize, can't communicate coherently, and can't find their own ass on a map if their lives depended on it.

MIssing Plane in Hazard Area

From the Associated Press:

HAZARD, Ky. -- Kentucky State Police are searching an area in eastern Kentucky for a plane that may be missing.

Trooper Jody Sims at the Hazard post says officials have spotted something that could be wreckage and are investigating whether it's related to a report of a plane possibly missing.

Trooper Tony Watts says the Federal Aviation Administration in Indianapolis notified police Tuesday afternoon that a plane may have been lost in the vicinity of Clay, Owsley and Leslie counties.

Rescuers are searching the area, but Watts says they can't get an aircraft in the air to help look because of the weather.

Unanswered Sparkman Questions

The dust has finally settled on the Bill Sparkman case, and everyone seems to accept the final investigative report. It concluded Sparkman committed suicide in Hoskins Cemetery and faked it to appear as a murder, because he thought his cancer was coming out of remission and he wanted to leave behind an insurance policy for his son. Case Closed.

But I'm still uneasy about the whole thing. Don't know why, exactly. Something's just not quite right.

True, people do some crazy things, and true, they don't have to always make sense. In fact, the more a news story neatly makes a pat sort of sense, the greater likelihood it's been crafted and contrived. So, part of me thinks, maybe it is true. Maybe Sparkman did kill himself.

But ask yourself: if you were going to fake your own murder, couldn't you have thought of a better way? And couldn't you have done a better job of making it more realistic and believable?

Today's Washington Post:

Investigators said Sparkman's wrists were bound so loosely that he could have done the taping himself. He was touching the ground almost to his knees. To survive, "all Mr. Sparkman had to do at any time was stand up," Capt. Lisa Rudzinksi of the Kentucky State Police said.

I don't mean to speak ill of the dead, but that's just plain stupid. What kind of lynching is that? Did Sparkman really think anyone was going to believe that unknown perps captured him, tied his hands loosely, and then hung him in such an unlikely way? (And why would they even need to tie his hands, anyway? Presumably he wouldn't be going anywhere.)

Sparkman, we're told, was a teacher, a man of science, and highly intelligent. I have real trouble squaring this intelligent man with this poorly-executed hoax attempt.

Lowell Adams, a close friend of Sparkman's, told investigators that Sparkman had confessed his whole secret plan to him. Why would he do that? I don't know. It doesn't make sense. Why would Adams betray Sparkman and spill the beans? I don't know that either.

Some friend.

The Washington Post again:

"In reality Bill spoke with me several times about killing himself and, on the Saturday before his death he told me he was going to kill himself on the next Wednesday," Adams said in a written statement included in more than 200 pages of investigative records.

Adams said Sparkman, who once had lymphoma, preferred to kill himself rather than to die from cancer.

"Bill said he had chosen a place to kill himself 'in the woods' in Clay County and he intended to hang himself," Adams said. "He said he intended to tie his hands behind his back so it would appear that someone else did it, to appear like a murder."

Adams said Sparkman asked him if he wanted to get drunk with him the weekend before his death. Adams said Sparkman bought a case of Budweiser beer in Richmond. An autopsy found that Sparkman was not under the influence of any drugs or alcohol at the time of his death. It also found that Sparkman did not have cancer.

Wait, so he didn't have cancer? He did all this for nothing? So why did he think his cancer had returned? Did he get a doctor's diagnosis? If so, who's the doctor? If not, why not?

The two life insurance policies that Sparkman took out on himself were for accidental death, and would not pay out in case of suicide. Wouldn't it have been far easier to fake an accident than to fake a murder? Wouldn't it have been far easier to actually set a real accident into motion?

For instance, couldn't he have driven his car off a cliff while doing 90 MPH, but stepped hard on the brakes, knowing full well that the brake marks on the road would be accepted as suitable evidence that it was an accident? (Not a very pleasant way to go, but neither is carving the word "Fed" into your own flesh and choking yourself with a noose.) For that matter, couldn't he just have deliberately overdosed on something? Or drowned in a lake? Why this bizarre and implausible kidnapping-lynching scenario?

Lastly, Sparkman allegedly did all this to help his son, who he loved very much. He left detailed written instructions to his son about what to do after his demise, and he closed the letter with "I love you and will always do so." And yet we're to believe that he, in some sort of severely misguided "Spock kills self but saves the ship" act of self destructive heroism, abandoned his son and committed suicide?

Some father.

I can't swallow it. I just can't. There's something more here we haven't been told, but I can't begin to pretend to guess what. I don't necessarily mean to imply anything in the realm of conspiracy or cover-up, but I just can't shake the feeling that there's still a third party at work here, a missing puzzle piece, a shadow over Innsmouth, a speckled band.

State Police: Sparkman a Suicide

The official verdict is in: Bill Sparkman, the census worker recently found dead in Clay County with the word "fed" written across his chest, killed himself and staged it to look like homicide so his son could collect the insurance money. Or so the Kentucky State Police believe.

According to State Police Capt. Lisa Rudzinski, Sparkman's wrists were bound loosely in front of his body, allowing considerable mobility. Duct tape held his glasses in place, and his mouth was taped shut and stuffed with a rag.

Curiously, Rudzinski said Sparkman was not blindfolded, despite previous eyewitness accounts to the contrary. Even odder to me, now they're saying he actually wasn't in Hoskins Cemetery as originally stated from day one. Now they're saying he was actually in a clearing nearby.

"No defensive wounds were located on his body," Rudzinski said. "And a rag was found in his pants that was consistent with other rags scattered at the scene, including the rag that was in his mouth. The victim's clothes were found undisturbed in the bed of his pickup truck, which was also recovered at the scene." Rudzinski also reported that the autopsy indicated that the letters spelling "Fed" were written from the bottom up, as someone might do when writing on themselves.

From the official KSP report:

The investigation indicates that Mr. Sparkman died of asphyxiation/strangulation at the same location where he was discovered in Clay County, Ky.

Despite the fact that Mr. Sparkman was found hands, feet and mouth bound with duct tape, rope around his neck and the word "FED" written on his chest, analysis of the evidence determined Mr. Sparkman's death was self-inflicted. A thorough examination of evidence from the scene, to include DNA testing, as well as examination of his vehicle and his residence resulted in the determination that Mr. Sparkman, alone, handled the key pieces of evidence with no indications of any other persons involved.

Witness statements, which are deemed credible, indicate Mr. Sparkman discussed ending his own life and these discussions matched details discovered during the course of the investigation. It was learned that Mr. Sparkman had discussed recent federal investigations and the perceived negative attitudes toward federal entities by some residents of Clay County.

Without raising any red flag of conspiracy theory, let me just say that I'm inclined to think there's a little more to the story than we are being told. Just because no one's DNA was found at the crime scene is meaningless - criminals do wear gloves and stuff in this forensically conscious age, you know. And the whole "letters written from the bottom up" thing makes no sense to me. I stood in front of a mirror, imagining "What would Sparkman do?" and my first impulse was to start the letters at the top, not the bottom.

Finally, I'm puzzled that they claim to have "witness statements" (plural) in which Sparkman divulged his whole secret plan to others before carrying it out. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense. In fact, if this was a suicide staged as murder, it's a really, really, really stupidly done one. And from all accounts, Sparkman was a very smart man.

I'm just sayin'.

Sparkman Case Gets Weirder

Things just keep getting weirder in the case of Bill Sparkman, a U.S. Census worker whose corpse was found tied, naked and asphyxiated by a rope in Clay County's Hoskins Cemetery.

The Times-Tribune is reporting that they've received a fax regarding Sparkman titled "I Did It" which seems to state that he was killed because he was working for the Federal Government. The fax has been turned over to the FBI.

That same Times-Tribune article brings something even stranger to the table:

One police investigator, who asked to remain anonymous, told the Times-Tribune that Beyer’s statement indicated law enforcement officials were apparently still entertaining the notions of accidental death or suicide.

One press report indicated that Sparkman’s feet were touching the ground when police found his body. “If his feet were touching and he was hanging from a limb, you’d want to know if it was a broken limb or if the rope slipped,” the investigator continued, saying, “if it appeared his feet were touching when he was tied, it would make you start to think.”

The investigator suggested reporters research the death of David Carradine, an actor whose body was found bound in a closet following death by apparent autoerotic asphyxiation.

Meanwhile, conservative blogger Stacy McCain has written up extended remarks about his recent visit to the scene of the crime, and underscores the mystery fairly succinctly:

If Bill Sparkman hadn’t just driven up here to Hoskins Cemetery to enjoy the scenery, but rather had been lured up here or brought here by his killer, then whoever killed him was almost certainly a local resident, someone familiar with the area. No way somebody from out of town, a stranger to the area, would have driven past many other possible places to dump a body in order to reach this isolated location...

This cemetery was far away from town, and even farther from Sparkman’s home in Laurel County. Sparkman’s truck had been parked up here when his body was found. How did the truck get here? Did Sparkman drive up here, or had he been kidnapped by someone?

What had Bill Sparkman been doing up here in the middle of the woods? Who brought him here? Why did they kill him?

Fascinating as it sounds, I really can't buy the theory that Sparkman was romping around naked in cemeteries performing acts of Carradine-style sexual self-asphyxiation. (David Carradine, you may recall, was found half naked, bound, and hanging in a closet in a hotel this year. Curiously, in his final interview, which just aired on the show Celebrity Ghost Stories, he confessed that he feared a ghost in his closet was haunting him.)

However, neither can I really buy the idea that Sparkman was killed by druggies or militiamen (even though the coroner has now officially confirmed that the word "Fed" was indeed scrawled on Sparkman's chest with a felt-tip pen). The absolute last thing those kind of people would want is to cause a big scene that would focus the entire world's attention on little old Clay County, KY. They would have just disappeared Sparkman's body, simple as that.

Sparkman's son Josh has been voicing concern about the mixed messages and slow signals being given by the police in the matter. So far, law enforcement officials have still refused to rule out the possibility of suicide or accident as a cause of death. (Accident?? Seriously?) Josh insists that Sparkman was absolutely not capable of suicide, and he should know. He also points out that Sparkman had just won a lengthy battle with lymphoma. "No person on this planet is going to fight cancer like he did, then turn around and kill himself a year or so later."

Hoskins Cemetery

Conservative blogger Stacy McCain recently took a road trip to Clay County, KY to check out the scene of the alleged lynching of census worker Bill Sparkman.

I say "alleged" now, because the London Sentinel-Echo is reporting that the original Associated Press report about Sparkman was filled with factual errors. Contrary to previous reports, the Kentucky State Police are now saying that although a rope was around his neck, Sparkman was not hanging from a tree.

Check out McCain's report and photos here. (Photo above from McCain, photo below from AP)


Hoskins Cemetery (located at Lat: 37.1184229, Lon: -83.5874134) is referred to by some sources (and even by the road sign pictured here) as "Hoskin Cemetery" but that's a typo that's taken on a bit of a life of its own... it's clearly "Hoskins" because it was specifically created by and for the Hoskins family.

Google Maps shows the cemetery as being quite off the beaten path, but the aerial photography also seems to be indicating a major road running near it - one that isn't on the actual map. McCain must have had a heck of a time finding this place.

Census Worker Lynched in Clay County

From the Courier-Journal:

A U.S. Census worker found hanging from a tree near a Kentucky cemetery had the word "fed" scrawled on his chest, a law enforcement official said Wednesday, and the FBI is investigating whether he was a victim of anti-government sentiment.

The body of Bill Sparkman, a 51-year-old, part-time Census field worker and teacher, was found Sept. 12 in a remote patch of the Daniel Boone National Forest in rural southeast Kentucky.

The Census has suspended door-to-door interviews in rural Clay County where the body was found pending the outcome of the investigation. An autopsy report is pending...

A private group called PEER, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, tracks violence against employees who enforce environmental regulations, but the group's executive director, Jeff Ruch, said it is hard to know about all of the cases because some agencies don't share data on instances of violence against employees.

Ruch said that after the bombing in Oklahoma City, "we kept getting reports from employees that attacks and intimidation against federal employees had not diminished, and that's why we've been tracking them."

The Eriline Stone

In September 1989, the National Register of Historic Places voted to include this large sandstone outcropping that protruded from a cliff overlooking Highway 66 at Eriline, KY.

It was covered in petroglyphs made, presumably, by ancient man. In 1994, the rock spontaneously broke off and fell into the road, surprisingly intact. Just two days later, arrangements were made to move the giant stone to the Clay County seat of Manchester, where it can be viewed on display to this day.


Bill Thayer at the University of Chicago does an excellent job of deconstructing the markings seen on the stone, and debunking some of the odd claims made about the meaning of the glyphs. One of the most prominent markings on the stone has been interpreted as meaning "Jesus Christ, Son of the Father" in a mixture of Hebrew and Greek. However, the glyph in question has absolutely zero resemblance to Hebrew and Greek, and most certainly does not say "Jesus Christ, Son of the Father" in said languages. Whoever came up with this idea clearly knew nothing about Greek, and even less about Hebrew.

The closest connection with Christ one could remotely draw from this glyph would be that there are two intersecting lines that are not unlike the Christian cross. I shouldn't have to point out, however, that the Christian faith has no exclusive right to two intersecting lines. This is something cavemen have been etching for millions of years prior to the Christian scholars who adopted the cross as their symbol long after Christ's crucifixion.


The sign also interprets a simple circle shape as definitely being a "sun disc" intended to symbolize Ra, the Egyptian Sun God. Again, early primitive man was rendering circle shapes long before the Egyptian culture. There's zero reason to find a circle on a rock in Kentucky and declare it to be the work of someone wanting to exalt Ra, especially when seven other languages are supposedly represented here as well.

As Dr. Thayer puts it:

So why do we have eight scripts proposed here? Very simply, because someone has gone fishing for them to support a preconceived notion. If this squiggle isn't Greek, well it's Ogham or "South Semitic" — this last term, by the way, covering several dozen languages modern and extinct, none of which has signs for vowels — or Punic or Runic. Worse than "not true", this is... boulderdash; and very likely with something of an agenda: see this page on Chief Red Bird and the petroglyphs.

Burning Springs

Back in the glory days when Kentucky was being explored by Europeans in the 1600s, the early settlers were dazzled by natural gas vents in the Earth, also known as "burning springs". I'm not sure if history records how someone first figured out there was highly flammable gas spewing from these vents, but if a frontiersman bearing a torch happened to walk up to one, I'm sure what happens next would be quite a shock!

Today, Kentucky still has a town named for one such gas vent: Burning Springs, KY in Clay County. Burning Springs was once a bustling place, but its post office closed in 1965 and it's currently listed as an unincorporated community. According to Robert Rennick's "Kentucky Place Names" book:

"A very early settlement, it was named for the ignitable springs of natural gas, in seemingly inexhaustible supply, discovered before 1800 at several sites in the area."

Another Kentucky burning spring was in Magoffin County, which dried up in 1900 after being tapped by an oil & gas company in the 1880s. Today the small community named Burning Fork is a remnant of those days. This spring was a literal spring of water, which emitted from the ground mixed with the natural gas. According to "A Library Of Wonders And Curiosities Found In Nature And Art, Science And Literature", by I. Platt:

A spring here breaks out at the foot of a hill, forming a basin of water about six feet in diameter and two feet deep, at the bottom of which issues a stream of gas, which in volume and force is about equal to the blast forced from a common smith's bellows; but there is no cessation of its force, which is such as to create a violent ebullition in the water. Being heavier than common atmospheric air, the gas, on passing up through the water, constantly occupies the surface, which is still the lower part of an indenture in the earth at that place. On presenting a taper, this gas instantly takes fire, and burns with great brilliancy.

Yet another one was near Beaver Creek in Floyd County, mentioned by Lewis Collins in 1847 his "Historical Sketches of Kentucky". According to Collins, the local gas vent was known as a "place of notoriety" to the early residents of Floyd County, and marveled at how the site "instantly ignites on the application of fire".