The Belva Mine Disaster

This story, as told over and over, and cut and pasted almost verbatim on numerous online sources, goes like this:

In December 1945, an explosion at the Belva mine in Fourmile, KY killed many miners and left a handful of survivors trapped. These survivors were eventually rescued, and subsequently stated in interviews that at one point during their ordeal, a "door" somehow opened up in a rock wall and a man dressed as a "lumberjack" or "telephone lineman" stepped out to reassure everyone that they would be rescued. The mystery man then went back into this well-lit room, closed the opening behind him, and was gone.

The source for these interviews is universally given as having "appeared in the December 1981 - January 1982 issues of newspapers in Pineville, Kentucky". Some online sources mistakenly place the setting of the Belva mine in Pennsylvania, but they're obviously confusing it with a similar story of strange men illuminated by a bluish light that manifested to trapped miners in Shipton, PA and told them not to worry.


The CDC actually has an old report online here (in pdf format) - but it doesn't address the magical lumberjack.

The recent hubbub about the rescued Chilean miners being forbidden to talk about the first 17 days underground has raised a lot of conjecture about what exactly is being concealed in that incident.

Some invoke the Richard Shaver "Deros", others the "Hollow Earth" hypothesis, and still others point to the list of alleged underground bases that has been circling the net since the 1990s.

(That list, by the way, names Pineville, KY as the site of a so-called "underground base", apparently for no other reason than because of this very "mystery lumberjack" story we're addressing now. It also incorrectly lists a cave in Tazewell County, VA as being in Kentucky.)


It also doesn't help the story's provenance that a newspaper account at the time, published in the Middlesboro Daily News, makes no mention of anything odd or supernatural happening. I have yet to track down these alleged 1981-1982 papers that blow the lid off the lumberjack legend.

The whole thing sounds like malarkey to me, but I've learned by now that sometimes that stories that sound the absolute stupidest often tend to be the ones that are true. Some have used the Belva lumberjack as a springboard for envisioning a whole concept about good samaritans traveling through time and space to help people in need. Though I don't doubt that such entities could exist, I'm pretty sure this isn't such a case. But with all such matters, like the supposed time-traveler at a Chaplin movie premiere or the long-enduring mythology of the Men in Black, I remain an open circuit and not a closed switch.

Men in Black

In the course of researching the Weird Kentucky book, I spoke to a man in Madison County who told me an interesting tale. He didn't want to be named on the record, and I lost track of the story while hoping he'd reconsider going on the record. Now I've lost track with the guy entirely.

In a nutshell, he claimed that in the 1970s he was visited by a pair of suspicious-acting, pale, cadaverous men wearing dark glasses and dressed in old, musty-looking black suits and ties.

In other words, the classic Men In Black mythical archetype. As Wikipedia describes them:

Men in Black (MIB), in popular culture and in UFO conspiracy theories, are men dressed in black suits who are government agents who harass or threaten UFO witnesses to keep them quiet about what they have seen. It is sometimes implied that they may be aliens themselves. The term is also frequently used to describe mysterious men working for unknown organizations, as well as to various branches of government allegedly designed to protect secrets or perform other strange activities.

The fellow in Madison County said the men were claiming to be selling subscriptions to the Richmond Daily Register and other periodicals. However, their patter was rambling and unpracticed, like someone uttering the words for the first time rather than someone who had been saying the same thing over and over at every door he knocked on. Rather than have a stack of "take one" flyers with more information, they had only one flyer, and it looked water-damaged and dog-eared as if they'd found it on the ground. And he definitely felt as if one MIB was craning his neck to peer inside the house while the other MIB was distracting him.

I can't go into why he felt the men were part of some secret agency, without divulging key information regarding his identity. But I found his story compelling.

That's because I had an MIB experience myself.

In 1991, I was living with a girlfriend in a house in Lexington's Bell Court, and hosting a weekly rockabilly radio show on WRFL. I was just wrapping up my show at the station when I got a phone call. It was a man from Richmond, who said he just happened to be driving through Lexington and just happened to hear my radio show and just happened to have a carload of ultra-rare rockabilly records that he'd like to get rid of, cheap. Would I be interested? Oh hell yeah.

I gave him my address and told him I'd be right home in minutes, since I lived close to the station. Did he know where Bell Court was? "I think I can find it." He was already waiting there when I rolled up just moments later. He was of average height, short dark brown hair combed back, mustache. He was very friendly and professional-seeming in a nice dark suit and tie.

I invited him up, and we hauled the boxes of records up to my room. It was a treasure trove of some of the rarest vinyl possible - Elvis on Sun, super-rare Elvis white-label RCA DJ copies, Bill Haley DJ copies on pink-label Decca, Gene Vincent LPs, and various valuable 45s of obscure artists. And all in fantastic condition. We're talking thousands of dollars worth of classic rockabilly vinyl.

I told him I couldn't even begin to be able to afford to buy the collection, but if he'd let me cherry-pick some of the best ones out, I'd buy those now and try to buy more later. He smiled a warm and friendly smile and said, "Tell you what. I'm in Lexington all the time. I live in Richmond and work at the Blue Grass Army Depot. You keep the records and I'll stop back here in a couple days. That'll give you a chance to look through them and make your decision."

I was stunned that he would trust someone he had just met with all these valuable records, but gladly agreed. He wrote his name and number down on a scrap of paper for me, we shook hands, and he headed to his car. And I never saw him again.

When he didn't show up after a few days, I called the number he'd given me. I got the loud shrill three notes and the recorded robotic message: "We are sorry, you have reached a number that is disconnected or is no longer in service." I looked up the name he'd given me in the phone book. He wasn't there. I called the Depot and asked for him but was told they'd never heard of him.

What the hell?

At the time, I hadn't connected him with the Men In Black myth. I was just thinking "Well, I guess the records are mine now." But it bothered me that he knew exactly how to find me, so why wasn't he trying? Even if he lost my number, he knew where I lived. Even if he forgot that, he knew I worked at WRFL. Even if he forgot where that was, he knew I did a rockabilly show there and could have called the station.

For a third Kentucky MIB story, there's purportedly one in Bart Nunnelly's Mysterious Kentucky, but I haven't read it yet because Bart never sent me my copy ;)

And then there's yesterday's Masked Ninja Home Invasion story.

Masked Ninja Home Invasion

Thursday night, two masked men dressed in black full-body armored outfits, similar to those worn by ninjas or by SWAT riot police, invaded a home on Louisville's Greenwood Avenue and terrorized a grandmother, her daughter, and her grandchildren.

The two men broke into the house simultaneously and tactically, one through the back door and one through an upstairs window. They had ample handcuffs for everyone, cuffing Thelma Briscoe and her family. The men were also reportedly carrying high-tech hand weapons with laser sights.

Who were these terrifying men in black, and what did they want? Read the whole story in my Louisville Mojo column!