Frogland

A number of online directories list something called "CC Range", that hosts something "Frogland", that purports to be a miniature golf course in Hopkinsville. Scour the web as I may, I can't seem to find any detailed information or photographs.

Soon as it gets warmer, can you say "road trip"?

I did check Google Maps, and sure enough, I can see what clearly appears to be a miniature golf course, although I was kinda hoping for enormous towering fiberglas frog statues, Gatlinburg-style. I don't see any evidence of such on the aerial view, alas.

Secret Shopping Center Cemetery

In Louisville, near the corner of Breckenridge and Dutchmans Lane, directly behind Red Lobster and directly facing Books-A-Million, there is a large parking-lot island circled with dense hedges.

Many have parked here, driven past, walked by many times over the years and never stopped to notice that this square of hedges has a gate on one side. A gate that leads inside to a hidden cemetery.



What surprises me most is how visually interesting all of the graves are. In some cemeteries you could trudge for half an hour and still not find a stone with anything really worthy of being photographed, but here every marker has real character and attributes that make it special.


Although it seems moderately maintained, one of the stones has tipped over (apparently long long time ago) and no one ever saw fit to stand it back up. Now it's practically merged with the ground. The other stones are all in decent condition, although one is slightly askew from its base.



See it aerially on Google Maps here.

Drive Down One-Way Streets Virtually!

There are many useful functions to the new "Street view" mode on Google Maps, but for me, none are as fascinating as the thrill of using it to navigate the wrong way down one-way streets, getting a driver's seat view that few people ever have... except maybe those who are new in town, or are evading police in a high speed chase.

The Bridges of Kentucky

For those of you who have an unexplainable obsession with bridges - and I know you're out there - the "street view" feature on Google Maps can be quite a handy toy, allowing you to traverse Kentucky's bridges virtually.

Madison-Milton Bridge, Milton, KY

Cumberland River Falls Bridge, Whitley County, KY

Boonesboro Bridge, Boonesboro, KY

Sherman Minton Bridge, Louisville, KY

Clark Bridge, Louisville, KY

Gordon Hill Pike Bridge, Corbin, KY

Paducah Bridge, Paducah, KY

J.R. Miller Blvd Bridge, Owensboro, KY

Lake Barkley US 68 Bridge, Cadiz, KY

Clays Ferry Bridge, Clays Ferry, KY

Ironton-Russell Bridge, Ashland, KY

Roebling Suspension Bridge, Covington, KY


And while Google currently doesn't let us street-view the William H. Natcher Bridge in Daviess County, we do get to go underneath it, at least:

Bigfoot twins in Baskett

In 1999, there was a report of a pair of Bigfoots (Bigfeet?) being seen in a field of beans close to Highway 60 in Baskett, KY. According to researcher Bart Nunnelly, "Both were brownish-gray in color and were positioned with their backs towards witness. One BF was squatting down,apparently doing something to the ground which was obscured by beans."

This incident illustrates well the "hidden in plain sight" axiom which applies to all paranormal phenomena: the person who reported the creatures noted that traffic was heavy that day, with lots of cars in front of him and behind him, and yet no one else bothered reporting the incident that day.

Underwater Cemeteries

Lake Barkley and Kentucky Lake are enormous twin lakes side by side, with the territory between them known as “Land Between the Lakes.” I’m not even sure why they’re given separate names when they’re really one huge lake connected by a canal, but there it is.

The lakes are man-made, created in 1966 as part of a controversial TVA plan to evacuate entire towns and flood the area. Kentucky citizens were forced out of their homes and their property seized under “eminent domain.” To this day you can still don scuba gear and go down and see the remains of buildings, railroad tracks, streets, etc. underwater. They’re also visible from low flying planes, and possibly Google Maps.

The Army Corps of Engineers was instructed to dig up all the graves in all the cemeteries - a stagerring number of corpses and coffins - and transplant them elsewhere. There’s been quite a bit of speculation about whether or not things were done by the book. Cemeteries were not always transferred intact, and families that had originally been buried together in one cemetery were often needlessly split up across four others when moved. Some headstones didn’t even make it to their new location, and some have said that the likelihood is high that headstones were often mismatched with their proper owners out of carelessness or just trying to get a very unpleasant job done in a hurry.

Many graves in those old cemeteries had no stone at all, especially those of babies, slaves, and paupers. We know from old cemetery records that the people were interred there, but we don’t know exactly where they were - and neither did the Army Corps of Engineers. There’s no telling how many graves were left behind to be submerged forever under hundreds of feet of water.

Given this, it’s not much of a stretch to theorize the existence of ghosts in the vicinity who are extremely displeased about what happened to their homes, their relatives, their headstones, their graves.

Concentric Rings near Blackburn

What exactly are we seeing in this Google Maps image of enormous concentric rings imposed across stretches of farmland near Blackburn, KY in Union County? It's not really a crop circle in the strictest sense of the word, but it does remind me of some of the odd bullseyes in the Nevada desert near Area 51.

Central State Hospital Cemetery

A huge area of Anchorage, KY, including all of the vast E.P. Sawyer Park, was once the dreaded Central State Mental Hospital and its sprawling grounds.

In 1873 the place was the Lakeland Home for Juvenile Delinquents, which soon thereafter expanded its purpose to become an insane asylum. No asylum of that era was ever a friendly place to be, but this one takes the proverbial cake. For decades, hellish conditions, improper care, senseless deaths and unchecked madness lent a continually greasy patina of very bad karma to this land.

Think of every horror story you’ve ever heard about psychiatry, and it’s all here: overcrowding, abuse, insulin “therapy,” forced freezing cold showers as “treatment,” crude lobotomies, electroshocks, you name it. According to Jay Gravatte of the Louisville Ghost Hunters, wards with a capacity for 1600 persons were containing more like 2400, and in 1943 the Kentucky grand jury discovered that Central State was unfairly committing and imprisoning people who were not mentally ill.

Today all the original buildings are demolished, and a new complex of modern clean edifices stand down the road, at the corner of Lakeland and LaGrange. The old asylum's site can be seen here on Google Maps, and if you scroll just a bit south, you'll see the present facilities.


Voices, purportedly of the dead, have been tape-recorded late at night by ghost hunters in the hospital's long-abandoned cemetery, which is also now part of the E.P. Sawyer park grounds. Most of the stones are now missing, and the ones that are still extant are misplaced and piled haphazardly around nearby trees. You can still tell where the graves are, however, by the prominent sinkholes that dot the landscape. It’s one of the most neglected and poorly maintained cemeteries I’ve ever seen, and these people interred here were unhappy enough from the getgo without having their final resting place so shoddily treated.

I have heard the tape and, for what it’s worth, voices are clearly heard although I can’t make out any of it. I remain dubious about the whole EVP concept.

Avoca Station

This historic building was at one time, I believe, the Avoca post office, and then a grocery. Currently it's affiliated with the Lyndon Coal Company. I say "affiliated" because the building doesn't actually seem to function as an office for them - it's in considerable disrepair and seems abandoned.

Remnants of Long Run Baptist Church

Long Run Cemetery, located off Old Stage Coach Road near the Jefferson-Shelby County border, contains what's left of the old Long Run Baptist Church. That's not much, unfortunately - just a stone foundation.

The church's remains can be seen clearly on Google Maps here.

This area was the site of the "Long Run Massacre", described by the historical marker sign as "undoubtedly the bloodiest in Kentucky". Huron and Miami indians killed 76 settlers and soldiers during a two-day period. Those killed on the first day were en route from Squire Boone's Painted Station to the Falls of the Ohio, and those killed on the second day were militiamen dispatched to bury the victims from the previous day.

The Peaslee Sphinx

The Peaslee family plot, located in Louisville's Cave Hill Cemetery, always commands attention with its huge Sphinx replica. The Peaslee Sphinx can be clearly seen on Google Maps here.

Although I'm fuzzy on the genealogy of it all, the Peaslees buried here are related to Louisville's former mayor Charles Rowland Peaslee Farnsley. Farnsley is also buried in Cave Hill, but this plot contains Ella Harper Harbeson Peaslee, Eleanora Harbeson Peaslee, and Charles Rowland Peaslee. This Charles Rowland, however, is neither Mayor Farnsley (who was born in 1907), nor is it Charles Rowland Peaslee Harbeson, who was born in 1910 and died in 1912.

Mayor Farnsley's much more modest grave can be seen here.

Watterson Trail

Something that never fails to fascinate me is that many of our existing paved roads today began as ancient traditional trails and pathways, blazed by animals as they stomped the same path into the forests year after year. These natural pathways were already etched into the wilderness by the buffalo long before humans set foot on this soil.

Watterson Trail is one such ancient animal-created road. When people drive on it, they don't stop to consider that this road was meant to be a road, long before even the tribes we call Native Americans were here. (Well, I think about it all the time, of course, but I'm a freak.)

It stretches from the Middletown district of Louisville to Jeffersontown, and isn't much to look at, but for some inexplicable sppoky reason I find it one of my favorite roads, one I'm often drawn to against my will. I was surprised to find that Google Maps has it available in their "street view" mode!

Southeast Christian Church

To use the term "Megachurch" to describe Louisville's Southeast Christian Church would be a great understatement. With five enormous buildings on a campus-like plot, their own newspaper, and a weekly attendance of 18,000 people, it's no wonder that Southeast Christian is the 6th largest church in the United States.

The church is often under fire for one reason or another, whether it's gaffes like a pastor's assertion that the 9-11 attacks were "proof of Christianity's superiority", or simple local complaints about the maddening traffic snarls caused by their events. Some have sued over allegations of harassment and assault and attacks by the off-duty cops the church employs as security and traffic directors. Others have merely voiced anger at the church's tactics and their alleged connections to the creepy dominionist movement.

The church has also been attacked by rival pastors and preachers, who charge that Southern Christian's message, style and presentation is far too slick, commercial, and easy-going. Apparently they're just not "fire and brimstone" enough for some people. Many sourpusses don't approve of the spectacular stage shows put on by the church, which are often heavier on music and entertainment than preaching gospel.

Personally, for what it is, I find their glitzy, commercialized approach much more refreshing and far less offensive than the typical dry old "turn to Leviticus and I'll tell you why you're going to hell" routine. (As I type this, the lead blurb on their website announces that "American Idol" finalist Mandisa will be performing there soon.)

I also have to have a certain amount of respect for something that started so small (a tiny building in Hikes Point) and quickly snowballed into something so astonishingly huge. In principle anyway, I tend to support and salute any enterprise that's so audaciously ambitious, even if I don't fully agree with their product. (Especially when it's tax-free.) Like many churches, Southeast Christian does plenty of charitable and beneficial work, such as their current toy drive for children. But unlike most churches, they have the size and added clout to really achieve these goals on a big scale.


The Church complex is especially purty to view from above on Google Maps, as seen above.

D.W. Griffith

Early this morning I happened to be driving in Oldham County towards LaGrange, KY on Highway 22, and noticed a cemetery I'd never investigated before. It was a fairly sizable place, adjacent to the Mount Tabor Methodist Church in a small spot-in-the-road called Centerfield. I had my camera in the car, so I pulled over and checked it out.

I've always been a fan of coffin-sized above-ground crypts, so I immediately gravitated to a large one nearby and started taking photos of it.

"Hmmm...David Wark Griffith", I thought to myself as I snapped the pics, "and he died in Hollywood ? Huh. That's interesting."

Gradually it sunk in on me that I was standing at the grave of D.W. Griffith, the famous/infamous silent film director. I had no idea he was even buried in Kentucky, and had sort-of assumed in the back of my mind that he was at Forest Lawn or something.


Then I noticed the Kentucky roadside marker alerting me to what I had already stumbled onto completely by dumb luck. So I'm not the most observant mug on the planet sometimes.; I still hadn't finished my morning Starbucks.


Griffith's entire life was marred, ironically, by his greatest success: the film Birth of a Nation, which caused considerable controversy by giving the KKK an almost heroic treatment, and presenting a highly stereotyped view of African-Americans. So glowing was the film's handling of the subject, that the KKK even used the film as a promotional recruiting film for their cause for the majority of the 20th century. Griffith attempted to make up for the negative publicity and to show that he was no racist, by making the epic film Intolerance.

It wasn't enough, and the bad karma from the previous film dogged him to his grave, and well beyond. In 1953, the Directors Guild of America instituted the D.W. Griffith Award as its highest honor, but then rescinded the name in 1999, changing it simply to the "DGA Lifetime Achievement Award".


Griffith's grave can plainly be seen on Google Maps - notice the large squarish plot at nine o'clock in the above image.

Lexington Google Glitch Revisited

Earlier this month, we reported on an odd blurred spot on a Google Maps image of Lexington. A reader has pointed out that the Yahoo Maps image of the corresponding coordinates, as seen above, is unblurred. It's still most likely just a random accidental digital artifact; but it is interesting to note that the glitch just happens to neatly obscure these two houses, as well as the short turn-off road that services these two specific homes.

Curiouser still, this road doesn't show up on Google when you put the image in "map" mode, but it does on Yahoo. Now mind you, digital glitches do show up on Google's satellite images from time to time, and mistakes do happen on Google's map images, but that the obscuring of this road should occur simultaneously by accident on this very spot in both images from their satellite source and from their map source, well, now that is very odd indeed.


Meh. Still probably nothing.

The Yahoo Maps are also noticeably more recent than their Google counterparts. Numerous new housing developments have been built in the area that don't show up on the Google images.

Google Maps Glitch in Lexington?

This is probably just a digital glitch, since there's certainly nothing relating to national security that would make anyone want to censor out this little area near Jacobson Park in Lexington.

Then again, such things do happen. The territory inside Washington D.C.'s Observatory Circle have been digitally dulled down for Dick Cheney's protection (he lives there). A construction site for a new American embassy is, for some reason, considered off limits. And this blurry spot in Russia has stirred some speculation.

Bondurant's Pharmacy

This drive-thru pharmacy, shaped like an enormous mortar and pestle, can be found at 1465 Village Drive in Lexington, KY.

(Do people even know what mortars and pestles are anymore? I doubt it.)

The people here are very proud of their unusual structure and are happy to tell visitors all about it. Believe it or not, this building dates back only to the 1970s, not the 30s-60s heyday of creative mimetic architecture.

You can see an aerial view on Google Maps here.

The Frankfort Avenue Art House

Take a look at this amazingly decorated home on Frankfort Avenue near Butchertown in Louisville. We are unable to drive past it without slowing down for a long gaze at it, even if it means missing the green light. Like a Hieronymus Bosch painting, we see something different in it every time we study it.


More images and information about this wonderful building can be found in the Weird Kentucky book.


You can sort-of see all the stuff peppered all over the property on Google Maps.

The Spaceship School

The locals are so used to it by now they think nothing of it, but people visiting Berea for the first time are often startled to find this building (looking like an odd cross between a buddhist temple and an alien spacecraft) in the midst of a rural area of the quaint little town of Berea, KY.

This is Berea Community School, believe it or not. Why would a school in a small community that prides itself on its rustic and woodsy heritage look like something Ming The Merciless would live in? I dunno.

The picture just doesn't do justice to the attention-commanding sight this UFO schoolhouse really is. The school is a complete concentric ring, made up of several pods revolving around a center one. The classrooms are mostly open areas with no walls or doors, which can be a profoundly annoying experience for all. This was some Frank Lloyd Wrong's idea of "progressive" architecture for schools. (Thank God it never became a trend.)

View it on Google Maps here.