Ghosts of Sue Bennett College

In the 19th century, Kentuckian Sue Bennett was a teacher and social activist who sought to improve education in impoverished rural areas. She and her sister Belle Bennett (not to be confused with the vaudeville actress of the same name) raised $40,000 - a considerable sum of money in the late 1800s! - to found their own school. Sue died before the project was completed, and Belle opened it in London, KY in 1897, calling it the Sue Bennett Memorial School in her sister's honor.

After a century of success, Sue Bennett College was forced to close down in 1997. For reasons that are somewhat opaque to me, the Federal Government rescinded their funding, on which they had come to completely depend. Oprah Winfrey tried to intercede by calling attention to the school's plight on her TV show, but it was to no avail. Sue Bennett College joined the graveyard of defunct Kentucky colleges like Southeastern Christian College (Winchester), Bethel College (Hopkinsville), Lees College (Jackson), Lexington Baptist College (Lexington), Urania College (Glasgow), Pleasant J. Potter College, (Bowling Green), and Cedar Bluff College (Woodburn).


The buildings are still there, however. Some have been repurposed but the ghosts of the school remain. According to the Shadowlands: "They say the dorms and the theater are haunted and that Belle Bennett roams the halls all night playing the piano’s turning off and on lights and watching people sleep that still stay there if you go in your sure to find something." (misspelling and typos retained from original source).

Meanwhile, Theresa says: "a former student also shared information on a suicide that ocurred on the 2nd floor of Helm Hall. The apparition of the young lady who hung herself in that dorm is reported to have been seen more often than Belle." (I'm not sure how anyone would know whether the ghost in question is Belle or the suicide victim or someone else entirely, but there you have it.)

The biggest ghost haunting Laurel County seems to be that of the college itself. Many locals are still lamenting its passing, and hoping that some sort of higher education institution might form and put these college buildings back on track to their intended purpose.

Psychic Tour of Wickland

Ever been to Bardstown's historic Wickland house? Well, maybe tonight's the night you should check it out: A Visit With the Spirits of Wickland, billed as "a psychic tour of the 1826 Plantation house with a small group" is being held this very evening at 7:30pm sharp.

Then again, apparently they do this every Friday.

I'm not really sure what a psychic tour entails. Since it's implied - well, no, heck, it isn't implied, it's actually stated that you'll be visiting with spirits - is this going to be some sort of seance kinda thing? Or, like 1,001 lame TV programs with soulless scammers like Sylvia Browne, is the host going to close his/her eyes at some point and start channeling "Ozmo, the Fifth Ascended Celestial Angel Guide from the Great Magellanic Cloud"? I'd rather go back to 1942 and hang out with Madam Brent behind her beaded curtain and get some phrenology.

It says on the Visit Bardstown site: "Take a 90 minute paranormal family-friendly tour which includes the opportunity to interact through a psychic medium and the friendly spirits who once lived there." Click through that link if you have a strong stomach for fried baloney and hogwash - it runs down a detailed list of the characters, with a highly detailed "backstory" for each of them. I don't know whether it makes me angry or just sad. Both, maybe?

Ask yourself: if you had psychic abilities, would you use your God-given supernatural powers to help mankind, or would you host "ghost tours" of an allegedly haunted house in a small town in Kentucky for a $15 admission price?

Say what you will about Edgar Cayce, but even if he was delusional, he at least loathed the idea of making money off his alleged psychic gifts.

I'm not carping on this because I'm a skeptic - I'm carping on this because I know there are such things as ghosts and psychics and hauntings and channelled entities, and I don't like seeing them presented as goofy tourist attractions. I've had some "psychic" experiences myself, and you don't see me even talking about it, let alone hyping myself as a medium, let alone claiming it's something that can be repeated with guaranteed results, every Friday, week after week, year after year.

Those who say don't know, and those who know don't say.

Okay, okay, I hear ya, "Don't be so wedged, Jeff, it's just all in good fun", right? Fine. Go, have a great time, give yourself some spooky shivers, and tell 'em I sent you by. Reservations are required, so call 502-507-0808 to make yours.

Pearce Cabin

Also known as The James Pearce House, or the Pearce-Capito House, this is not only the oldest building in New Castle but specifically the first structure built there - circa 1790 or 1791.

Mr. Pearce and his brother erected this home and settled here back when Kentucky was still part of Virginia. It originally was twice the size it is today, but a portion of the home in the rear deteriorated away long ago. It has something of a reputation for being haunted, with frightening sounds and moving objects reported by some who have stayed here over the years.


However, much of New Castle in general has similar ghostly experiences, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's just something that comes with the land in general. Or perhaps it's all emanating from spirits who are displeased at how shoddily their cemetery has been treated.

Haunted Christian Science Church?

There's a ghost story that perenially makes the rounds of, well, those who pass along ghost stories, regarding a haunting on the steps of Louisville's magnificent First Church of Christ, Scientist at 1305 South Third Street.

As the legend goes, a woman in 1918 paced around the front steps of the church, which was the prearranged place where she was to meet her husband. When her husband, who was a soldier stationed at nearby Camp Taylor, never arrived, she took it as a sign that he no longer cared for her.

Okay. That's the first part, and there's something of a leap on logic, rather like a poorly-constructed plot, between that and the next bit: unbeknownst to the woman, her husband had actually died of Spanish Flu, and then she herself died of that very same disease a week later.

Furthermore, the story is sometimes embroidered with the factoid that the woman and her soldier boy were actually not married, and that they had made secret plans to elope to Chicago that very night. But if they were secret plans, and they both died, how did anyone know this and how did that info become part of the story?

And, of course, the tale has the inevitable punchline that even to this day, late at night when the moon is just right, you can sometimes see her ghost still pacing around the steps of the Christian Science church. Yada yada yada.

(I'm pretty sure David Dominé deals with the subject in great detail, and probably much more accurately than the specious and sketchy online accounts I've perused, but I've misplaced my copy. When I find it, and if better data is to be gleaned, I'll update this post.)

I wonder what the parishioners of the First Church of Christ Scientist must think about all this. Apparently some local "ghost tours" take people by the church so they can gawk and hear the hearsay and say "golly, Martha, sure am spooky."

I'm not exactly certain what the Christian Science position is regarding ghosts, but I do know they don't believe in Heaven per se, at least not in the conventionally understood manner. (On the other hand, the term "Holy Ghost" does appear in their writings often.) The faith's founder, Mary Baker Eddy, stated in her autobiography that from the age of eight, she began hearing disembodied voices.

Often confused with The Church of Scientology, the Christian Science religion was formed in February 1866, after Eddy had a severe fall which caused a major spinal injury. According to her own account, Eddy unexpectedly made a full recovery after reading Matthew 9:2. She subsequently claimed to have helped to heal others via Bible Study, and also to have taught others in the precise way to do it most effectively. By 1875, this belief system was fully formed and expressed in her book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.

Today, Christian Science reading rooms can be found all over the world, and most people have come to look at their newspaper, the Christian Science Monitor, as one of the best sources of journalism available.

The Christian Scientist radio program can be heard every Sunday in Louisville at 8:00-8:30am on WAVG-AM 1450, and 9:00-9:30am on WKJK-AM 1080.

Harlan County Haunts

You may have seen Harlan County Haunts and More Harlan County Haunts by local writer Darla Jackson in stores. And if you haven't, ask. Jackson, a lifelong Native of Harlan County, has compiled two fine collections, each containing over a hundred individual reports of ghosts, monsters, angels and other paranormal and mysterious phenomena.

Her books can be purchased at Jewelcraft, Harlan A.R.H. in Harlan, KY, Kilgore's in Evarts, KY, Brookhaven in London, KY and Cumberland Falls State Park Gift Shop in Whitley County, KY. And, of course, at the usual places like Amazon, and also Jackson's Lulu store.


Jackson is currently working on Mountain Murders, a collection of cold case files from Harlan County.

According to the Kentucky Arts Council:

As a dancer, Darla is an experienced Appalachian clog dancer and has visited schools as a performer, dance instructor and coach for teachers eager to learn Appalachian culture. Growing up in the mountains of Harlan County, she was exposed to different styles of Appalachian dance and music. Clogging is her passion. Darla is a Cherokee Indian and is enrolled in a state recognized Native American tribe.

Something Olde's Ghost

Years ago, during my Lovejoy-esque period as a roving rogue antique dealer, I had booths in flea market/antique mall booths all across central Kentucky, from Mt.Vernon to Lexington to Irvine. And when you're dealing with such a quantity of raw materials from the physical world, soaked with all the history and psychic emotional residue that ends up attached to these items (if you believe in such things), it could drive a man insane.

And, some might say, it did the same to me.

If you believe that objects could have a will of their own and that they can express displeasure about being someplace they don't want to be, imagine surrounding yourself with antiques - much of which originally entered the market because their former owner died - and you can end up getting bad vibes all over yourself like baby powder or craft glitter.

Those were some strange times indeed, and they could provide fodder for countless ghost-story books - no doubt, sooner or later, I will write them. All in time.

But one particular incident that comes to mind was a ghost, poltergeist, entity, manifestation, what-have-you, that haunted the Something Olde Antique Mall on Chestnut Street in Berea. I haven't been by there in a long time, but as far as I know, the mall is still there and the ghost probably is too.

The building itself was converted from an old Western Auto store from the 50s, but who knows what was on the site prior to that. The upstairs of the place was entirely devoted to old books, with an elaborate array of shelves built to accomodate them. Soon after I moved into the place as a dealer, I learned that everyone there was quite spooked by the goings-on above our heads.

Even when nobody was upstairs, you could often hear footsteps walking across the floor directly above our heads. Now, there's no way to convey this via text, but you'll just have to take my word for it that I know the sounds that old creaky buildings can make, and that these sounds were not typical of those red-herring noises of settling foundation, expanding/contracting floorboards, or rattling ductwork. No, these were clear footsteps no different from the ones made when a real person was up there walking - you could even discern that the steps were consistent with a man of some weight, wearing shoes with hard clompy-sounding soles.

"See? There it is again!" someone would shout, and we'd all go running up there immediately. And of course, there was nothing. Those who stayed downstairs would invariably report that the footsteps stopped while we were on our way up. It was, truly, one of the weirdest things I've ever seen - or, rather, didn't see.

Lo and behold, a Google search for Something Olde Antique Mall brought up this old archived news article from Berea Online, and it interviews the shop's owner, Karen Todd, on the matter:

Strange things began to occur after the bookstore opened. People reported hearing the sounds of footsteps overhead when the upstairs rooms were presumably empty. And one piece of furniture back in a dark corner of the store is consistently found out of place when Todd opens the building in the morning.

Since the light switch for the second floor is in that corner, Todd says she makes a point of always putting the chair aside when she closes the store at night - a precaution to insure she has a clear path to the switch. One morning, however, she tripped over the chair, which during the night appeared to have been pulled into the middle of the floor, as if someone moved it to sit down for a good read.
"I knew I moved that chair the night before because I always walk out that way," Todd says.

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.

Lakeland Asylum Markers

The bronze commemorative marker on the grounds of the now-demolished Central State Asylum at Lakeland (Anchorage) vanished awhile back, and no one seems to know what became of it.

Recently, while taking my early-morning coffee-walk constitutional in the E.P. Sawyer Park (which now occupies the haunted former asylum property), I discovered that not one but two new markers have appeared. One's your basic state historical marker, pretty vague and dry and not terribly informational in its capsule description. The other is a surprisingly elaborate presentation that speaks of the asylum's horrors with a little more candor, but still doesn't even begin to touch upon the full nauseating extent of the atrocities said to have occurred here in the name of psychiatry.


The photos were taken with a flash since it was 5:30am and pitch black dark out (I couldn't even read these plaques until I got home and looked at my own photos.) Don't mention the "orbs" in the photo unless you want to be thoroughly ridiculed.

Maple Hill Manor

Maple Hill Manor wears many hats - it's a historic home, a Bed & Breakfast, a craft store, an orchard, a nature preserve, and an alpaca/llama farm. But it's also a haunted house. William Lynwood Montell, in his book Haunted Houses and Family Ghosts of Kentucky, includes a chapter devoted to Maple Hill's ghosts.

The house was built in 1851 by slaves, who took three years to painstakingly cut all wood by hand and make the bricks on-site from scratch. The original owners were Thomas McElroy and his wife young enough to be his daughter, Sarah Maxwell. Of their seven children, four of them died in the house at a very young age. Thomas and Sarah both eventually passed away in the home as well.

All of these family members have been cited as possible sources for the spirits, but there's more: the Battle of Perryville was fought in 1862, and left wounded and dead laying all over the area for miles. Many of the troops were brought to nearby Springfield homes, including Maple Hill, to recover and regroup. Some died on the premises.


Aspects of the hauntings that have occurred here have taken on a number of forms: knocks on doors with nobody there, sounds of footsteps coming from empty rooms, associated cold spots, inexplicable perfume odors, odd lights showing up in photographs, and prophetic lucid dreams experienced by some guests who have slept here.

Maple Hill Manor is located at 2941 Perryville Road in Springfield. Even without the fascinating ghost rumors and history, it's a delightful place to stay - check it out!

The Little Colonel

All but forgotten now except to historians, classic film buffs, and a few other people in the know, is the Victorian-age meme of the "Little Colonel".

There's a theatre company in Pewee Valley (just outside Louisville) called the Little Colonel Players; perhaps you've seen their logo with an odd little character in a Napoleonic hat. But from whence did this concept originate?

Annie Fellows Johnston wrote a series of novels dealing with the aristocracy in a small southern town. These were semi-biographical and based on actual local people and places. The stories were set in Lloydsborough Valley, which was actually a fictionalized version of Pewee Valley. Johnston, originally from Indiana, eventually made Pewee Valley her home, and she died there in 1931.


Among the books in the "Little Colonel" series: The Little Colonel in Arizona, The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor, The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation, The Little Colonel's Hero, The Little Colonel's House Party, The Little Colonel's Holiday, The Little Colonel at Boarding School, Little Colonel's Knight Comes Riding, and The Little Colonel's Chum, Mary Ware. (From that last one, she spun off a popular series of "Mary Ware" books.) Other books in her decidedly dated oeuvre include Miss Santa Clause of the Pullman, The Rescue of the Princess Winsome, Georgina of the Rainbows, It was the Road to Jericho, Mildred's Inheritance, and Ole Mammy's Torment.

In 1935 a film adaptation was made, starring Shirley Temple and Lionel Barrymore. And after that, Johnston and her beloved characters seemed to vanish down the memory hole. Lists of popular Kentucky authors - even specifically lists of ones from the Victorian age - often omit Johnston and her "Little Colonel" books.


In the stories, the Little Colonel (a young girl), draws inspiration from "The Old Colonel" (a Southern Gentleman who had lost his arm in the Civil War):

"Along this street one summer morning, nearly thirty years ago, came stepping an old Confederate Colonel. Every one greeted him deferentially. He was always pointed out to new comers. Some people called attention to him because he had given his right arm to the lost cause, some because they thought he resembled Napoleon, and others because they had some amusing tale to tell of his eccentricities. He was always clad in white duck in the summer, and was wrapped in a picturesque military cape in the winter."

The Old Colonel was a thinly-veiled dramatization of one George Washington Weissinger, Jr., a well-known lawyer in Louisville and Middletown. He's buried in Cave Hill Cemetery, but visiting his grave is tricky. According to littlecolonel.com:

Cave Hill Cemetery (the most prestigious burial ground in the region) has records that the Old Colonel was buried on February 25, 1903, his wife two months later. A plot map shows the exact location of the graves. But there are no tombstones or grave markers. Why? We don't know. We also can find nothing about the death of Amelia Pearce Weissinger (born Amelia Neville Pearce), his wife, just before her interment beside him on April 30, 1903.

And David Domine, in his great book Haunts of Old Louisville, reports sightings of an elderly one-armed ghost in a Civil War uniform, fitting the Old Colonel's description perfectly.

PIRK

The Bowling Green Daily News recently ran a feature story about PIRK (Paranormal Investigators and Researchers of Kentucky), a ghost-hunter organization led by the father-daughter team of Jeff and Kayla Yeckering, plus Kayla's fiance Joey McGee.

From the article:

“I’ve always had an interest in the paranormal,” said Kayla Yeckering, a freshman at Western Kentucky University interested in nursing and psychology. “I have had many experiences, and I’m always looking for answers.” Her search for answers is shared by fellow investigator and fiance Joey McGee, the group’s equipment specialist...

Just to help things along, PIRK brings back-up equipment such as voice recorders, cameras, electro-magnetic field detectors, ambient thermometers and infrared lights. “It’s just common equipment you can get at Walmart,” McGee said.

(Unfortunately, the group embraces the phony-baloney internet hoax meme of Orbs.)

What is Coal?

The fossil fuel known as coal is the largest source of energy for the generation of electricity worldwide. And, as it just so happens, Kentucky's chock-full of the stuff. It's sprinkled throughout the state but is especially pocketed in two major deposit areas that take up half of Kentucky.

But what is coal?

According to Wikipedia, "Coal begins as layers of plant matter accumulated at the bottom of a body of water. For the process to continue the plant matter must be protected from biodegradation and oxidization, usually by mud or acidic water. The wide shallow seas of the Carboniferous period provided such conditions."


Everything we do today, around the world, depends on the continued mining of this dessicated metamorphosized prehistoric plant material from the days of the proto-dinosaurs.

But coal is essentially carbon, which is in itself the basic building block of all life on Earth. Although it's theoretically possible that there could be other forms of life out there in the Universe, such as silicon-based life, it's purely within the realm of speculation. For our purposes here on Earth, everything is based on carbon.

In very ancient times, mankind's world was revolutionized by the simple discovery that carbon could give us Carbon Black, a material derived by charring organic materials such as wood or bone, for the purposes of ink for writing and pigment for art. From this man progressed from the spoken word to the written word, and language and communication took a quantum leap into becoming something tangible, something you could save and have and hold and touch. Veritably, "the word made flesh".

Those who find significance in the number 666 as being representational of evil and Satanic forces might then find it troubling to know that the atom of elemental carbon is comprised of 6 electrons, 6 protons, and 6 neutrons. As they say, the Devil is in the details.


And since the number 666 is supposed to be connected to a future "Mark of the Beast" that is placed on every person's body, it's also interesting to note that most black tattoo inks use carbon black ("the word made flesh" again). Could the Mark of the Beast be, literally, a tattoo that inserts carbon into your skin cells?

(Short answer: yep. Take a look at U.S. Patent 5,878,155, issued to Houston inventor Thomas W. Heeter, described as a "Method for verifying human identity during electronic sale transactions" — by tattooing a bar code on an individual.)

And what does this Satanic interpretation of coal mean when symbolically applied to the notion of Santa Claus who, like Krampus before him, places coal in the stockings of "bad" children?

Meanwhile, some researchers in China have discovered that coal specifically from the Permian-Triassic mass extinction is especially toxic and harmful to humans today. As the American Chemical Society press release puts it: "The volcanic eruptions thought responsible for Earth’s largest mass extinction which killed more than 70 percent of plants and animals 250 million years ago is still taking lives today." Interestingly, part of what is making the extinction-coal-dust so harmful is the high level of silicon.

Coal dust, being essenially carbon, is forever lodged in not just the lungs but many other internal organs of many Kentuckians. It also has a tendency to remain trapped in the skin and other tissues. Just as I wonder about the ubiquitous corn molecules that are permeating all human tissues, I also wonder about the long-term consequences for us as a species having greater and greater amount of coal being permanent parts of our own personal ecosystems. It isn't just for coal miners anymore.

The Algonquins tell us that all substances and all things have a separate spirit, an entity that represents that thing and pervades it, called a Manitou. If so, the Manitou of carbon, the Manitou of coal, and even the Manitous of the prehistoric plants who once were these atoms are inside us, touching us, within us all even as we speak.

And what is their intent for us?


If there is an answer that we have chance of gleaning, it probably lies deep underground, in the coal's natural habitat, where dust-drenched Kentuckians endure the sulphurous reek of the hellish subterranean mines.

Derek Smith and Bermuda Triangle Curse?

And hey, speaking of the so-called Bermuda Triangle of the Ohio (which we were yesterday) were you aware that University of Louisville basketball star Derek Smith was in the Bermuda Triangle shortly before his unexpected death in 1996?

Smith was aboard a luxury cruise liner called the Dreamward (since renamed the Norwegian Dream) on a trip to Bermuda - which in itself comprises one of the points of the triangle - and he began feeling anxious and ill on the journey. He wore a scopolamine patch behind each ear to help ward off seasickness and nausea. It was on the return trip that he abruptly died without warning.

According to the New York Daily News:

The night of Aug. 9, during a cocktail party aboard the Dreamward, Smith was his normal self. Smiling. Laughing. Animated in conversation as he autographed basketballs for about 100 vacationers. As always, he was eager to join his wife, Monica, their 9-year-old daughter, Sydney, and 5-year-old son, Nolan. At 8:30 Monica Smith left the observatory lounge with her children and went downstairs to take their seats for the farewell dinner.

Five minutes later, Smith was seated upstairs in the lounge, chatting with several people. Suddenly, his eyes narrowed, opened and then closed. His head moved back. "C'mon Derek, quit messin' around," someone said. Smith's body slumped to the right. Another passenger ran over, found a very faint pulse and started administering CPR. Ship medical personnel rushed in and spent the better part of a half hour trying to resuscitate him.

"That's it", said one of the medics. It was 9:10. "There's nothing more we can do."

Despite their efforts to jump-start Smith's heart, it never produced more than five beats in succession.

Interestingly, another death cited as a possible Bermuda Triangle case is that of a man named Derrick Smith, who vanished off the coast of Savannah in 2001.

Bermuda Triangle of the Ohio River?

Currently part of the Wikipedia article for Maysville, Kentucky:

The story of Maysville's Bermuda Triangle began around 1992 when a barge sank near the Kentucky shoreline in West Maysville Kentucky. A subsequent salvage operation in 1994 tried to raise the sunken barge with two Navy minesweepers. The minesweepers were the next victim as they became stuck in the mud. A towboat trying to free the minesweepers also fell victim when damage to its engines rendered it crippled. Next came a salvage barge named The Hercules. The Maysville Bermuda Triangle made short work of it as well. While hoisting the original barge, the crane aboard The Hercules broke as the barge reached the surface, and down it sank again. Then The Hercules itself sank, coming to rest on top of the barge it was supposed to save. Eventually the minesweepers and the towboat sank as well. The entire salvage operation nick-named John Beatty's Navy, after its owner, fell victim to what an Army Corps of Engineers spokesperson would later call, "The Bermuda Triangle of the Ohio River".

Like much of Wikipedia, the section of text is unsourced. In fact, it may not remain on the article long since it's already been tagged as needing a citation and it's part of a trivia section that will likely get deleted. (Also in that same trivia section: "Seen from above at night, the streetlights of the downtown area form the outline of the Liberty Bell, crack included". Hmmmm. Now that I gotta see.)

I'm still researching this "Maysville Bermuda Triangle" matter, but nothing surprises me about the Ohio River. Time and time again, it's proven to be a very strange and, I daresay, cursed place.

Ghosts, Spirits and Angels

It's been out for a few months now, but I've just become aware of a book called Ghosts, Spirits and Angels: True Tales from Kentucky & Beyond, that looks to be a real pip. I learned about it from a post made on the Phantoms and Monsters blog.

Author Thomas L. Freese (any relation to Claude H. Freese, I wonder?) is an author and storyteller whose work includes over 130 articles for magazines and newspapers such as Lexington's Chevy Chaser. His other books include Shaker Ghost Stories from Pleasant Hill, KY, Fog Swirler and 11 Other Ghost Stories, and Strange and Wonderful Things.

I know I've met Mr. Freese but I can't remember where. Some of my synapses suggest it was at the St. James Art Fair but other voices in my noggin say it may have been at a Farmer's Market in Shelbyville. My fractal memory's too fractal to pull it up right now, but I do recall he was a really sincere and nice guy.

Here's the Barnes & Noble synopsis about his new book:

Ghosts, Spirits and Angels, presenting compelling true tales and eye-witness accounts from over 75 individuals with stories set in Kentucky, plus a dozen other states and two countries! This unique panorama of paranormal and spiritual incidences is laid out by ordinary folks who happen to live in haunted houses, come up to the edge of spiritual realities and are blest to encounter angels.

Ghosts, Spirits and Angels makes a dramatic statement in spreading the net wider than just ghostly tales to bring in true accounts of the simply amazing. Lives are forever changed by these encounters in such stories as a dead friend saving a would-be author from throwing away her first book manuscript, a Kentucky girl who grows up with a witch who married into their family, angel wings that caught a skier who fell off a cliff, and the arrival of a cash-filled envelope addressed by someone's deceased mother postmarked after her death. There are also tales of shadow people from very haunted Waverly Hills TB Sanatorium, an account of Tennessee's Bell Witch, a humorous tale of a family's ghost cat, and the touching story of an angelic emergency responder, to name a few.

Scaring Away Breast Cancer

From WCPO-TV:

FORT WRIGHT, Ky. – Ghost enthusiasts, investigators, speakers and vendors will roll out their very best in paranormal investigations at Shimmer’s Ballroom & Tavern for a pink-ribbon cause.

On Sunday, Jan. 17, from 12:30-6:30 p.m. you can engage in ghost-hunting talk and paranormal investigations, all the while raising money for breast cancer research at Shimmer’s in Fort Wright, Ky. You could even win the chance to hunt with one of the best.

If you come out to help Tri-State Paranormal of Northern Kentucky (TSP) "Scare Away Breast Cancer" you may just win the opportunity to go on a ghost hunt with SyFy’s own Shannon Sylvia from "Ghost Hunters International"...

And not only is this all about ghosts and scaring away cancer, but all proceeds will go to benefit the research of metaplastic breast cancer and TSP’s own team member, recently diagnosed Marybeth Stagman.

Tickets are $15 at the door and vendors interested in renting a booth at the benefit can do so for $25. Donations are also welcome at the door or prior to the event.

For more information or to make a donation call Chris Maggard at (859) 620-3062 or e-mail him at chris@tspnorthernkentucky.com.

The Cumberland Gap Tunnel

The uber-spooky Cumberland Gap Tunnel takes U.S. Route 25E underground, going beneath hills in the Cumberland Gap National Historical Park. The east portal of the tunnel is in Tennessee and the west portal is in Kentucky, making it one of only two American highway mountain tunnels that cross state lines. (The other is the East River Mountain Tunnel between Virginia and West Virginia.)

There's a lame and pointless Blair Witch-wannabe homemade hoax on YouTube that was supposedly "found in the woods" in this area. A comment someone left on the page is far more interesting than the video itself:

"It does not surprise me,if there are apparitions/ghosts,or residual paranormal activity in and around Cumberland Gap.
A lot of history and death,especially from the Am.Civil War,and car wrecks on Cumberland mountain.

Also my grandmother who would be 102, if living told me of a young blonde heaired blue eyed young man 18 yrs.old was killed on the old highway and rolled in a wool blanket and left there. Reminents of the old highway from the 1920's & 30's is still present on the mountain"

Voting Rights for the Dead

I've always felt that the biggest problem with modern society is that it doesn't take into account its own big picture. To the average American - who knows more about football stats than his own country's history - Millard Fillmore, Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt might as well all be the same person or from the same time period. And the Bill of Rights means about as much to them as any other oblique and opaque document they had to study in school but never really understood, like the Magna Carta, the Emancipation Proclamation, or the Smoot-Hawley Act.

Despite the efforts of the ACLU and other organizations to try to hold the original spirit and structure of the U.S. Constitution in place, each generation of Americans is more ignorant than the last when it comes to basic civics. If only there were a way to keep the beliefs of the Founding Fathers alive in the brave new world of today.

A modest proposal:

Let's give voting rights to the dead.

And we can retroactively give a vote to the Founding Fathers, whose votes should count the largest, since they started this whole thing of ours, thus cancelling out the votes of the lowest common denominators who walk our streets today. (But of course, that doesn't include you, dear reader!)

Much of the atrocities we've seen in our lifetimes would never have been condoned by previous generations. Let's record how they felt and let their voices continue to carry weight today. Of course, there's the inverse problem that most of these older voices of cantakerous dead guys lack a certain progressiveness, and that many of them would not vote for things we take for granted today, like equal rights. This is, of course, why we need to give the biggest votes to the Founding Fathers and those who shared their ideals.

But on many pressing issues of the day, bringing in the dead-folks vote would help bring cohesion and fairness and save us all from an almost certain technocratic hell. Wouldn't you like to be able to vote now on certain things that may take place in the future, like "If, someday, it's proposed that we all have microchips in our asses that monitor our every move, do you support this?" and we can all vote "uh, no, thanks anyway, do not want."

What's more, we may not have to rely on the historical record of any given dead person's stated opinions to determine how they would have voted on modern issues. There's also the option of contacting them via channellers, spiritualists, Ouija boards, divination, what have you, and asking their ghosts directly what they think about, say, Obama's health care plan.

I submit to you an article found in the March 14, 1873 edition of the New York Times, in which an unattributed writer waggishly notes:

If ghosts continue to multiply with their present rapidity, there will have to be an addition made to the recent volume of census statistics. At the present rate, our ghostly population will soon far outnumber the Indians or the Chinamen, and we may expect to see a movement in favor of giving the rights of citizenship to resident ghosts, either by virtue of the phraseology of the fourteenth amendment, or on the pretext that they are included among the "other persons" mentioned in the original Constitution. A census that omits so important a part of our population is certainly incomplete...

The author goes on to illustrate two recent examples of ghostly incidents that had come to his attention; one was a pie-eating ghost in Ulster, and the other was in located in Kentucky. The author is somewhat geographically confused - there's no such thing as Lebanon County - but let's not let that spoil the anecdote:


(I especially liked the part about a flask of bourbon and a deck of cards being among the "articles necessary to the comfort of a Kentucky Gentleman", which called to mind my own words about how a good Transylvania Gentleman needs lots of pockets to hold all his swag.)

Of course, we could take the whole retroactive-rights idea even further and give a posthumous vote to each of the dead men and women who populated this hemisphere before the United States. That might be the fairest thing to do, even though it would almost certainly mean that most of us would find ourselves "voted off the island", so to speak.

Let's initiate a grass-roots campaign right now to stop disenfranchising our noble deceased ancestors, and to bring them in on the issues that face us young corporeal whippersnappers. To the polls, you spirits, spooks, and spectres!

The Tan Man of Pike County

William Lynwood Montell, in his Haunted houses and family ghosts of Kentucky, tells of a strange "Tan Man" haunting in Harmons Branch, KY.

Montell interviewed two different women reporting firsthand sightings of the "Tan Man". One of them, just 13 at the time, was riding a trail bike in the middle of nowhere and suddenly saw him - an ordinary, nondescript-looking man dressed in khaki or tan shirt and pants. But as she got closer to him, he disappeared. This Tan Man, so the family believed, began following them, and anything weird that ever happened after that was seemingly ascribed to him.

I'm not a skeptic by any means, but I find it interesting that almost every form of paranormal phenomena has been attributed to the Tan Man: physical manifestations, disappearing, seeing mist, feeling cold spots, hearing a flute playing by itself, hearing a piano playing by itself, feeling air in a room get "heavier", hearing unexplained footsteps, doors opening and closing by themselves, smelling sweet rose-like scents, feeling caresses of invisible hands, seeing movements from the corner of one's eye, seeing a "smoke-like blob", a locked screen door becoming unlocked, a bed shaking violently, candles going out, mystery lights projected from nowhere against a wall spinning in a circle, television and stereo volumes going up and down by themselves, missing and reappearing keys, an accosted child, a terrified dog, and lightbulbs burning out inexplicably fast. There's even an anecdote about contacting the Tan Man with a Ouija Board, and getting a barrage of obscenities!

Every myth contains a kernel of truth at its center, though, and I'd be very interested in learning more about the actual eyewitness sightings of the man in tan, even if everything else said about him was lily-gilding.

The Hunt-Morgan House

Lexington's haunted Hunt Morgan House, a.k.a. "Hopemont", is at 201 N. Mill Street, the corner of N. Mill and W. Second.


It was built in 1814 by millionaire John Wesley Hunt,who died of Cholera in 1849 and left it to his daughter Henrietta and her husband Calvin. Their son John Hunt Morgan, went on to become a noted Brigadier General in the Civil War. He was killed in Greeneville, TN, shot in the back by Union soldiers.

John Hunt Morgan's nephew, geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan, was born here in 1866 and won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1933. (He is, incidentally, the only Kentuckian so far to have won the Nobel Prize.)




Supposedly, the house is haunted by John Wesley Hunt himself (who has been allegedly sighted walking the halls), and by Mammy Bouviette James, the nursemaid of John Hunt Morgan's children. There are various online reports of her apparition being seen on the third floor, where the nursery had been located.