Cemetery Deer

What is it with deer? They're stalking me. Everywhere I go nowadays, I encounter deer, even in the city. I never used to see them so often, not even when I lived in the wilderness of Waco, KY - with the sole exception of the now-infamous "Devil Deer" incident.

But now I see them everywhere (to quote Hank Thompson) and they're popping up in urban settings with greater frequency as mankind continues to encroach on what dwindling wild space is left to them. One even barged into the Middletown Fresh Market a few months ago.

And last fall (holy moley - I just checked and it was exactly a year ago today and I didn't even realize it when I started writing this. Now that's weird!) I was driving Westbound on I-64 at night through Franklin County, and ran over an enormous deer. I didn't run into it, I ran over it. Now, the impact was great, to be sure, but aside from a really skull-joggling staccato double-WHAM!! as each set of tires bounced over the unfortunate buck, it was relatively untraumatic. I have pretty darn good reflexes, or so I like to flatter myself, and managed to keep the car straight and continue driving with relative calm.

It wasn't until I got home that it really started sinking on me how incredible the whole thing was. It's like in Pulp Fiction where John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson look at the bulletholes in the wall behind them and can't figure out why they aren't dead. I kept picturing - and still picture to this day - the frozen-in-time snapshot my mind took of the moment just before impact. The deer's considerable rack should have been run over by my driver-side tires, and it's a minor miracle that my tires weren't punctured by them.

But then it's a major miracle that I'm even alive at all. When I tell the story to people, many have been incredulous - "you ran over a deer in a Volvo station wagon and didn't wreck? Is that even possible?" I admit it doesn't sound possible at all, and yet it happened. And all I lost was a muffler.

I recently saw a news story where a Brownsville man driving one of those monster-sized heavy-duty pickup trucks collided with a deer in Grayson County. If any vehicle could squash a deer, you would expect it would be one of those, right? Nope. The impact sent him flipping over repeatedly, totalling his vehicle.

And just this past weekend, someone died in a deer collision in Harold, KY (Floyd County).

The statistics for deer/vehicle impact fatalities are so grim that a number of organizations exist to monitor the problem, such as Deer Crash.



Anyway, I said all that to say all this: I was in Louisville's Calvary Cemetery the other day, and came face to face with Bambi. We stared each other down for a couple minutes before the little doe decided she didn't want her picture taken.

Deer Runs Amok in Fresh Market

According to the Courier-Journal, the Fresh Market in Middletown, KY was terrorized last week by a crazed deer that leaped into the plate glass window and smashed its way into the store. (Perhaps it charged at its own reflection, or perhaps it was the Devil Deer.)

According to the store's manager, the deer - profusely bleeding from its encounter with the glass - "went all through the store and bled all over the place," then eventually ended up collapsing near the back. Metro Police officers arrived about 10 minutes later, the deer approached them, prompting the officers to use their tasers on it.

What happened next is even weirder. Says the news report:

After it was tased, an officer grabbed the deer by its back legs and dragged it out the open door in the back, [police spokeswoman Alicia] Smiley said. Once outside, the deer eventually left the area. The animal has not been seen since, she said...

Wait, so you have a large bleeding and injured deer, and you let it go?? Even if you don't care (and I do) that the creature needs medical attention, aren't you concerned that the deer that you turned loose in a highly populated urban area is going to go cause mayhem and havoc somewhere else?

Has anyone else in that area had a sighting of this errant deer?

The Donder Society

Everyone knows that Santa has nine reindeer: Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, Blitzen and Rudolph. (Well, not counting Egbert, Wilburn, Skippy, Smidgen, Angst, Bunsen, Kriemhild and Bob. But they're only the auxilliary backups in case of emergency.)

But guess what? You're wrong! It's actually Donder, not Donner, according to many scholars who know more about such things than you and I.

You may find this discrepancy to be less than Earth-shattering, but Louisville attorney Donald M. Heavrin has made it his life's calling to spread the word about the real name of this rogue reindeer. He's the commander-in-chief of the Donder Society, an ad hoc group dedicated to correcting the historical record and getting Donder's true name reinstated in popular usage. Each year about this time, the Society releases its annual report, letting the faithful know where we are in the great war against creeping Donnerian hegemony.

So what's the deal here? Well, it's complicated.

"A Visit from Saint Nicholas" made its first print appearance anonymously in New York's Troy Sentinel newspaper in 1823, and it had a reindeer named "Dunder". It was reprinted this way for the next thirteen years, until authorship was claimed by Clement Clarke Moore, a New Yorker of Dutch ancestry and professor of Biblical Studies at New York's General Theological Seminary. Moore published the poem in a book in 1844, and changed Dunder to Donder.


Thunder and lightning would be donder and bliksem in Dutch (transliterated) and donner and blitzen in German. The confusing part is that in naming Santa's two most majestic paranormally-powered Devil Deer "Thunder and Lightning", Moore chose to use one Dutch name and one German one. But hey, he can call 'em whatever he wants, it's his poem.

Or is it?

There's a growing revisionist school of thought that names another New Yorker of Dutch ancestry, Henry Livingston, as the story's true author. In 2000, scholar and textual analyst Donald W. Foster published his findings naming Livingston as the poem's actual source.

According to Snopes, which I regard as accurate only a quarter of the time, there have been many prior examples of Donder rendered as Donner, going as far back as 1906 in an article in the New York Times. However, I checked the online NYT database for 1906 and didn't find the article they speak of. Regardless, these examples are probably either typos or instances where editors well-versed in German thought they were cleverly correcting typos, mistaking Donder for Donner.

The real source of the Donner/Donder glitch was Gene Autry and his 1949 popular song "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer", which said Donner, not Donder, and thus cemented this nomenclature in the public consciousness for the rest of the century.


In 1939, a coloring book called "Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer" was created by Robert May for the Montgomery Ward department stores. This, in turn, led to Gene Autry's song in 1949. Together, the book and the song introduced this ruminant-come-lately to the Santa mythology, and many regard his presence as being not strictly "in canon".

The "Mad Stone"

February 19, 1903, in the brittle and decaying pages of an obscure Lawrenceburg newspaper called simply It:

On last Thursday, the little eight-year-old son of Mrs Ide Long of Van Buren, was brought to this place to have the mad stone applied to a wound on his hand made by a rabid dog some days past. When the stone was applied, it adhered one hour and forty minutes.

Mad stone? Adhered? Huh?

I'd never heard of such a thing, but as it turns out the Mad Stone was a peculiar quasi-medical superstition of the day. According to an essay by Dennis Muncrief:

The Mad Stone is a stony concretion (as a hair ball) taken from the stomach of a deer. They have been described as round or oval in shape with a porous surface texture measuring about 3 to 4 inches in size and very light weight. They have a brownish-green color with a highly polished surface. The purpose of the Mad Stone was to cure rabies, hence the name.

The Mad Stone is an object that has several grades of curative power. All stones are not created equal. A stone from a brown deer will work in a bind if another cannot be found. A better grade of Mad Stone comes from a white or spotted deer. This stone works a lot better than a stone from a brown deer. The very best Mad Stone comes from an albino or "witch deer" that is pure white with pink eyes. It not only cures the rabies, it also cures rattlesnake and spider bites.

Now, there is a very strict set of rules associated with the use and care of a Mad Stone. First, it can never be bought or sold. It must never be changed in shape. The patient must go to the person with the Mad Stone. The Mad Stone must never be brought to the patient. There can never be a charge for the use of the Mad Stone. The stone was usually passed down from father to son. Anyone who owns a Mad Stone can use the stone as long as they follow a strict set of procedures.

The use of the Mad Stone is quite strict. The procedure for curing the infected patient is as follows. When the person with the bite arrives at the place where the Mad Stone is kept, the stone is boiled in sweet milk. The sweet milk neutralizes the poison from the bite. The stone must be boiled in the milk until the milk turns green. That is how you can tell when all the rabies is out of the stone.

After boiling the stone in milk, it is applied directly to the wound. The wound must be bleeding. If it is no longer bleeding it must be scraped until it is bleeding. The Mad Stone will stick to the wound if there is rabies infection in the wound. It does not need to be tied. When the stone falls off the wound, it is boiled again in milk to remove the poison from the stone. The stone is re-applied to the wound. If it sticks, there is still rabies in the wound. When the stone fails to stick to the wound, the rabies poison is all gone and the patient will not get rabies.

Thankfully these aren't standard issue in Kentucky doctor's offices anymore. (They're not, right?)

And just a day after discussing the "Devil Deer", now we get references to "Witch Deer"? The plot thickens, like an Appalachian forest.

Devil Deer

We're currently in a peculiar moment in history: even though wildlife populations are dwindling more than ever, we're actually far more likely to encounter them now than we were twenty years ago. The reason for this is because the privacy of their natural habitat is increasingly encroached upon by civilization.

Case in point: just a few years ago I was walking through a small semi-wooded area being cleared for a forthcoming subdivision. A lot of bulldozers and hammering going on, so definitely the last place I'd expect to see deer.

As I walked down a recently paved road, an impossibly enormous elk jumped out of the shrubbery to my right and charged straight for me. All my life, it's always been deer running from me, not straight at me! Its antlers were a huge, crazy, multi-tined, asymmetrical mess, and its eyes were like evil black soulless marbles. I moved out of the deer's path and fortunately, it kept on charging along its prescribed path, crashing through the shrubbery on the other side of the road.

And then it was gone.

When I used to have an art studio in Richmond, my neighbor was an old-timer hunter who ran an army-surplus store. I recounted the incident to him, and his eyes widened. "You know whatchoo saw??" he exclaimed. "Son, you done saw the DEVIL DEER! Do you know how many hunters would give their left NUT to see the Devil Deer?"

Prodded to elaborate further, he told me "all serious big-time hunters know about Devil Deer, and that they're the most dangerous thing in all the wilderness. They're bigger, meaner and crazier than regular deer, and they cain't be killed!"

What I don't know about the world of hunting, you can almost fit into the Hollywood Bowl. So, I remain unsure if this guy was either crazy or just pulling my leg with some sort of "Great Pumpkin" story for drunk outdoorsmen.

What I do know, however, is that Kentucky is quite popular among hunters for non-typical deer specimens. And this message board post alludes to a 200-inch buck shot in Fredonia in Caldwell County.

And then there are certain ancient legends, carried across the great pond to our fair continent by Europeans but finding a suitable growth culture in our dark and bloody ground. Legends of hunters witnessing magical and frightening deer, the likes of which never beheld before, which lure the hunter to strange and unfamiliar parts of the woods. The evil ghostly deer then disappears like an apparition, leaving the unfortunate hunter completely and hopelessly lost in terra incognita.


Then there's the Catholic Saint Hubert, who became the patron saint of hunters. As the story goes, Hubert was a reckless and thoughtless hunter, until one day he was visited by a majestic talking stag with a glowing crucifix floating above his head. The talking stag warned Hubert he was doomed to Hell, so Hubert turned to Christianity, resolved to spend the rest of his days doing good works, and became a Saint. The eerie, mystical-looking stag that has adorned bottles of Jagermeister since 1934 is that same creature that confronted St. Hubert.

The cross-stag may seemingly be playing for the opposite team of the Devil Deer, but it sure as heck looks scary!