More Weird Mailboxes of Kentucky

The American South is a treasure trove of unusual and creative mailboxes, and Kentucky's no exception. The tractor is from Reeds Crossing, KY, the schoolbus is from Richmond, and the pump is from Lexington.




See also the birdhouse mailbox in Lancaster and a dog mailbox in Berea.

Weird Cemetery

Inadvertently came across this yesterday while surfing the net.

Apparently "Weird" in this instance is a family surname, with a Weird Cemetery located on Weird Road. Bullitt County is not far away from me at all, so looks like a road trip will be in order soon....

Ralph Eugene Meatyard

Ralph Eugene Meatyard, a humble optician from Lexington, KY, unwittingly became one of the twentieth century's greatest - and weirdest - photographers when he took up the hobby of taking photographs of his children in the 1950s. Gradually his photos took on more and more of a "Southern Gothic" feel, with his children looking menacing and sullen (sometimes even wearing horrific masks) among the crumbling debris of old rotting houses in the country. I quote from an essay by Mario Cutajar:

The images he is justly renowned for are ones of children and adults wearing dime-store Halloween masks. The device is so transparent that part of the pictures' intrigue is why they work at all. They do because of Meatyard's eye for setting and pose, because of his ability to extract startling black-and-white contrasts from the silver-rich photographic paper he used (contrasts that create amorphous voids out of which the masked figures materialize like apparitions), but just as importantly because Meatyard never tried to disguise his artifice. Later on toward the premature end of his life when he shot the Lucybelle Crater series, he even dispensed with the murky backgrounds and relied entirely on the transgressive impact of his masked figures nonchalantly inhabiting the daylit world like regular folk--as if they belonged.

These grotesques (which were only a fraction of Meatyard's output but which were the fruit of an obsession that endured throughout his life) are most closely allied to painterly antecedents than photographic ones. They recall the odd family portraits painted by the Douanier Rousseau, Ensor's masked characters, and, more distantly, Goya's caricatures. Their psychic source can easily be located in a sense of estrangement from the world that crosses over into depersonalization, except that Meatyard--who made his living as an optician, raised a family, and lived a settled life in Lexington, Kentucky--was not a withdrawn or morose individual. The singular oddness of his work intimates, rather, an appreciation of the more ubiquitous and easily overlooked oddness of individuality itself and of the dissociation inherent in the photographic process, whose arrest of time makes moments eternal at the price of removing them from our possession.

On May 6, 1972, Meatyard, diagnosed with terminal cancer, watched Riva Ridge win the Kentucky Derby on television. He died in his sleep during the night, in the early hours of May 7.

Blue Moon

Random disassociated fragments, in search of glue:

1. Elvis Presley, in private moments filtered through his own internal gobo of pills and vodka, often stated that he felt as if he was not of this world.

2. The mysterious term "blue moon" is one whose origin is shrouded in antiquity, and has seemed to have had numerous meanings over time. The first recorded instance of the term was in British in the year 1528. Interestingly, the first recorded instance of the idea of moon being made of green cheese was one year later, in 1529.

3. According to some ancient myths, a blue moon is a rarely occurring magical event during which the moon's cratered face speaks.

4. The term "blue moon" is most commonly used metaphorically to describe a rare event, as in the saying "once in a blue moon".

5. Kentuckian Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass music, wrote "Blue Moon of Kentucky" in 1947.

5. According to Wikipedia: "Most years have twelve full moons which occur approximately monthly, but each calendar year contains those twelve full lunar cycles plus about eleven days to spare. The extra days accumulate, so that every two or three years there is an extra full moon (this happens every 2.72 years). Different definitions place the extra moon at different times - the extra moon is called a blue moon".

6. Many people call a full moon a blue moon if it was the second of two full moons to occur in the same calendar month. However, this definition of "blue moon" originated from a mistake in an article in the March 1946 Sky & Telescope magazine. This mistake has perpetuated and taken on a life of its own since 1946.

7. Elvis Presley had an unusual propensity for recording "blue" songs, and three of them specifically were blue moon songs: "Blue Moon", "Blue Moon of Kentucky", and "When My Blue Moon Turns To Gold Again".

8. "When My Blue Moon Turns To Gold Again" was written in 1941 by Kentuckians Wiley Walker and Gene Sullivan.

9. The band R.E.M. featured a blue moon on the cover of their "In Time" compilation CD.

10. One of R.E.M.'s biggest hits was "Man on the Moon", which seems to express doubt that mankind actually went to the moon, and also mentions Elvis.

11. In an early interview, Michael Stipe said that R.E.M. actually stood for Ralph Eugene Meatyard, a Kentuckian best known for his epic photographic work The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater.

12. The blue people of Kentucky were originally believed by some to be aliens, or angels, from another world.

13. The matriarch of the best-known Kentucky blue-people clan was named Luna.

Blue People of Kentucky

This subject has always been one of the trickier ones for me to write about. Although the blue people of Kentucky are a real phenomenon that has been well documented and written about in all manner of publications from science journals to mass-market magazines, I really don't want you goofballs loading your cameras and going on a gawking spree, bothering innocent people. But it’s too fascinating a story not to tell:

From at least the year 1800 to the 1960s, multiple families of blue-skinned people made their home along Troublesome Creek near Hazard, KY. Local superstitions and rumors about them were rampant, and included theories that they were either aliens, angels, or a separate race of humans. Apparently, it all began with a blue-skinned family called the Fugates, who came to the Hazard area in the late 18th or early 19th century. They descended from one Martin Fugate, who supposedly came from France (just like the alien Coneheads from Saturday Night Live!)

In the 1960s, a Lexington hematologist named Madison Cawein suggested the blueness could be caused by an extremely rare disorder called methemoglobinemia, in which the patient has an abnormally high level of methemoglobin in the blood. This in turn causes one's skin to be tinted blue.

Cawein injected a chemical dye substitute for the missing enzyme into some test members of the Fugate family, and within minutes their skin turned pink. Many of the blue Kentuckians came out of rural seclusion to seek the treatment, but others, it is said, chose to remain blue. Unfortunately, to my knowledge, there have been no reliable sightings of them since 1979. And the very few old family photographs known to exist of the blue-skinned people were taken in the 1940s and 1950s with, alas, black and white film.

It is unknown how many, if any, blue-skinned people still exist in Kentucky, but their lack of visibility would seem to indicate they want to be left alone. There’s a story about a Hollywood camera crew getting shot at and chased away by dogs when they trespassed on a blue person’s land.

According to an article in Science 82 magazine, these families were intensely inbreeding and intermarrying, which perpetuated the methemoglobinemia gene on both sides.

Despite what we are told about the disastrous effects of inbreeding, these people did it consistently for generations with seemingly no ill effects: the Fugates were not impaired in terms of mental or physical abilities in any way. One woman (with the wonderful name of Luna) gave birth to 13 healthy blue children and lived to be 84. And while most people with methemoglobinemia acquire it through health-threatening circumstances such as heart and artery defects, nitrate poisoning (“Blue baby syndrome”) or respiratory problems, the Fugates and the other blue families were in perfect health and lived long robust lives.

And thus another wonderful bit of human uniqueness is eradicated by modern technology. Me, I’d love to see deliberately induced blueness become a new fad in body modification.

Blue Grass

For a fledgling tourist to Kentucky, one of the biggest mysteries is "where is the blue grass?" Often have I heard newbies inquiring about where to find it, and I've even heard them pull the wool over their own eyes and convince themselves that they're seeing it: "oh, look, Martha, the grass really is kinda bluish here."

Fact o' the matter is, blue grass isn't blue. It's as green as any other kind of grass, green as the valley, green as them little apples, green as the grass of home.

Blue grass is a common grass called poa pratensis, and it's only blue when you allow it grow tall like weeds, so that the blue-flowered seed heads can bloom in Spring. Ironically, because Kentucky is "horse country" and thus covered in groomed and manicured farms, you rarely ever see fields of unmown blue grass. Small patches of poa pratensis are everywhere you look, to be sure, but it takes a whole huge vista of rolling hills covered in the flowering plants to get that "blue" effect.

Despite popular assumptions, poa pratensis isn't even especially indigenous to Kentucky. It's an extremely common plant in North America, and all across the world. Had some other plant, such as Witch Hazel, Ginseng or Devil's Trumpet, become the official symbol of Kentucky instead, bluegrass music might have ended up being called "Devil's Trumpet Music". Then tourists would then be wondering why there's no trumpets in Devil's Trumpet Music. And can you imagine the Devil's Trumpet Army Depot?

JSH on PBS again

From the KET Press Room:

Jeffrey Scott Holland, author of Weird Kentucky, shares some of the Commonwealth's strangest tales on the next edition of Louisville Life, airing Thursday, Oct. 30 at 7:30/6:30 p.m. CT on KET2; Saturday, Nov. 1 at 7/6 p.m. CT on KET1; and Sunday, Nov. 2 at noon/11 a.m. CT on KET2.

Holland uncovered the stories behind the myths of the Pope Lick goatman, a half-man half-goat reported to live beneath a railroad trestle at Pope Lick Creek; giant Jim Porter, who stood close to 8 feet tall; and the day it rained meat in Kentucky. The author also discusses his successful art career and why he prefers to live in Louisville and commute to his coastal art galleries.

Louisville Life is a KET production, produced and directed by Gary Pahler. Jayne McClew is producer/writer; associate producer is Kelli Brodersen. More information about Louisville Life, including streaming video, is available at www.ket.org/loulife. More information about KET programming and education services, as well as how to support KET, can be found at www.ket.org.

Upcoming Airdates:

KETKY: Monday, November 3 at 5:00 pm EST
KETKY: Monday, November 3 at 7:00 pm EST
KETKY: Tuesday, November 4 at 6:30 am EST
KETKY: Saturday, November 8 at 7:30 pm EST

"Thriller" on Lexington Streets

Every Halloween, the streets of Lexington are filled with zombies - dancing zombies - as the music video for Michael Jackson's "Thriller" is re-enacted downtown by Mecca dance studio and friends.

But....why? Don't ask why. Just accept.

Micah Isaacs has played the part of MJ each year (except one where he was stuck in a snowstorm in Canada) since originating the role in 2002, when he was but seventeen years old.

Mummified Georgetown Woman Found in Car

From the Associated Press by way of Fox News:

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — The mummified remains of a disabled Kentucky woman were found in the trunk of her brother's car, police said, and her crudely wrapped body may have been stored in her bedroom for two years.

The severely decomposed body of Penny Brown, 31, was discovered Friday by police in the central Kentucky town of Georgetown, KY, said Georgetown Police Chief Greg Reeves. Police are searching for her brother, Timothy Allen Brown, 30, of Georgetown.

The car was discovered in St. Louis last week, Reeves said, when police responded to a complaint that it had been on a street for several days. Police had the car towed more than 300 miles back to Kentucky where they searched it and found the body.

Penny Brown's body had been "wrapped in quilts and then the quilts were wrapped in construction-grade plastic to make it more of an air-tight package, and then placed in the back of his car, in the trunk," said county coroner John Goble.

Goble said the body was so decomposed the state medical examiner's office was unable to determine a cause of death, but "she had no fractures, no broken bones whatsoever."

He said toxicology tests would be performed to determine how Penny Brown died, but "we're probably never going to know, to be honest."

Reeves said a Georgetown police officer had visited Timothy Brown's apartment Sept. 20 as part of a child welfare case involving his 8-year-old son, who was taken from the residence after social service workers found deplorable conditions there, including "human feces and everything just on the floor."

The officer went back after the child had "mentioned he was never allowed in Aunt Penny's room," Reeves said.

Afterward, Timothy Brown disappeared, and police contacted another relative, who filed a missing persons report, he said.

Police in Georgetown, which is about 70 miles east of Louisville, believe the body was kept in Timothy Brown's apartment for two years, Reeves said, probably in Penny Brown's bedroom. The police chief said Timothy Brown had signed his sister out of a nursing home in 2006.

"There was a bedroom that was her bedroom in the apartment," Reeves said. "We believe that's where he stored her."

Reeves said Penny Brown had used a wheelchair but would not elaborate further on her disability.

Timothy Brown has not been charged, police said.

And then, later, by way of WTOP:

GEORGETOWN, Ky. (AP) - A Kentucky man arrested after police found the mummified remains of his disabled sister in the trunk of his car was set to appear in court Wednesday for an extradition hearing.

Timothy Allen Brown, 36, was arrested by U.S. Marshals in St. Louis on Tuesday night, said Georgetown Police Chief Greg Reeves.

The severely decomposed body of 31-year-old Penny Brown was discovered Friday after police towed the car from St. Louis to Kentucky. They had received complaints that it had been on the street for several days.

Brown has been charged with abuse or neglect of an adult, a felony in Kentucky, Reeves said. He could face additional federal charges in Kentucky for allegedly cashing his sister's disability checks, Reeves said Wednesday.

Timothy Brown signed his wheelchair-dependent sister out of a nursing home in 2006, and the remains may have been in his apartment for two years, police said. Officials have said they may not be able to determine how she died.

Lee Messmer, a U.S. Marshal's assistant chief deputy in St. Louis, said Brown had been in the St. Louis area probably for a couple of weeks. He was arrested Tuesday night at a library, Messmer said.

Brown's car was found last week when police responded to a complaint that it had been on a street for several days. Police had the car towed more than 300 miles back to Kentucky where they found the badly decomposed body wrapped in quilts and plastic.

Reeves said a local Kentucky police officer had visited Timothy Brown's apartment Sept. 20 as part of a child welfare case involving his 8-year-old son, who was taken from the residence after social service workers found deplorable conditions. Reeves said the boy mentioned that he hadn't seen his aunt "in some time," and was not allowed into her room.

Reeves said officers found evidence of decomposition in the room that matched the remains in the trunk.

Grave Sights

There's an article by yours truly in this week's issue of Louisville's Velocity magazine. It's "Grave Sights", highlighting some of Kentucky's most noteworthy tombstones, such as Colonel Sanders, Harry Collins, and Sylvester Weaver.

You can check out their online version here. (For some reason, their online version is "Metromix"; not sure what that's about)

Win One Dead Body!

Pictured above is part of an advertisement for "Dr. Satan's Shrieks In The Night Show", a Girdler-esque live spook show that took place in Hopkinsville, KY in the 1960s. Among the odd features of the attraction, they promise you will see "dead painter Van Gogh materialize" and "the posing apparation of Marilyn Monroe". But most curious of all, a drawing was held and "one real dead body" was given away to some lucky contestant.

Another interesting horror-show attraction in Hopkinsville was "Kirma's Ghost Party", pictured below.

The Milton Lizard

In the summer of 1975, a cryptid described as resembling a 15-foot monitor lizard was sighted multiple times at Canip Creek, near the town of Milton, in Trimble County. It's come to be known as the Milton Lizard, sometimes called the Canip Monster.

Clarence Cable, manager of the Blue Grass Body Shop, saw the hissing creature come out from behind some wrecked vehicles. Cable said it had "big eyes similar to a frog's... Beneath its mouth was an off-white color and there were black and white stripes cross ways of its body with quarter-sized speckles over it."

The lizard was described by Cable as having a long forked tongue and huge, bulging, froglike eyes. Its skin was said to be black and white striped, and with small speckles. After the concentrated flurry of sightings in 1975, it was never seen again, leaving Fortean researchers to wonder.

Some have theorized the Milton Lizard might have been a monitor lizard (pictured above) that somehow got released into Kentucky's ecosystem.

(The city of Milton's other claim to fame, incidentally, is that the Rat Pack film Some Came Running was filmed here.)