Harry Dean Stanton

Get down on your knees, Planet Earth, and thank Kentucky once again for bringing you raw talent at its best. Harry Dean Stanton, one of Hollywood's greatest maverick actors, and known for being a character offstage as well as on, is a Kentuckian.

Harry was born in Irvine in 1926, and graduated from the University of Kentucky in Lexington before moving on to a theatre and film career in California. His long film oeuvre includes How the West Was Won (1962), Cool Hand Luke (1967), Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), The Godfather Part II (1974), Alien (1979), Escape from New York (1981), Repo Man, (1984), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), and Inland Empire (2006), among others. Youngsters today probably know him best as Roman Grant, the elder in the Mormon-themed HBO show Big Love.

While he's still kickin', I'd love to do some research about Harry's Lexington years, and find out what clubs, bars and taverns he frequented - it's entirely possible that he and the great writer/pool hustler/drinkin' man Walter Tevis' paths may have crossed, either knowingly or unknowingly. Tevis was born in 1928, and spent a lot of time in both Irvine and Lexington. Since Winchester and Richmond lie directly between Irvine and Lexington (on Route 89 and Highway 25, respectively) it's a certainty that these cities were part of Harry's teenage stomping grounds as well.

Raven Run

The Raven Run nature preserve is way off the beaten path, and not well known. For this reason, it's one of my favorite places to visit in Kentucky for a nature hike. It's over 10 miles of wooded hiking trails containing over 600 species of plants and 200 species of birds. Among the preserve's ultra-rare endangered species are Soft-hair Marbleseed (Onosmodium molle), Downy Arrowwood (Viburnum rafinesquianum), Hispid Falsemallow (Malvastrum hispidum) and Nodding Rattlesnake-root (Prenanthes crepidinea).

Since Raven Run is a serious nature sanctuary and not merely a park, you have to sign in at the front desk and strictly observe their rules, such as no bikes, no pets, no alcohol, no weapons, no fires, no camping, no picnicking, and for that matter, no touching anything if you can possibly help it.

Because of its remote location, the sanctuary is popular with local astronomers, and stargazing events are often held there with the Bluegrass Amateur Astronomy Club. I've heard claims that the land upon which Raven Run rests has had more than a few ghostly and paranormal happenings, but my attempts to pin anybody down on useful details has so far turned up zippo. Every Halloween, they host a "mysteries of the night" hayride, but I have yet to check that out.


To visit Raven Run, get on U.S. 25 between Richmond and Lexington, and turn at Jacks Creek Pike by Judy Ray's Food Mart. Follow it about 6 miles and watch for signs on your left.

Cassius Clay's Child Bride

If you're familiar with Stephen Sondheim's musical Sweeney Todd and the subsequent film adaptation, you may remember the character of Judge Turpin. Turpin is an educated and well-spoken man, but also cantakerous, hotheaded, and perverted. After kidnapping a child named Johanna that he obsesses over, he locks her in a room in his mansion to prevent her escape, and prepares to marry her against her will.

Sound familiar? No? Read on.

According to several sources, such as William Lynwood Montell's "Haunted Houses and Family Ghosts of Kentucky", Cassius M. Clay married a fifteen-year-old daughter of one his sharecroppers, and at the age of eighty-four, no less. Presumably the marriage was against her will, because like Johanna, she was locked in a room in Clay's Whitehall Mansion to prevent her escape! It's also been reported that she made a failed suicide attempt by leaping from the window of her room.


Montell also notes a 1980 occurrence with two witnesses:

Two park rangers were there in the house one night. They saw a light in the room where Clay had locked his young bride. Yet there were no light sockets in the room, no furniture, and it was closed away from the other rooms. The rangers drew their guns and searched the lighted room, but found nothing to explain the light. As a result, they resigned from their jobs.

Clay's obituary in the New York Times didn't shy away from the subject, devoting several long paragraphs to it, albeit couched in soft language like "the old warrior's eccentricities".

Ultimately, Clay divorced Dora, but soon began plotting to get her back. He never did.


Whitehall can be found just off U.S. 25 near the Boonesboro exit.

U.S. 25

Kentucky's own "Route 66" of paranormal weirdness is Highway 25, running straight down the center of the state. An inordinate amount of our pieces here take place very near U.S. 25, making it an ideal roadtripping destination for those of you visiting from elsewhere.

Highway 25 begins at the KY/OH border, and from there it winds its way south, spending the next couple hours running alongside I-75. In Corbin U.S 25 splits into two, one going East (25 East), one going South (though for some reason they call it 25 West). Both 25E and 25W have their points of interest, but it's 25E that has that good ol' U.S. 25 feeling all the way to the Tennessee border.

And if it's an East-West drive you had in mind, U.S. 25 delivers you directly to access points to the Blue Grass Parkway (which will get you to Hopkinsville and Mammoth Cave), the Bert T. Combs Mountain Parkway (which will get you to Red River Gorge), and the Daniel Boone Parkway (which will get you to the Hazard area).

Dixie Highway

The stretch of Highway 31W, or “Dixie Highway,” that takes one out of Jefferson County has long fascinated me. It may not exactly be a “road less traveled” - in fact, the traffic can often be quite annoying - but it’s a road that many seek to avoid. It should come as no surprise to the reader, then, that’s it’s a road I enjoy greatly, for the very same reasons that others shun it.

Dixie Highway, to many people’s sense of aesthetics and decorum, is ugly. Dirty. Tacky. Businesses abound that still have that beautiful classic 1940s-1960s architecture and signage, which I’ll take any day over the dreary modern homogenized look. One of my favorite places here is Pepper Tackle, a fishing supply store whose sign features a gargantuan fiberglass fish. City officials, who wouldn’t know cultural beauty if it bit the psoriasis off their elbows, have made attempts to have the sign removed over various contrived technicalities. So far the enemy’s efforts have been unsuccessful. The price of eternal awesomeness is eternal vigilance.

Then there’s the plethora of porno stores and adult theaters, which lend a pleasantly gaudy bright pink je ne sais quoi to the area, as do the charming characters seen furtively shuffling and stumbling in and out of them. It’s no Bourbon Street, but the scene nevertheless conjures up a powerful sense of noble lowlife resonance with the denizens of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s "Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny".

The porno houses seem to drastically proliferate the closer one gets to Fort Knox. A coincidence, no doubt.

And then there’s Rubbertown, where all sorts of pleasant substances are manufactured, and many more are sloughed off. You’ll know it when you come upon it - look for the giant belching smokestacks. You can’t miss it. You also might smell some funny smells while passing through this area, but don’t worry, they wouldn’t be allowed to send toxic chemicals into the air, right? Responsible and far-sighted men in local and federal government have entire careers devoted to keep that from happening, right?

There’s an environmental activist group in Jefferson County called REACT, which stands for Rubbertown Emergency Action, who describe themselves as a “campaign to stop toxic air pollution coming from ten chemical plants located in the Rubbertown area of Louisville,” and go on to say: “Air monitors located in neighborhoods surrounding the chemical plants revealed that residents have been breathing in at least 18 toxic chemicals at levels sometimes as high as 540 times the health threshold established by the EPA.” The 18 toxic chemicals detected by the air monitors, chemicals such as 1,3-butadiene and vinyl chloride, can cause cancer, cardiovascular disease and central nervous system damage. REACT is a campaign of Rubbertown residents who have finally said, “Enough! We're not taking it anymore”, and are taking action to end Rubbertown's 'killer air.'

The history of Dixie Highway is as convoluted as its terrain. As I understand it, in 1914 it was decided to create a series of highways and roads that were generally regarded to be one unified highway, even though this included side roads, connecting roads, and multiple branches. Today Dixie Highway’s meandering paths have been renamed piecemeal, dependent on location, and now make up portions of other highways, such as U.S. 25. Most Kentuckians no longer refer to these roads as “Dixie Highway,” but the stretch of Highway 31W that we are discussing here is still referred to by that name by its locals.

The Bull of Battlefield Farm

The Battlefield Farm was a historic civil war battleground. Since the 1940s, this bull sculpture has been there, mounted high on a pole with a "Polled Charolais" sign overlooking U.S. 25 between Richmond and Berea. It was locally famous during the 1960s and 1970s because it became a tradition for EKU college students to climb the pole and paint the white bull's scrotum pink. The farm would have it painted white again, and someone would paint the bull's privates again shortly thereafter. This good-natured war went on for years.

A few years back, unfortunately, the Battlefield Farm has become the Battlefield Golf Course and the bastards took the sign down. After some snooping, however, we discovered the bull is currently residing in the backyard of a house near the original farmhouse. last we checked, it was still there, and hopefully it will remain safely for future generations to look at and say "um, okay".

The bull is just a few miles up Highway 25 from The Bull of Berea's current location, incidentally.