Chained Rock

High above the city of Pineville, there stands an immense protruding rock held in place by an old rusty chain. This is "Chained Rock", a peculiar tourist attraction in the Pine Mountain State Resort Park (established in 1924 as Kentucky's first state park).

Accounts vary regarding how the rock got its chain. Some sources say the rock is/was genuinely unstable and the chain is what's saved Pineville from a dangerous rockslide. Others say that was a just a pretense for a publicity stunt to deliberately create the tourist attraction. And still others say that both are to some degree true; that the rock could indeed have fallen without restraint but also that the danger was exaggerated for the sake of a good story.

Furthermore, there are also accounts that the chain was originally put in place because parents had already been telling their children for years not to worry about the very visible outcropping rock falling, and made up a story about how the rock was safely chained in place. After these stories got around, so legend has it, enough out-of-towners started inquiring about the chained rock that the city government decided in 1933, "heck, maybe we really do need to put a chain around it."

And finally, there's also the odd note on the historical plaque (see below) that the chain that was installed in 1933 actually was a replacement for a much earlier pre-existing chain. Puzzling evidence.

The chain itself is said to have been acquired from a rock quarry's steam shovel in Virginia and painstakingly lugged up the mountain by Boy Scouts, the local Kiwanis Club, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and a team of pack mules. It weighs 1.5 tons and is 101 feet long.

The Belva Mine Disaster

This story, as told over and over, and cut and pasted almost verbatim on numerous online sources, goes like this:

In December 1945, an explosion at the Belva mine in Fourmile, KY killed many miners and left a handful of survivors trapped. These survivors were eventually rescued, and subsequently stated in interviews that at one point during their ordeal, a "door" somehow opened up in a rock wall and a man dressed as a "lumberjack" or "telephone lineman" stepped out to reassure everyone that they would be rescued. The mystery man then went back into this well-lit room, closed the opening behind him, and was gone.

The source for these interviews is universally given as having "appeared in the December 1981 - January 1982 issues of newspapers in Pineville, Kentucky". Some online sources mistakenly place the setting of the Belva mine in Pennsylvania, but they're obviously confusing it with a similar story of strange men illuminated by a bluish light that manifested to trapped miners in Shipton, PA and told them not to worry.


The CDC actually has an old report online here (in pdf format) - but it doesn't address the magical lumberjack.

The recent hubbub about the rescued Chilean miners being forbidden to talk about the first 17 days underground has raised a lot of conjecture about what exactly is being concealed in that incident.

Some invoke the Richard Shaver "Deros", others the "Hollow Earth" hypothesis, and still others point to the list of alleged underground bases that has been circling the net since the 1990s.

(That list, by the way, names Pineville, KY as the site of a so-called "underground base", apparently for no other reason than because of this very "mystery lumberjack" story we're addressing now. It also incorrectly lists a cave in Tazewell County, VA as being in Kentucky.)


It also doesn't help the story's provenance that a newspaper account at the time, published in the Middlesboro Daily News, makes no mention of anything odd or supernatural happening. I have yet to track down these alleged 1981-1982 papers that blow the lid off the lumberjack legend.

The whole thing sounds like malarkey to me, but I've learned by now that sometimes that stories that sound the absolute stupidest often tend to be the ones that are true. Some have used the Belva lumberjack as a springboard for envisioning a whole concept about good samaritans traveling through time and space to help people in need. Though I don't doubt that such entities could exist, I'm pretty sure this isn't such a case. But with all such matters, like the supposed time-traveler at a Chaplin movie premiere or the long-enduring mythology of the Men in Black, I remain an open circuit and not a closed switch.

Vinland Energy Company Ruins Family Cemetery

As reported in the Lexington Herald-Leader, a bulldozer for Vinland Energy of London, Ky., was recently caught destroying a family cemetery near Fourmile, KY.

According to the article, Vinland Energy Vice President of Operations Scott Gilbert said the company had no idea that the cemetery was there, and pointed to maps of Bell County which don't list the graveyard. However, the graves were clearly visible, and there's no reason on Earth anyone standing on that property could not know it was a cemetery. The land was inspected by a surveyor - whose identity is not yet known - who tied a ribbon around the area designated to be bulldozed. It is unfathomable that neither he nor the bulldozer operator could not have noticed the graves.

And as a commenter on the online edition of the Herald-Leader noted, it took only a quick internet search to find proof that the cemetery's existence was indeed well-known.

What the news story doesn't tell us, though, is how Vinland came to get the rights to dig there in the first place, and who specifically authorized them on the property. It also doesn't spell exactly what sort of "project" Vinland was there for, but we do know that Vinland is in the business of oil-well drilling and natural gas. They're a subsidiary of a larger oil-drilling company called Vanguard out of Texas.

Pirate Treasure in Kentucky

An article in the Hardin County News-Enterprise pointed me to an interesting-sounding book I wasn't aware of: Robert Prather's The Strange Case of Jonathan Swift and the real Long John Silver.

In it, Prather makes the case for the semi-mythical pirate Jonathan Swift and the semi-mythical pirate Long John Silver being one and the same man, and suggests that Swift may have buried his fabled treasure (and concealed a gold/silver mine) somewhere on his thousands of acres of property he owned in Kentucky.

(We're speaking here, of course, of the Jonathan Swift who is said to have discovered a vast gold/silver mine somewhere in Kentucky, not the Gulliver's Travels author.)

Prather suggests the Swift cache sits near the Hardin-Breckinridge county line, in the middle of an “X” formed by the towns of Eastview, Westview, Centerview and Grandview.

Furthermore, Prather points out an old newspaper article from 1902 that mentions a goldmine near Easy Gap, just a few miles from the area in question.

Wikipedia says:

"Tradition holds that he [Swift] was an established Indian trader, but some historians came to believe he was a pirate who preyed on Spanish merchants and made his frequent trips into the wilderness not to retrieve his treasure, but to hide and coin it. A resident of Laurel County, Kentucky named William Reams held that following Swift's visit to the mine in 1769 – the last trip recorded in the journal – he and his accomplices agreed not to claim any of the treasure they had hidden in the area until 1790. When they did return, Swift was overcome by the sight of the wealth and killed the other members of the party while they slept. Following this action, he was struck blind and unable to recover the treasure."

Henry Harvey Fuson's 1939 History of Bell County, Kentucky, on the other hand, pooh-poohs the whole notion and does so in a rather disingenuous manner:

"The mountain people in the past have been good subjects for the creation of this folk-tale, since no mines have been found that we can trace to Swift. They lived for a century far from railroads in a wilderness of mountain country. They made a living, a bare living in many instances, by the hardest of work. People in this condition dream of wealth and luxury.

The story of Swift fell into fertile soil of their dreaming minds and became fixed there as a fact. After it became fixed, and no mines could be found, then reasons were invented to account for not finding the silver. Hence, dark caves with heaped-up silver guarded by demons, great kettles of silver deep down in the ground protected by a league of devils, and many other stories grew up around this tradition. What better modern folk-tale could we have?"

(For those who find significance in synchronicities for their own sake, you may be intrigued to note the promixity of Swift's alleged buried treasure site to that of Fort Knox. Likewise, you may note the fact that the Long John Silver's restaurant chain is owned by the Kentucky-based Yum! Brands.)