Human Sacrifice Rites near Inez

In Tomahawk, KY (near Inez in Martin County), February 1933, an elderly woman was voluntarily killed by her own family during an ecstatic frenzy of a peculiar religious sect. This sect intended to attach the woman's corpse on fire on a cross-shaped altar in an extremely confused twisting of the Old Testament concept of the "burnt offering", or holocaust. The group were raided by police - too late to save the victim, alas - having been tipped off by suspicious neighbors.

According to the New York Times, Mrs. Lucinda Mills was "choked to death in a religious frenzy to prove their power over death" during a ritual celebrating "the death of sin". This ritual reportedly involved a week of prior dancing, fasting, and glossolalia. According to family members, the woman willingly agreed to be a human sacrifice, murdered by her own son's hand.


From the Marion, Ohio Star, February 9, 1933:

Praying for deliverance in a gutteral, unearthly chant, eight members of a mountain family are in jail today, seven of them charged with murder following the cult "sacrifice" of an aged mother.

Police said they crashed their way through barred doors into the desolate Mills homestead as plans were made to place the body of Mrs. Lucinda Mills, 72, on an altar. Interrupting the haunting ritual of fasting and mystic rites, which police say started last Friday, culminating in a mad frenzy of ardor, the officers arrested two daughters, two sons, a grandson, and two sons-in-laws and a daughter-in-law of the slain woman...

An inquest conducted by Judge T. J. Hardin brought a verdict that Mrs. Mills died "at the hands of her son John and others."

Questioned at the jail, members of the family told police that hours of praying, shouting, singing and dancing - a part of the bizarre ceremony - called forth "divine commands" that the life of one person presented be offered in "human sacrifice". Mrs. Mills was chosen, they said, and John grasped his mother by the neck as others looked on.

Blaine McGinnis told authorities he wanted to prevent the "sacrifice" but that "a feeling" impelled him to stand back. He said that his mother-in-law was strangled, a chain fastened about her throat, and preparations made for a "burnt offering"...

Police say the cult members claim they perform miracles, such as converting water into wine, and transforming grapevine stalks into curling snakes.

John H. Mills, the son who strangled his own mother, was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment on April 12, 1933. He was 36. I'm currently trying to determine where he was buried, as well as Lucinda. Anyone have a clue?

International Mystery Writers Festival

Every year, the International Mystery Writers Festival is held in, of all places, Owensboro, KY. This year's festival runs from August 12th to the 16th. Their website says:

Mystery lovers worldwide are celebrating the International Mystery Writers' Festival. The Festival presents unique opportunities to discover plays, screenplays, and short stories professionally performed, published, or produced for the first time.

Discovering New Mysteries celebrates the best of new mystery works through an annual competition offering more than $20,000 in prize money. Audience members cast ballots during the festival and select the winners for The Angie Award categories. "The Angies" are named for the legendary Angela Lansbury, Kentucky's First Lady of Mystery 2007.

Among the luminaries who will be in attendance:

William Link - Award-winning writer-producer of TV shows such as Columbo, Murder She Wrote, The Bill Cosby Mysteries, Mannix, Ellery Queen, etc.

Sue Grafton - Louisville's own best-selling mystery chronicler. Grafton's many works include A is for Alibi, B is for Burglar, and C is for Cookie. (Okay, I may have hallucinated that last one.)

David Breckman - Hollywood producer, director, and former Saturday Night Live writer, currently writing for the hit television series Monk, starring Tony Shalhoub.

Zev Buffman - The Tony-nominated Broadway veteran actually lives in Owensboro, and is the CEO of River Park Center.

Gary Sandy - Best known for playing Travis on WKRP in Cincinnati, Gary really is from the southern Ohio area and will be attending the Festival to take part in the "Live Radio Theatre" enactments.

Roller Coaster Yard Sale

If you missed the 400 Mile Yard Sale in June, take heart: there's another giant marathon yard sale in Kentucky coming up.

The Roller Coaster Yard Sale will be held October 1, 2 and 3 in the vicinity of Hwy 90 and Hwy 63, starting in the Mammoth Cave area.

The Tour Southern & Eastern Kentucky site says: "Don't miss this three day grassroots extravaganza from Mammoth Cave, KY to Tennessee - around Dale Hollow Lake and back to Glasgow, KY, with over 150 miles of yard sales, crafts, antiques, handcrafted quilts, produce, southern foods, BBQ, entertainment, souvenirs, flea markets and more!

Visit the offical Roller Coaster Yard Sale website: rollercoasterfair.com.

Woodrow Wilson's Turkey Fight

From the Washington Post, Nov 23, 1920:

"President's Turkeys Battle: Kentucky Bird Defeats Texan In White House Grounds Fight."

The White House grounds were the scene yesterday of a spirited battle between the turkey gobblers sent President Wilson for Thanksgiving by South Trimble, of Kentucky, and the chamber of commerce of Cuero, Tex.

The turkeys were released from their crates, and Texas leaped upon Kentucky, but in the fighting the turkey from Kentucky emerged victorious, although not unscathed. Then with bloody comb and bedraggled feathers it engaged in a strut of pride over its victorious battle.

Government-sponsored animal fights on the White House lawn?? Where was PETA when we needed them? Times were different then indeed. The article doesn't specify what became of the winner, but I'm sure he was eaten just like the loser.


Such behavior from Woodrow Wilson doesn't surprise me, though. Wilson was a sociopath, and openly and unapologetically a white supremacist, and his public endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan was quoted in Kentuckian D.W. Griffith's controversial film The Birth of a Nation.

Scuffletown

Another of Kentucky's Ghost Towns is Henderson County's Scuffletown, which is on the Kentucky-Indiana border along the Ohio River, just above the mouth of Green River.

According to the 1976 book The Annals and Scandals of Henderson County by Maralea Arnett, Scuffletown was built up around a tavern/trading post run by one Jonathan Thomas Stott. "Since he kept a good supply of liquor, it became a rendezvous for flatboatmen and others on the river. Often a general fight developed after several hours of drinking and the place received the name of Scuffletown."

A tobacco-processing operation in Scuffletown was quite successful, exporting 400 to 450 hogsheads of tobacco per year to Europe, for pipe tobacco and nasal snuff.

According to them there Wikipedia folks:

The site witnessed numerous Civil War-era activities. It may have been the intended target of a raid by a handful of Confederate cavalrymen from Tennessee led by Captain Jake Bennett. It was Colonel's Johnson set up his cannon a few miles below Scuffletown to take Newburgh. The Silver Lake No. 2, a sternwheel packet (steamboat) weighing some 129 tons and outfitted with six cannons capable of firing 24 pound shot, stopped at Scuffletown during its patrols of the Ohio. In 1863, eight Union companies of infantry and one company of artillery were stationed at Scuffletown to protect the area of Confederate raiders. Scuffletown is mentioned in the Civil War account Operations of the Mississippi Squadron during Morgan's Raid.

In 1893 the Southern Cherokee Nation were welcomed to Kentucky in Scuffletown and recognized as an Indian tribe by Governor John Y. Brown. The Southern Cherokee is still living on the Green River today.

The 1913 flood greatly devastated the city, causing a mass exodus that they never recovered from. Its post office closed permanently the following year. An even larger flood in 1937 decimated what was left, and a vast chunk of real estate has sat inexplicably deserted ever since. There's been talk for a decade about having it declared a protected wetland and setting up a national wildlife refuge there, but so far not much has happened.

Jim Bunning

I'm going to miss Jim Bunning. After a long and distinguished career in Kentucky politics, he recently announced that he will not seek Congressional re-election in 2010, thus ending one of the weirdest political careers in memory.

Bunning, who was born and raised in Southgate, KY, had a quite respectable career in pro Baseball, pitching for the Tigers, Phillies, Pirates and Dodgers between 1955 and 1971. He ended up in the Baseball Hall of Fame with a Win-Loss Record of 224-184, an Earned Run Average of 3.27, and 2,855 strikeouts. Might have been for the best if he'd retired on his sports glories.


National Journal voted him the second most conversative Congressman, second only to Jim DeMint, the guy who stated that single mothers who live with their boyfriends shouldn't be allowed to work in the education system.

Bunning was always more than a little peculiar, but in recent years he's grown more and more loopy, to the point that his own party is increasingly wary of him. As Mary Jacoby wrote in Salon just before the 2004 election:

It's no secret in Kentucky that Sen. Jim Bunning, a Republican who was expected to coast to reelection on Nov. 2, has been acting strange. Over the past few months, Bunning has angrily pushed away reporters, exchanged testy words with a questioner at a Rotary Club and stuck to brief, heavily scripted remarks at campaign events, delivered in a halting monotone. The former major league baseball star now travels the Bluegrass State with a special police escort, at taxpayer expense. His explanation? Al-Qaida may be out to get him.

During that same campaign, Bunning described his Democratic opponent Daniel Mongiardo as looking "like one of Saddam Hussein's sons." At first Bunning denied having made the statement and admitted it only after it was made clear to him that he had said it on tape. Even then, he only made an apology for his remarks after considerable public pressure.


In February 2009, at a dinner for the Hardin County Republican Party, Bunning predicted that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg would probably die within nine months. Bunning later sent out a press release apology. (The press release misspelled the Justice's last name not once, but twice.)

In an April 2009 poll, Bunning’s approval rating was at an all-time low of 28 percent, but he vowed to run for another term. Amid rumors that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was not pleased at that prospect, Bunning lashed out in a series of irrational rants to reporters.

Despite previous assurances that he was in the race, Bunning has finally bowed out and will retire in 2010. However, even in his announcement of such, he couldn't help but let his conspiratorially cranky side out again:

"Over the past year, some of the leaders of the Republican Party in the Senate have done everything in their power to dry up my fundraising," Bunning said in a statement. "The simple fact is that I have not raised the funds necessary to run an effective campaign for the U.S. Senate. For this reason, I will not be a candidate for re-election in 2010."

On the other hand, the 2010 election is still a long ways away. Something tells me we haven't heard the last of Mr. Bunning....

Lost in the Flood

Après nous, le Déluge. Tuesday morning I was dashing out in the torrential thunderstorm, on the way to a meeting at Starbucks on Blankenbaker. I witnessed lightning striking a tree across the street, sending branches flying. That should have been a warning sign to forget the meeting and go back inside, but I stubbornly pressed on.

Unfortunately, my car has developed an aversion to rain - something's getting wet under the hood (starter? battery? distributor cap?) and makes it reluctant to run under moist conditions. It died right around a sharp curve on Watterson Trail, and wouldn't start again. A couple of cars came speeding around the corner and very nearly slamming into me since visibility in the downpour was very low. Finally I had to put it in neutral and push it out of the road. About half an hour later, I was able to get it started again.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, a lot of other people in Louisville were having far worse troubles. From WAVE-TV:

In Louisville, there's flooding at Second and Broadway, and First and Main. East Breckenridge Street also has water as high as car windows.

Police had to pull a driver from a vehicle at Grinstead and Cherokee Road, and there was another rescue at 15th and Hill Street.

In New Albany, cars were floating in high water at Scribner Place and Thomas.

There were reports of three feet of water at Arthur Street and Eastern Parkway. And someone reported seeing a person floating in a motorized wheelchair at 901 south 15th Street.

There are also unconfirmed reports that manhole covers are blowing off because of the heavy rain.

Norton Hospital on disaster due to flood damage.

And from bizjournals.com:

One of the hardest hit public buildings was the main branch of the Louisville Free Public Library, 301 York St.

Craig Buthod, executive director of the library system, said that the lower level of the library building took on several feet of water. He estimated that “tens of thousands” of books were lost.

Buthod said that the building’s heating, ventilation and air conditioning system was under water, as was his personal car, library vehicles and Bookmobile units.

The library is expected to be closed through at least Wednesday.

And most tragic of all, from WHAS-TV:

Witnesses say it took only minutes for floodwaters to rise nearly waist deep inside Louisville’s animal shelter.

But with only a dozen people around and nearly 600 animals, they couldn't get them all to safety in time.

One dog and nearly a dozen cats drowned Tuesday afternoon.

(Photos by Kari Donahue.)

Glencoe Gun Shop's Obama Sign

Reported on WLWT-TV:

GLENCOE, Ky. -- A racially charged sign that takes aim at President Barack Obama is raising eyebrows in northern Kentucky.

The sign is located along Main Street in Glencoe at the Eagle Hill Armoury gun store.

The sign reads, "Obama complains Americans are fat, police act stupid, U.S.A. is a bully, the president is a nagger." However, at some point over the weekend, the last word was changed to be a racial slur.

The store owner said that he changed the sign immediately after being told about the slur and that he reported the issue to police.

The man who owns the sign, Bryan Roach, said that vandals changed the sign.

"It was basically vandalized, and we didn't appreciate it," Roach said. "Somebody had actually taken one of the letters out of one of the other words. I think it was in 'complains,' and put it in a place that made a word that we don't advocate or condone at all."

Sounds awfully disingenuous to me. I find it extremely hard to believe that the gun shop's choice of the word "nagger" to describe President Obama was perfectly innocent and had no pun intended. Furthermore, WLWT says Mr. Roach is refusing to change the sign even though all the media attention will surely encourage further racist vandalism.

Larry Vincent

One from our Creeps Records mp3 blog:


Born in California, Larry Vincent (no relation to the horror host) moved around the country plying his musicianly trade for many years in many places, including Chicago's Alamo Cafe in 1926, before settling down in Covington, KY in the late 30s, early 40s.

Larry arrived in Northern Kentucky at the peak of its decadent period, when the area was ruled by mobsters, strippers, prostitutes, card sharks, burlesque halls, and other such glorious sleaze. He took up a residency performing at Jimmy Brink's Lookout House, a supper club that was actually a front for an illegal casino. This became Larry's second home for years to come.


He formed Pearl Records, an odd label whose artist roster consisted almost entirely of Larry himself performing under many pseudonyms. This particular recording, "The Freckle Song", is one of his tamer outings, an almost Benny Bell-like novelty song based around rhymes that you think you will go one way but then go another, and the fact that its chorus "She's got freckles on her, but she's nice" sounds rather uncannily like "She's got freckles on her butt, she's nice."

People were easily amused in those days. Other puerile Larry Vincent gems include "I Took My Organ To The Party", "Sarah Sittin' In A Shoe Shine Shop", and "I Grow Gooey over Chop Suey".

Near the end of his life, Larry told radio host Dr. Demento:

At a time when sale or possession of records with the f-word and other indiscretions could get you arrested, I made records that were just risque enough to be slightly scandalous to Middle Americans, yet discreet enough to be acceptable to at least some mainstream record stores.

I did have some regional success as a pop crooner in the 1920s. In the late 1930s I collaborated with several established Tin Pan Alley songwriters. With Henry Tobias and Moe Jaffe I turned out one song that eventually became a semi-standard, "If I Had My Life To Live Over."

Larry Vincent - The Freckle Song

He died in 1977 in Forest Hills, KY (a suburb of Louisville).

Dovie's Restaurant

In February 2003, I received an email from one Rebecca Troyer, urging me to do a post about Dovie's Restaurant in Tompkinsville. As I am livin' on Creeps time, it's taken me until now to get around to it. But here 'tis!

I haven't actually been down to Tompkinsville in a few years, but I hear-tell lots of good things about Dovie's, and next time I find myself in Monroe County, I plan on making a point of getting a Dovieburger, squozed.

Squozed? Squozed. At Dovie's, they offer their burgers squozed or unsquozed, meaning they will or will not squeeze all the hot grease out with the spatula before serving. The Dovie burger, you see, is deep fried. Immersed completely in hot oil. They also offer deep-fried hot dogs, ham and cheese, ham and egg, or bologna and egg sandwiches. It ain't fer vegans. Still, they're using soybean oil, which is better for you, I suppose, than recycled bacon skillet scrapings. I suppose.


KET's Kentucky Life did a segment about them, which you can watch online here.

(Bonus Tompkinsville trivia: 70s/80s NFL football star Elois Grooms was born and raised here. Whatever happened to ol' Elois?)

Middletown UFO

I've been chewing over whether or not to mention this, but Saturday night a friend and I saw a UFO slowly and silently moving over our heads in downtown Middletown, KY.

Keep in mind that a UFO means just what it says - an object that is flying and is unidentified. I'm not inclined to think the device came from Martians, but I am open to the idea that it was some sort of covert experimental aircraft. (On the other hand, how covert could it be if they're flying it directly overhead?)

It was traveling very low and very slowly - far slower than a normal plane should have seemed to take to travel overhead so low-flying. The shape of the craft was hard to determine but it did have wings and it did have right-of-way lights, so this would seem to discount aliens. I don't think any entities from other planets would have bothered to consult the FAA airworthiness standards code.

Or would they?

Anyway, the problem with the running lights was this: their placement relative to the body of the object gave the effect of making the wings seem extremely, impossibly, short and stubby. Impossible for a conventional airplane, anyway. I couldn't really see the wings at all, but the lights seemed a little too close to the center of the object. An additional large slow strobing light was rhythmically fading in and out, briefly illuminating part of the underside of the hull of the whatever-it-was.

The biggest problem with it was its silence. To be flying so low, we heard almost no sound emanating from it, except for an almost-subsonic pulsing hum. That's really, more than anything else, what lent a sci-fi sense of cognitive dissonance to the whole thing.

If what we saw was in fact a Triangle UFO like the one seen near McAlester, OK, then the shortness of the placement of the lights would suddenly make sense, of a sort. Assuming this is what we saw, then the two rear points of the triangle were lit while the front was not. These rear-point lights could then, logically, be what I assumed had been lights in the center of wings. Also, the center pulsing light would have been back of center instead of dead center (which seems to be the case in the photo above, of a Belgian triangle UFO).

The Triangle UFO hypothesis is especially compelling in light of the reports of triangular craft in Louisville and in Stanton back in the Spring.

Most likely, it was nothing. But it was certainly an interesting nothing. And one never knows, really, what's hidden in plain sight. (You know what Ferris Bueller says about stopping to look around you. And you know what Jack Burton always says at a time like this.)

The Flukes of Kentucky

Remember the old X-Files episode about the half-man-half-Flukeworm living in the sewers? The real thing is even scarier.

At least there's no chance of accidentally ingesting the Flukeman, or carrying him around in your innards for years while he fills you up with eggs. Some sources say the average American male is packing around up to 2 lbs of intestinal parasites inside of his body. And not only are the great outdoors teeming with intestinal flukes, there are also liver flukes, lung flukes, and - scariest of all - blood flukes.

Blood flukes, known as Schistosoma or Bilharzia (so named for its discoverer, German pathologist Theodor Maximilian Bilharz), are the World Health Organization's second biggest concern after Malaria. They cause a condition called Schistosomiasis that affects hundreds of millions of people around the world.


Then there's the thread-like filarial nematodes, which can be transmitted by mosquito bites. I found this factoid about them most fascinating, from Wikipedia:

Filariasis is usually diagnosed by identifying microfilariae on a Giemsa stained thick blood film. Blood must be drawn at night, since the microfilaria circulate at night(nocturnal periodicity), when their mosquito vector is most likely to bite.

Paragonimus kellicotti was first identified in Kentucky, and though it was originally believed to be primarily a North American parasite of snails and crustaceans, it has since spread worldwide and has been found in cats, dogs, minks, muskrats, and, yes, humans. I've always maintained that anything can jump species if it really wants to, and if given the opportunity.


And then there's the scientists who, being scientists, decided to round up 176 frogs and toads from Kentucky and Indiana and cut their lungs open just to see what they'd find. The results were: 412 H. complexus, 63 H. longiplexus, 23 H. breviplexus and 8 H. varioplexus. That's a grand total of 506 lung flukes for 176 frogs. Yum!

And then according to this study, "a survey of 36 cats within a 250-mile radius of Fort Knox, Kentucky, revealed that 5 of these cats had pancreatic flukes". (Uh... will someone explain to me why they chose Fort Knox as their epicenter?? Please?)


Should I mention the Flukes found inside Catfish in Kentucky Lake? Or that the Beef Tapeworm can grow up to 40 feet long inside your intestines? Nah. I'm making myself queasy here.