Kentucky Book of the Dead

By Keven McQueen and Kyle McQueen

Discover the ghostly, and sometimes ghastly, characteristics of death in Kentucky.

Author Keven McQueen dissects some of Kentucky's more bizarre aspects of death, pulled directly from the history pages. Discover the reaper's creative side, meet the disgusting ghosts of Louisville and find out more than you wanted to know about old-fashioned embalming techniques. You will find it quite engrossing and just plain gross.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Jul 15, 2008
• ISBN: 9781614234388

Keven McQueen

Keven McQueen was born in Richmond, Kentucky, in 1967. He has degrees in English from Berea College and Eastern Kentucky University and is a senior lecturer in composition and world literature at EKU. He has written nineteen books on history, the supernatural, historical true crime, biography and many strange topics, covering nearly every region of the United States. In addition, he has made many appearances on radio, podcasts and television. Look him up on Facebook or at kevenmcqueenstories.com.

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A NOTE TO THE GENTLE AND PATIENT READER

There is neither rhyme nor reason to the organization of this book. It is not arranged chronologically and barely by topic. It is intended simply to be a mélange of bizarre incidents and entertaining, sometimes macabre factoids and incidents from Kentucky’s past, interspersed with droll commentary—sometimes half-believing and sometimes skeptical. The subjects broached include ghosts, strange deaths, old-time embalming procedures and the paranormal.

I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the stories in this book. Most came from long-lost accounts in newspapers from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. When uncovering an amazing story I had to speculate: was the account true as stated? Or did it result from poor reporting? Was it an outright hoax? Journalists at the time were notorious for reporting some wonder and then running no follow-up stories, resulting in frustration and bleeding ulcers for modern researchers who want more details. Additionally, newspapermen saw nothing wrong with concocting soberly written hoaxes to entertain their readers. I tried to verify each story through the magic of backbreaking research, but all too often it proved impossible due to the inadequate preservation of small-town Kentucky newspapers. On rare occasions when I found conflicting accounts or proof of a hoax, I made sure to mention so.

In other words, feel free to believe as much of the following as you like; if you pick up any nuggets of legitimate history, it will be by accident and not by design.

THEY WERE MY OWN RIGHT HAND

Rob Aken of the University of Kentucky Library, Berea College Archives and Special Collections, Geneta Chumley, Drema Colangelo, Rose Coleman, Jackie Couture, Paula Cunningham, Sarah Davenport, Eastern Kentucky University Archives and Special Collections, Eastern Kentucky University Departments of English and Theatre, Eastern Kentucky University Interlibrary Loan Department, Lee Feathers, Dr. Jim Gifford, Tammy Horn, Mr. and Mrs. Jones, Rene McGuire, Kyle and Bonnie McQueen, the Darrell McQueen family, Charles and Lashé Mullins, Pat New, Colleen O’Connor Olson, Deonna Pinson, Joy Sawyers, Gaile Sheppard, Michelle Steele, Kathy Switzer, Mia Temple, University of Kentucky Interlibrary Loan Department, the staff at White Hall State Historic Site, John Wilkinson and the staff at The History Press and Shannon Wilson. And of course, the Man Upstairs, as He is colloquially known.

Musical inspirations include Ben Eshbach, Kiara Geller, Joe King and Colonel J.D. Wilkes.

This book was edited by Lee Feathers.

Check out KevenMcQueen.com! Friend me on Facebook!

THE GHOSTS OF WHITE HALL

Cassius Marcellus Clay (1810–1903) may be one of the most underrated characters in Kentucky’s, if not the nation’s, history. Despite being the son of Madison County’s Green Clay, one of the largest slaveholders in the state, Cassius was one of the most vocal emancipationists in the South. He was handsome, willful, tall, powerfully built and usually armed. The last two traits served him in good stead, as he was involved in innumerable fistfights and duels in his lifetime.

A brief listing of his more famous fights may provide an insight into Clay’s times. In May 1841, he fought an inconclusive duel with his political enemy, Robert Wickliffe Jr.; unsatisfied, Wickliffe hired a professional thug named Sam Brown to kill Clay. On August 1, 1843, Brown attended a political rally at Russell Cave, Fayette County, with the intention of picking a fight with Clay and shooting him during the trouble that would follow. Brown’s plan worked well except for a few minor details. The bullet he fired ricocheted harmlessly off a scabbard Clay kept concealed in his waistcoat. The scabbard happened to contain Clay’s favorite weapon—a bowie knife—and within moments, Sam Brown parted company with his ear, nose and eye. To save Brown’s life, if not his dignity, his friends rushed the stage and tossed him over a fence and into a spring. Brown survived, even if his looks did not.

A couple of years later, a mob broke into the Lexington office where Clay published his antislavery newspaper, the True American, and made off with his printing press. It is worth noting that they waited until Clay was bedfast with typhoid fever before attempting such a move. Clay’s most serious fight came on June 15, 1849, when he insisted on making an antislavery speech at a proslavery rally at Foxtown, Madison County. A riot ensued, during which an enemy stabbed Clay in the side with his own knife. When he regained control of the weapon, Clay sank it into the abdomen of another attacker, Squire Turner. Turner died thirty-two hours later and Clay required several months to recover.

In addition to these adventures, Clay was also an early co-founder of the Republican Party. His campaigning on behalf of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 resulted in the president naming Clay the minister plenipotentiary to Russia, where he served from 1861 to 1869. He got along well with Czar Alexander II and was instrumental in preventing Russia from siding with the Confederacy during the Civil War. Clay always maintained that he, not Secretary of State William Seward, should have been given credit for persuading the czar to sell Alaska to the United States.

Something now must be said of Clay’s remarkable house in Madison County, located eleven miles north of Richmond. The original house was built in 1798 by Clay’s father, who called it Clermont. While Cassius was in Russia, his wife, Mary Jane Warfield Clay, supervised an architectural expansion of the house. As a result, Clermont went from two stories to three and from eight rooms to forty-four, including the walk-in closets. It was one of the first houses in America to feature central heating and indoor plumbing, which consisted of a flushing commode, a sink and a bathtub—each in its own separate, adjoining room. At some indeterminate point, the house became known as White Hall rather than Clermont.

When Clay returned home from Russia in 1870, he found that his marital relations were irreparably strained—the fact that he adopted a Russian boy of uncertain parentage undoubtedly had something to do with it—and his wife left the palatial house in 1871. She moved to Lexington, never to return on a permanent basis. The couple officially divorced in 1878.

Clay also found that after his pet cause, the ending of slavery, had been accomplished, he was a persona non grata in politics. For the rest of his life, he made sporadic attempts to reenter the political arena, never with his previous success. He grew old and eccentric in his enormous, empty house with little company other than his servants, some of whom were afraid of him. He whiled away some time writing his memoirs, which were published in 1886.

The eighty-four-year-old Clay made national headlines in November 1894 when he married a fifteen-year-old tenant farmer’s sister named Dora Richardson. A group of men, convinced the girl was being held against her will, came to rescue her. They slunk away after Clay threatened to fire a cannon full of shrapnel at them. (He did not actually do so, local legend to the contrary.) But whatever happiness Clay attained with his child bride, as the press called her, was fleeting. They divorced in September 1898, but remained cordial.

Clay’s remaining years were marked by loneliness and increasing senile dementia. Legend maintains that he recaptured something of his former glory when he killed two burglars in self-defense and chased away a third, circa December 1899, at the age of eighty-nine. By July 1903, he was on his deathbed in his house’s library. The bedridden old gladiator impressed onlookers one day by grabbing a rifle and blowing to atoms an annoying housefly that had lit on the ceiling. Poetically, he died during a violent thunderstorm on the night of July 22.

After Clay’s death, his already-decrepit house was leased by his descendants to several generations of tenant farming families. By 1965, White Hall was abandoned and had become prey for vandals. In 1968, two of Clay’s great-grandchildren—Warfield Bennett Jr. and Esther Bennett—gave the mansion to the Commonwealth of Kentucky. A thorough restoration project ensued, spearheaded largely by Beula Nunn, wife of Governor Louie B. Nunn. The house was opened to the public in 1971 and has since received many original pieces of Clay family furniture for display.

White Hall is the delight of history buffs and lovers of antiques, but there is a third reason the place is popular with tourists: it has had the reputation for years of being one of the most haunted houses in Kentucky. Many tour guides, employees and visitors claim to have witnessed things of a paranormal nature. In my book, Cassius M. Clay, Freedom’s Champion, I recounted several ghost stories about White Hall. Here I will summarize some of those stories, as well as include events that have occurred in the house since the publication of the book in 2001.

Strange lights have long been a notable sight at White Hall. A woman whose tenant farming father had been born in the house in 1911 told me that when he was growing up on the grounds, residents saw a mysterious light bobbing around on the vast yard at night as though someone were carrying a lantern. Reports of eerie doings at White Hall date to the late 1960s, when the state was restoring the house. Guards reported seeing candlelight moving from window to window in the second-floor master bedroom. (Since then, others, including a park manager and two rangers, have seen lights moving around in the windows of this room and the adjoining tower room; the cousin of the present curator saw the silhouette of a human looking out one of the master-bedroom windows as he was plowing a field next to the house. He reported seeing a light come on behind the figure and assumed it was a light with an automatic timer. But there were no automatic timers in the mansion and nobody inside, as it was past closing time.) Probably the most frequently told tale from what we might call the restoration era involves a watchman who happened to be a descendant of Cassius Clay’s son Brutus. One memorable night, he turned out the lights in the house, locked up and headed for his car, only to look over his shoulder and see a lamp still on in Brutus’s bedroom. The guard entered the building and took the long, lonely walk to the third floor in order to turn the lamp out again. After doing so, he again locked up and left the building, but when he was about to leave the grounds he noticed that the light was on again. Depending on which account is accurate, either he stomped into the house for the third time and