New Glyndon Hotel Photos

An anonymous tipster emailed me some photos showing Richmond's Glyndon Hotel in its current state: gentrified, cleaned up, remodeled, renovated, and whitewashed.



Let's just be real quiet for a few minutes.

The Rathskeller

The Seelbach Hotel has more than its share of crazy history - Al Capone had secret tunnels in and out of the place as part of his organized crime operation, and F. Scott Fitzgerald loved the place so much he featured it in "The Great Gatsby". It's also chock-full of ghost legends, some of which you'll find in Weird Kentucky.

But what I really love about the Seelbach is its spooky subterranean grotto ballroom called the Rathskeller. It's the only surviving room in the world completely encrusted in Rookwood pottery, from stem to stern, and has a powerfully creepy vibe.



Strange designs and symbols pervade the room’s ornate decor, a mixture of signs from zodiacal, alchemical, Masonic, heraldic, and various other symbologies. Rookwood pelicans pervade the area, and although the Hotel’s tourist information likes to cheerfully note that the pelicans are there “for good luck,” it’s also true that the pelican is regarded in some occult mythologies as a symbol of resurrecting one’s children after having killed them oneself, by anointing them with one’s own blood. The pelican has also long been synonymous with the Phoenix (the mythological bird of occult initiation, wherein one is reborn into a new awareness or gnosis) and with Henet (a pelican goddess from pyramid-era Egypt, who appears on walls of ancient tombs and in royal funerary texts).




The Seelbach is located in downtown Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Muhammad Ali Boulevard.

The Catalina Motel

Oh lordy lordy lordy. If this motel could talk.

Well, if any motel could talk, you'd have enough bizarre and poignant anecdotes about the human condition than you could stomach... but this motel is something special. The drapes, the carpet, the pool, the pillows, the towels, they all radiate a certain mythic resonance. And I mean that in a good way.

Someday I'll file a report divulging all I have learned in my years of research in this wondrously retro commercial lodging facility (as well as The Glyndon Hotel, among others), but it'll have to come later in life when I release my epic multi-volume tell-all autobiography Transmissions From Agent J. But now just ain't the time and this blog ain't the place.

Like life on the streets, though, the Catalina's life on the sheets isn't all romance. In 1997, Steven Lee Fox was murdered here by Aaron Leaf Rivers, who didn't plead guilty to it until 2007, the case being officially unsolved until then.

As part of a plea agreement, Rivers was transferred to a state prison in Kentucky from the super-maximum Red Onion State Prison in Virginia, where he was already serving a 35-year sentence. According to the Lexington Herald-Leader, Rivers' long criminal record includes six persistent felony offender counts, two robbery charges, assault, burglary and theft by unlawful taking, arson, possession of a fake ID, and mailing fake anthrax to former Governor Paul Patton.

Also according to the Herald-Leader, this drama unfolded in room 208. And the motel is located at 208 West New Circle Road. Numerologists among us, you may now go apoplectic.



Anyone have old-school postcards and pictures of the Catalina in its 50's heyday? Tip me if you can hip me.

Wigwam Village

Not to be confused with the Wig Wam Restaurant, Wigwam Village is one of Kentucky's most famed and enduring examples of 20th century mimetic architecture. Each motel room unit is a separate stone teepee, as well as the main office building. Amazingly, even though this tourist trap of a bygone era was originally built in 1937, it still stands today and hasn't been torn down by blasé land developers.

The main teepee is made up of 38 tons of concrete, 13 tons of steel, and stands 52 feet high. Used to have a restaurant back in the day, but sadly that's been long gone for decades. They do still have quite a thriving and wacky gift shop though.

Of the seven original Wigwam Villages, only three remain today. The other two are out West, in Arizona and California.

Does anyone out there own any memorabilia from the Wigwam Village, specifically the Kentucky one? Pictured below is a postcard from the now-vanished Florida one:


Wigwam Village is located at 601 North Dixie Highway, Cave City, KY. Call (270) 773-3381 to make reservations.

Li'l Abner Motel

There are basically two types of Kentuckians.

(Don't you love it when someone starts a speech that way?)

There are those who embrace their hillbilly heritage and then there are those who would seek to ignore it, or worse, conceal it.

It should come as no surprise to the dedicated reader that I am of the former group, the True Group, the unrepentant hillbillies, the rightful heirs to the soil of Transylvania.

At one time, the hillbilly stereotype was a common fixture across the tourist traps of the South, as shrewd hucksters were "puttin' on the hick" to razzle-dazzle the know-nothing Northerners who came to gawk and learn the arcane mystic arts of miniature golf.

Nowadays, those places are a dying breed, what with the politically correct mindset reinforced by too much internet, too many cable channels, and too much toxic Nutrasweet and Splenda in the diet sodas.

That's why it pleases me to no end to find that references to Al Capp's gloriously Southern comic strip Li'l Abner can still be found in Kentucky. It's one of the funny ironies of life that Capp wasn't even a hillbilly himself. He spent his entire life in Boston, New York, and Connecticut and got his knowledge of hillbilly lore thirdhand. And yet, his viewpoint was right-on (at least until the late 60s, when he abruptly turned politically ultra-conservative - slightly to the right of Attila the Hun - even as his infamous lecherous nature become even more out of control.)

Anyway, in summary: boring normal people want to keep the hillbilly meme down. The existence of places like the Li'l Abner Motel help keep it alive. Therefore, it is good. Next time you're looking for lodging in the Red River Gorge area, give them your business and tell them I sent you by.

The Glyndon Hotel

Believe it or don't, not everyone likes being spotlighted by the Unusual Kentucky staff. Some people feel it's insulting, or beneath their dignity to be thought of as "weird" or unusual or interesting or potentially haunted or just plain cool. That's always puzzled me, because my purpose here is glorify, to exalt, to elevate, to honor, and to celebrate what's left of our fair state that hasn't been homogenized into this post-post-modern hell our society currently finds itself mired in.

Take, for instance, the guy who has a certain ice cream parlor in St.Matthews who came running out, furiously angry because I was taking a picture of the giant fiberglass ice cream cone on his sign.

"Is this for any sort of commercial purposes?" he asked haughtily.

"Not really", I replied, "I'm a photographer, and I'm working on a book..."

Before I could say more, he said, "That's a commercial purpose. Don't take any more pictures of my ice cream cone, please."

And yet, I would have been willing to do a whole-page spread about his business and his cone in the Weird Kentucky book. Free advertising. Great publicity. And he ran me off (I was also a regular customer). Now that's truly weird.

Then there was a run-down motor inn with a beautiful old star-shaped 1940's neon sign, and the woman who came scrambling out to inform me that the type of people who stayed at her motel valued their privacy and didn't want people with cameras skulking around. Never mind that I was only pointing the camera straight up at the sign, and never mind that she basically openly admitted her establishment was a "no-tell motel". Never mind that I was on a public sidewalk, and in theory can take a photo of whatever I damn well please.

And then there was the time that a certain writer sent me angry, cursing, obscene e-mails for referring to a certain Kentucky locale as "a sleepy little town". "You big city people come to Kentucky just to laugh at us hicks", he ranted. Apparently he didn't realize that not only am I from Kentucky, I still live in Kentucky and I am a "hick" myself, having grown up a hog-sloppin' farmboy proudly from Madison County's Waco, one of the sleepiest of all sleepy little towns in Kentucky. I would never mean to offend anyone by my coverage here, but on the other hand, I am not one to sit and agonize about political correctness and word-parsing to avoid the off chance that someone, somewhere, might potentially be offended for some abstract personal reasons.

Which brings us to the Glyndon Hotel.

I'm not saying anything about it. I'm just telling you that it exists. And that I love it. It's in Richmond. Go there and check it out for yourself.

That is all.