Madison County Meteor

Once when I was a kid living on the farm in Waco, KY, my father and I saw a huge red glowing ball streak down through the sky and disappear on the forested horizon. It made an audible crash, and a red glow momentarily rose the spot.

I've always wondered about that fireball from the sky, and a few years ago I decided to go poking around in the general vicinity that it appeared to have landed. I came upon this round pond that seemed uncannily like an impact crater. Unfortunately, the next time I came to the site to investigate further, construction work for homes had begun and obliterated the evidence.

Bubbleland

There's a small isolated piece of Kentucky that isn't actually connected to the rest of the state ("exclaves", geographers call such things) known as "Kentucky Bend", or more colorfully, "Bubbleland". The exclave was created due to the shift in course of the Mississippi after the New Madrid Earthquakes in 1811 and 1812.

Located in the southwestern corner of the state, Bubbleland is a curiosity in many ways. Although the area is 17.5 square miles, only seventeen people live there according to the 2000 census. And despite being declared part of Kentucky after a long and protracted squabble with Tennessee over the land (who actually owned it as recently as 1848), the official post office mailing address for the area is nearby Tiptonville, Tennessee. (Since rockabilly legend Carl Perkins is from Tiptonville, this could in a sense make Perkins an unofficial Kentuckian!)

Mark Twain, in Life on the Mississippi, wrote about the feud between the Darnell and Watson families in Bubbleland, one that lasted six decades!

Toulouse-inations

No Unusual Kentucky updates in a week??

Well, I've not had much time as of late. I've been in superserious crunch time with my play Toulouse-inations, which makes its world debut tomorrow night at 8pm at the Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts in downtown Louisville. The show is pretty damn weird in itself, in more ways than one, so go and check it out even if you think theatre's not your bag.

After its run in Louisville, the show will go on to play in other cities and will set its sights on an Off-Off-Broadway production in NYC in 2009. By sheer persistence, stubbornness, and plugging away, this play will eke out a reputation for itself, for better or for worse, by hook or by crook, a bis ou a blanc.

Someday you'll kick yourself for not having jumped on this chance to see the show in its very first raw incarnation with its original cast, so save your future self the anguish of hindsight, and purchase tickets NOW!

Consult the Kentucky Center's schedule here to peruse and purchase. The show opens August 7 and runs for FOUR DAYS ONLY.

Questions? Call the Kentucky Center at 502.562.0100 or Catclaw Theatre Company at 502.649.3378.

Rose's Restaurant

One of the best places to eat in Slade, KY is Rose's Restaurant, which is located at 1289 Natural Bridge Road. As a wilderness roadhouse, the grub is great, but what we find unusual here is that the ceiling is covered in dollar bills, each of them autographed and inscribed from various customers. Why? We didn't ask.

The Airports of Madison County

Okay, so we here at Unusual Kentucky are admittedly given to paranoid and conspiratorial conjecture at the drop of a hat. But the Madison County Airport really does give us the Creeps. It's tucked back in the woods far, far, far from civilization and there are almost no signs pointing how to get there from the main road. There is a real feeling of uneasiness out here, and everyone here seems very paranoid and wary of outsiders. (It's been this way for years, incidentally - long before the Sept.11th incident made all airports a little more tense) Though airnav.com lists the military as accounting for only 3 percent of their traffic, we've seen an awful lot of military planes in and out of here at times. The airport, it should be noted, is not far from Blue Grass Army Depot, who of course have extensive airport and helipad facilities of their own.
On Menelaus Road, on the way to the Madison Airport, there is yet another airport, apparently called "The Berea/Richmond Airport" according to one map. Never seen planes come or go here but the planes parked in the weed-filled field change from time to time so evidently they do get some traffic. It's a tiny field next to a barn and farmhouse, with a small half-hangar towards the back.
And while you're out in this neck of the woods, also check out the Hanging Bridge.

The "Kentucky Anomaly"

This is apparently one of those things that tend to get buried and lost in the shuffle of mountains of government-generated paperwork and bureaucracy - check this out.

"A very prominent magnetic anomaly measured by MAGSAT over the eastern mid-continent of the United States was inferred to have a source region beneath Kentucky and Tennessee. Prominent aeromagnetic and gravity anomalies are also associated with the inferred source region."

Okay, so a huge magnetic anomaly under Kentucky is cool, and is right in line with everything I've been saying about the "Kentucky Vortex", the "Dark and Bloody Ground", and the old William S. Burroughs bit about old evils lurking under the soil. But gravity anomalies specifically under Kentucky? Damn! This is hardcore!

And of course, the first things that come to my mind are the stories about the ancient civilizations of people that were supposedly here before the Native Americans, and then I start thinking about why the Blue Grass Army Depot is said to be the Area 51 of Kentucky. (And then I start thinking about the guy who claims there was a UFO that crashed in Burnside, KY... but only for a moment.)

Could this "Kentucky Anomaly" be a sort of Unified Field Theory for everything that's weird about this area? I'm intrigued. They fed this anomalous data into a NASA computer and asked it to come up with a theoretical model that might explain the anomaly. As the NASA website tells it:

"A crustal model constructed to fit these anomalies interpreted the complex as a large mafic plutonic intrusion of Precambrian age. The complex was named the Kentucky body."

How X-Files is that? It's called "The Kentucky Body" and they don't know exactly what it is but they do know it's causing huge magnetic and gravity anomalies?

Did they really say "gravity anomalies"??? Yes, yes they did. Whoa.

Now I know the Pre-Cambrian era well - that's back in the old, old, times before everything. Actually, to call it an "era" is a misnomer - it actually comprises the entire first seven-eighths of the Earth's history, about which we know practically zip.

It's not just all about this "Kentucky Body" though: a subsequent report notes that "the source region for the satellite anomaly is considerably more extensive than the Kentucky body sensu stricto."

Aside from a mention in some grad student's online paper, I can't find any further analysis of the Kentucky Body and the Kentucky Anomaly by NASA (or anyone else) after this initial flurry of papers in the 1980s. Why? Did the subject become classified?

Red River Museum

Located in Clay City, KY, the Red River Museum is a veritable treasure trove of odd antiquated items related to the Powell County area.

Two floors of amazing junk and antiques, plus outbuildings and a yard full of more stuff. Railroad memorabilia, rustic antiques, taxidermified animals (including a disturbing pair of prematurely born baby deer) , old photos and paper ephemera from the Gorge's history. The building itself is the former Clay City National Bank building, built in 1875.

Best of all, it's free.

Haunted (Waffle) House

I'm tellin' ya, Kentucky is one spooky place, all across the board, and I maintain that we are all, at any given moment, swimming in a sea of unseen ghosts and otherworldly critters and we just don't know it.

Case in point: just an hour ago, I was having lunch at the Waffle House in Jeffersontown, KY (1620 Kentucky Mills Drive) and the jukebox was silent for most of the meal. Then, one song came on by itself without anyone having put any quarters in it. Then it went back to silence. I thought it rather odd, since every other jukebox I've seen that has an automatic-play feature runs continuously, not just playing one random song and then stopping.

I mentioned it to the waitress, who informed me in no uncertain terms that the Waffle House is haunted and that strange things like that happen so regularly that they're all used to it. Another waitress standing nearby nodded in affirmation, and mentioned that towels have flown by themselves, and so have these plastic containers they use in the kitchen.

The first waitress speculated that the spirits may have followed her to work from her own home, because she once lived in a very haunted house in Louisville with the exact same kind of poltergeist activity. She told of large art-glass bottles falling by themselves from atop a fishtank, not breaking when hitting the floor, and spinning to point all in one direction. She also told of rumors that a child was killed in her home, and that she discovered a creepy room in her basement, where someone had once lived, but was boarded up and hidden behind paneling. She's since moved from this house, but reports the ghostly phenomena still follows her, both to her new home and to her job at Waffle House.

She seemed extremely sincere and somewhat frazzled about having to endure the haunted weirdness. There was no sense of spinning a grand yarn to shock or impress; she was very blase and matter-of-fact about the ghosts in her life, which seem to have taken root in her workplace as well.

Needless to say, I will be making repeat visits to this Waffle House and having further chats with said waitress.

GWAR car?

You know, in the Weird Kentucky book I referred to this as a GWAR car (you know, the insane blood-splattering metal band?).... but now I wonder if it doesn't actually say "GNAR"?

Letters, We Get Letters

From the ol' JSH mailbag yesterday came this friendly and charming e-mail:

Mr. Holland,
I was very disappointed to see your page on the Creation Museum contain so many inaccuracies. Adam and Eve are presented as being middle brown, not Caucasian, there is no mention of people saddling dinosaurs ( the dino with a saddle on it is for picture taking), and there is absolutely no statement anywhere that says pornography and abortion are a direct result of the earth being millions of years old. Your statement that there are no reputable source citations provided for its claims is a lie. You don't agree with their opinion, that's all. Many, many educated scientists are on staff, but because they hold a different interpretation of evidence than you, they are not qualified or reputable? Your facts are wrong and you misrepresent the museum's position, isn't it funny that you did what you accuse them of doing? I am surprised your editor allowed so many lies into the book. Where is your professionalism?
Pam in CA

To which the author responds:

I'm not going to argue about it. I never claimed to have, or to seek, "professionalism" - whatever that means. I'm a lout. I suck. So does ABC News. So does Richard Dawkins. So does City Beat. So does The Chicago Tribune. So does Scientific American. We're all totally wrong and you're totally right. You totally nailed us. Have a great day.

Cowbell Cemetery

This is a great cemetery on the outskirts of Berea, but it's difficult to get to. You have to park by the side of Big Hill Road (which starts out as Prospect Street in Berea) which isn't exactly simple, since it's a winding and hilly country road and the pull-over place isn't obvious the first time you pass it. Once you do manage to pull over to the right spot, you have to hop a fence and then walk some distance to get to the graveyard's location nestled in the hills. It's a fascinating rural graveyard with lots of unusual homemade headstones and odd items left on graves.

Of all the cemeteries we've surveyed, this cemetery probably has the highest quotient of plastic whirlygigs, concrete trolls and animals, toys, shepherd's hooks, plastic flowers, and whatnot. A recurring theme here seems to be baby dolls sealed in glass jars and plastic jugs, which has an eerie and disturbing element not intended by the bereaved.

Abandoned Boonesboro Tourist Traps