New Yellow Cardinal Sighting

This just in: a reader from Pikeville sent these two photos and says: "My daughter took these pictures this morning (3-13-2011) through the kitchen window."


Recently, ultra-rare mutant yellow Cardinals were spotted in Boyle County, causing quite a stir in the world of ornithology.

Mayor Punches Newspaper Editor

From the Associated Press:

PIKEVILLE, Ky. — A Kentucky newspaper editor who says he was punched in the face by a small-town mayor has agreed to drop an assault complaint after the mayor issued a public apology.

Jerry Boggs is editor of the Appalachian News-Express in Pikeville. He said in a complaint that Pikeville Mayor Frank Justice II was angry about an article in the newspaper and confronted him at a sports bar Tuesday night. The article reported on a political donation by Justice's business that helped fund an attack ad in a local campaign.

The criminal complaint reported that others at Champs Bar and Grill pulled Justice away from Boggs. Justice released a statement apologizing for "the aggravation and duress" that he caused Boggs. Boggs said Thursday he wants to put the matter behind him.

The Pikeville Cut-Thru

Regardless of what one may think about such massively intrusive mountain-moving alterations of the environment by mankind, the Pikeville Cut-Thru is certainly a fascinating mess. It's the second largest land-removal engineering project in the entire Western Hemisphere of the planet, ever, second only to the Panama Canal. Think on that.

The project was completed in 1987 and took over 14 years to do, at a total cost of 77.6 million dollars. It moved 18,000,000 cubic yards of rock and dirt. (I wonder where they moved it to??)

Supposedly, the project helped a lot of people avoid traffic congestion and flooding of the Big Sandy River. I don't live there so I don't know. But it sure is ugly. And I can't believe they planted rows of trees along those narrow stone shelf-cuts - once they grow to a certain height, they're going to start tipping over and tumbling down into the road, mark my words.

Fake Cops Robbed Drug Dealers

Something that's always bothered me about the nature of police is that we're all expected to drop whatever we're doing and go into submissive "sir, yes, sir" mode just because someone says they're a cop. Or just looks or acts like one.

The entire security guard industry takes advantage of this socialized Pavlovian response by deliberately dressing security guards in police-style uniforms. Campus "toy cops", Impotent "mall cops", and all-purpose paunchy dudes hired to stand around looking vaguely official - they all depend on the appearance of being cop-like, in the hope that the illusion will bluff the public into cooperating with them.

Sure, real police are supposed to identify themselves as such, but really, anyone can put on a cop suit and flash a badge and say they're a cop. And some enterprising louts in Pikeville recently did just that. According to Kentucky.com:

A welder and former coal-company employee pleaded guilty Monday to using a gun in a scheme to impersonate police and Operation UNITE investigators and rob people of pills and cash in Letcher and Knott counties.

Tony Ray Herald said he worked with Vernon Todd Griffie, a former Perry County volunteer sheriff's deputy, to go to the homes of people they suspected of being drug dealers. They would scope out the houses and arrange to buy drugs, he said.

Later, the two would return dressed as sheriff's deputies or police officers, claiming to be part of the Operation UNITE Eastern Kentucky drug task force. They would put the victims in handcuffs and take cash and pills.

A federal judge in Pikeville set Herald's sentencing date for Aug. 17. The charges carry a penalty of at least seven years in prison.

The hilarity of druggies pretending to be cops so they can steal from other druggies is so great, it almost begs to be made into a movie, a play, or an HBO series.

But I'd love to know what happened after the fake cops left their marks. Didn't the druggies wonder why they hadn't been taken to jail? Didn't they think it was weird that the cops would confiscate their drugs AND their money, but then set them free? Perhaps they also wondered why these cops were driving an old mud-covered pickup truck instead of a cop car.

But even if they figured it out, what were they gonna do - call the police and say "hey dude, somebody robbed our meth lab"? Because of this Catch-22 inherent in criminals being robbed by other criminals, there was really no reason to impersonate cops in the first place. I suppose they just liked playing dress-up.

Natasha Cornett's Satanic Cult

What is it about Kentucky that seems to foster crew after crew of dangerous teenage Goth-loser-wannabe occultists? In 1998 the activities of yet another gang of self-styled spawns of Satan made national headlines, as 19-year-old Natasha Cornett and her Pikeville posse pleaded guilty to a triple homicide.

In April 1997, Vidar and Delfina Lillelid, along with their 6-year-old daughter Tabitha, were driving home from a Jehovah's Witnesses event when they stopped at a highway rest area. It was here that they were accosted by Cornett and her Korn-listening kooks. The entire family was later found, shot to death, in a ditch along a dark rural gravel road a few miles away.

The gang - Natasha Cornett, 19, Crystal Sturgill, 18, Karen Howell, 18, Jason Blake Bryant, 15, Dean Mullins, 20, and Joe Risner, 21 - were caught and arrested near the Arizona-Mexican border a few days later, driving the stolen Lillilid family van.

In police custody, Cornett declared herself to be "the daughter of Satan", and confessed to a blood-letting satanic ritual at the Colley Motel in Pikeville. Self-mutilation was a key part of the sect's activities, and when arrested, Cornett had around 20 cuts on her right arm and around 50 on her left. The group believed that communication with Satan was only possible during these self-cutting rituals.

Cornett also confessed that it had been the group's intent to carry out a cross-country murder spree, and specifically named the film "Natural Born Killers" as an influence.

A documentary about the kids, entitled Six, is available on DVD. The film raises a number of disturbing points, such as the fact that Cornett had previously been committed to the Charter Ridge mental hospital in Lexington and diagnosed as bipolar and dangerous, yet was released because she had no insurance.

The Ghost of Octavia Hatcher

There's no shortage of spooky Kentucky ghost stories (all of them sworn to be totally true, of course) circulating on the web as myths turned memes. Dozens of books and websites exist that are packed with these tall tales that are unverified and probably unverifiable. That's fine if you're in the mood for a simple vicarious chill around the campfire, but I'm only interested in things we can research, dissect, and work towards verifying and understanding.

The "Octavia Hatcher" meme is a curious one. A search for this name brings up only a handful of relevant hits, like this one and this one.

As Troy Taylor notes in the Prairie Ghosts link above, "Students at nearby Pikeville College can tell you a dozen different versions of how this ghost died, how she lived and how she makes her spectral presence known in the local graveyard. Unfortunately, few of these stories are actually true."

What I want to know is, on what basis do we assume any of them are true?

The Prairie Ghosts page also states, "According to a number of reliable witnesses, unexplained things still take place around the place where her life ended in terror." Okay, that's great. So, uh, like what? Who are these reliable witnesses? Who deemed them reliable? Exactly what did they say??

I won't bother recounting the soap-opera-esque Octavia Hatcher legend here, but instead I'll skip to the meat of the matter, which is the allegations of sightings of Octavia's ghost near her grave, as well as paranormal phenomena such as weird sounds. I'm very interested in getting firsthand reports about all this for a future book I'm working on.

Hatcher is buried at Pikeville Cemetery, Johnson Cemetery Rd, Pikeville, KY.

Hillbilly Days in Pikeville

I've already vented, ranted, and pedanted about the suppression of the "hillbilly" concept on my previous entry about The Li'l Abner Motel, so I won't beat that dead horse again here.

Okay, maybe just a little.

Suffice it to say that some people find this festival uncool because it chooses to embrace the old-fashioned garish Snuffy Smith hillbilly stereotype in this brave new modern space-age Splenda-drinkin' wi-fi world. Some think it makes Kentuckians "look bad" and "look silly" (as if the two were synonymous). I love it for the very same reasons those uptight folks despise it. After all, I am a hillbilly myself. I think they should declare being a hillbilly to be designated as an "alternative lifestyle", protected from discrimination by law.

However, the Pikeville Hillbilly Days isn't just a good excuse to run around in overalls and a corncob pipe - it's for a good cause. The event, which began in 1977, is a fundraiser benefitting kids at the Shriner's Children's Hospital in Lexington. It was started by Howard "Dirty Ear" Stratton and "Shady" Grady Kinney, two Shriners with the Hillbilly Clan Outhouse No. 2 in Pikeville.