Good Monday morning,

This time last year, virtual learning was underway, the Frazier was operating an NTI site to assist local students, and we were all putting our heads together to determine how to best engage learners in a world that had been turned upside-down.

Right before lockdowns had us scrambling for new ways to work with students, we’d been discussing the possibility of a Fall Fun field trip (yes, we think ahead in the Education world!). It was a fun coincidence that many of the canonical works of early American literature happen to be Halloween classics — “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” for example, and the entire catalog of Edgar Allan Poe. And if there’s anything we know as Frazier educators, it’s Poe. With a burst of inspiration that flew into our heads like a raven flying into a lonely study on a cold, spooky night, Poe 2.0 was born. We got out our webcams and created a virtual tour of Frazier artifacts that tied Poe’s works together. The next thing we knew, thousands of students in areas we had hoped to reach for a long time from Eastern to Western Kentucky were visiting the Frazier from their homes and classrooms.

This year, we have over 3,000 students participating in the new and improved Poe 2.0 virtual experience, which is free to Title I schools. It’s not too late to receive access to this field trip — teachers can sign up here and enjoy it through December 1 of this year.

This year, we are also thrilled that we can host kids of all ages and their families in the building. On Saturday, we’ll be hosting our first Spooky Saturday, which is free with admission to the Frazier Museum. We’ll have tours of our most haunting objects, some of them connected to Poe, spooky story times (one on the thrills-and-chills side, and one on the festive and fun side!), teaching artist Brian West reading “The Raven,” and crafts in the galleries. We’ll even have a magic show at 1 p.m. featuring local magicians! Activities are ongoing from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

You can sample the virtual experience yourself today, as we present a clip from the Poe 2.0 field trip on the multi-layered history of the Uranium Glass we have on display in the Beecher Terrace artifact case in our West of Ninth: Race, Reckoning, and Reconciliation exhibit. We’ll also be offering spooky tours at the museum at 3 p.m. every day we are open, now through Halloween!

This Week in the Museum

Live Reading of “The Raven” and Spooky Saturday

*A Beautiful Mind* by Thao Tran, student, duPont Manual High School, 2018. Artwork displayed as part of the Poe student art exhibit in the fall of 2018. Credit: Thao Tran.

For years, patrons at the Frazier were entertained by An Evening With Poe, a full theatrical production that ran every fall from 2010 until 2019. And, although the works adapted by the Frazier’s talented teaching artists might have changed from year to year, one work remained as a mainstay for each season: the poem “The Raven.”

Scene from an Evening With Poe performance, 2017

Written by the famous American gothic horror writer Edgar Allan Poe, “The Raven” explores themes of spiritual longing and lost love, with a raven as the equivocal character. The now-iconic poem has kept readers and consumers of popular entertainment enthralled since it was first penned more than 150 years ago. It has served as the basis for naming the professional football team of Poe’s hometown, Baltimore. It recently inspired the student body of Atherton High School to adopt Ravens as the school’s new mascot. Poe’s work even convinced a young Sylvester Stallone there was a future to be had in writing.

Although An Evening with Poe is sadly nevermore, our education and guest engagement departments — after scouring the Plutonian shore anew — have created a fresh, novel approach to an old favorite. First, the museum has created a virtual program for school groups, the aforementioned Poe 2.0, which includes our staff highlighting stories about some of the artifacts in our exhibits and galleries with connections to Edgar Allan Poe, as well as a virtual performance of “The Raven” I will perform.

Next, Frazier staff are providing Spooky Tours of the museum to guests on a daily basis. These tours include both objects with relations to Poe — like mystery novelist Sue Grafton’s Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America — and artifacts that are just plain spooky, such as the Victorian wreath made of human hair!

Lastly, the museum will cap off the season with our Spooky Saturday event: On Saturday, October 30, the museum will offer a range of activities that will entertain and edify guests of all ages. Among them are a spooky scavenger hunt, story time with “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” a creepy artifacts tour, and a live performance of “The Raven.”

For more info about Spooky Saturday, visit our website.

Brian West
Teaching Artist

Curator’s Corner: Five Spooky Stories at the Paranormal Museum in Somerset

A two-headed duckling specimen on display at the International Paranormal Museum and Research Center in Somerset, Kentucky, October 19, 2021

In the spirit of spooky season, I and several members of the Collections and Exhibitions team (plus one from Education) took a field trip to the International Paranormal Museum and Research Center, located in Somerset, Kentucky. We spoke with a volunteer, toured the museum, and got a little research done for future updates of Cool Kentucky along the way.

Big Foot looks on as Collections Manager Tish Boyer views his footprints, October 19, 2021

Though small, the museum has a ton of spooky stories and curious artifacts on display. We saw everything from a two-headed duckling to plaster casts of Big Foot footprints. Some personal favorites include a haunted mannequin and dolls, a cursed bottle of Bourbon, a Flatwoods Monster lantern, and a life-size representation of a Hopkinsville Goblin.

We were all super impressed with the content and professionalism of the museum and definitely learned a lot about all things supernatural. What was especially exciting to me was learning spooky stories from all over Kentucky. Here are my top five favorite:

A life-size illustration of a Hopkinsville Goblin, October 19, 2021

1. Hopkinsville Goblins. On August 21, 1955, twelve to fifteen short, dark figures appeared at the Sutton family farmhouse in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. The figures were described as silvery in color and around three feet tall, with upright pointed ears, thin limbs, long arms, and claw-like hands or talons. Those present shot at the creatures and were able to escape to the police station to report the incident. When police arrived at the farmhouse, nothing was found but the evidence of the gunshots. Ufologists regard it as one of the most significant and well-documented cases in the history of UFO incidents.

2. Penny Royal Plateau. The Penny Royal Plateau is a geological and geographical region of Kentucky that is characterized by sinkholes and caves. Pulaski County is part of this region, which contains the “Kentucky Anomaly,” the largest spike of the Earth’s geomagnetic field in North America. In the Penny Royal region, there have been reports of several strange sightings, including UFOs, dogmen, lake monsters, and meat raining from the sky (Transylvania University still has a sample of the meat!). For more info about the strange happenings of the Penny Royal Plateau, check out the podcast Penny Royal.

3. Ghost of Mark Thatcher. Mark Thatcher died on January 23, 1898 at the age of ten. In a building right next to where the Paranormal Museum now stands, Mark and some friends were playing with a bow and arrow when he was shot. Tragically, Mark died, even though a hospital was located right across the street. Mark is now one of the best-known spirits in Somerset, haunting the Carnegie building as well as the library where a portrait of him is on display.

4. Goatman of Pope Lick. Also known as the Pope Lick Monster, the Goatman of Pope Lick is a part-man, part-goat, part-sheep creature that lives beneath the railroad trestle bridge over Pope Lick Creek in the Fisherville neighborhood of Louisville. According to legend, the Goatman lures its victims onto the bridge to meet an untimely end: The victims either get hit by a train or, out of fear, jump off the bridge to escape the Goatman. Today, the bridge is protected from those who seek the Goatman by an eight-foot-tall fence, as trains still cross the bridge several times daily.

5. The Kentucky UFO Abduction. On January 6, 1976, at around 11:15 pm, Louise Smith, Mona Stafford, and Elaine Thomas were driving south on US Route 27 in Stanford, Kentucky when they saw a strange red object in the sky. Suddenly, the car began accelerating on its own, then a blue light came into the car. Their next memory was of riding down the highway again like normal. When they returned home, they realized that an hour and twenty-five minutes of time was unaccounted for and they had strange burns on their skin. Under hypnosis, the women were able to recount what had occurred during their alien abduction, including intense physical examination.

This article was supposed to be accompanied by a video recorded in a room of haunted objects at the International Paranormal Museum. Frazier Museum manager of youth and family programs Heather Gotlib recorded a fifteen-minute interview with Hannah, who was volunteering at the museum that day. When we began editing the video, we came across strange audio issues, including a buzzing noise and faint voices unable to be heard until they were separated from the rest of the audio. We had more strange issues when attempting to upload the video to YouTube: The video would only play about thirty times faster than normal, something that has never happened to us before. My hunch is that the spirits present weren’t very happy about being captured on camera.

So I guess you will just have to go visit the museum to see them for yourself… if you dare!

Object in Focus: Still of Bela Lugosi and Helen Chandler in the 1931 Film Dracula

Still of actors Bela Lugosi and Helen Chandler from *Dracula*, 1930. Part of the Frazier History Museum Collection.

In February 1931, Dracula — the English-language film adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 Gothic horror novel of the same name — premiered at movie theaters throughout the United States. Filmed in the fall of 1930 and directed by Tod Browning, a Louisville native, the film stars Hungarian-American actor Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula, Edward Van Sloan as Professor Van Helsing, and Helen Chandler as Mina Seward. Dracula — or rather, Lugosi’s performance in it — is widely regarded as having defined for the American audience what a vampire looks, sounds, and acts like.

Publicity still of, from left, Bela Lugosi, Helen Chandler, and Tod Browning on the set of *Dracula*, 1930. Credit: Universal Studios.

Dracula arrived at a unique moment in U.S. history: the era known as “pre-Code.” It slightly post-dates the introduction of sound in films — making it one of the first “talkie” horror films — but it pre-dates the Hays Code. Widely enforced beginning in 1934, the Production Code, also known as the Hays Code — named for Motion Picture Association of American head Will H. Hays — regulated content the Production Code Administration deemed “immoral,” such as sexual innuendo, profanity, and intense violence.

Consequently, when Dracula was reissued in 1936, roughly ten minutes of the eighty-minute film had been cut: certain scenes featuring extended “death groans” of characters dying and a “curtain call” epilogue. In the epilogue, which was cut because it was thought to promote belief in the supernatural, Professor Van Helsing appears on screen to deliver a message:

“Just a moment, ladies and gentlemen! A word before you go. We hope the memories of Dracula and Renfield won’t give you bad dreams, so just a word of reassurance. When you get home tonight, and the lights have been turned out, and you are afraid to look behind the curtains — and you dread to see a face appear at the window — why, just pull yourself together and remember that after all, there are such things as vampires!”

On display in the “Famous Kentucky” section of our Cool Kentucky exhibition, as part of a selection of posters and miscellanea representing horror films, is a still photograph from Dracula. Pictured is Count Dracula (Lugosi) holding Mina Seward (Helen Chandler), one of the victims on whose blood he feasts.

History All Around Us

Haunted Tales and Chocolate Chip Cookies at the Seelbach Hotel

Photograph of the Seelbach Hotel taken from the northeast corner of Fourth and Walnut Streets, 1910. Credit: Detroit Publishing Co.

It’s Halloween — the season of candy corn, costumes, caramel apples, and, of course, Casper, the friendly ghost! Louisville has its fair share of ghostly activity, and one of the most iconic haunted spots in Louisville is the Seelbach Hotel. The hotel was the creation of two brothers from Bavaria, Otto and Louis Seelbach, who designed and built a lavish Beaux Arts Baroque hotel that opened in 1905 at the corner of Fourth and Walnut Streets (now Muhammad Ali). The Seelbach was the hotel of choice for many well-known individuals, including the infamous gangster Al Capone and writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was inspired to incorporate references to the hotel in The Great Gatsby.

There have been numerous sightings of apparitions at the hotel, but the most famous is known as the Lady in Blue. This ghostly figure that walks the halls is supposedly Patricia Wilson, a young woman who was staying on the eighth floor of the hotel on July 14, 1936. Patricia, who had long dark hair and was wearing a long blue dress, planned to meet her estranged husband at The Stables Bar in the hotel for the purpose of trying to reconcile. When her former husband did not arrive, she learned he had perished in a car crash on his way to meet her. She became distraught and was later found dead at the bottom of the service elevator shaft in the hotel.

Excerpt of an article about Wilson’s death published on page 3 of the July 16, 1936 issue of the *Courier-Journal*. Credit: *Courier Journal*.

The Seelbach’s historian, Larry Johnson, has worked at the hotel since 1982. He has written a book, The Seelbach: A Centennial Salute to Louisville’s Grand Hotel, that is filled with facts and stories about both the hotel and the ghosts that are said to walk its halls. According to Mr. Johnson, Mrs. Wilson’s body was discovered by James Embry, an employee of the hotel, on the morning of July 15. He told a coroner’s jury he noticed a glove sticking out of the top of the dummy elevator that was used for carrying linens. The coroner’s jury found that Wilson came by her death due to her own carelessness. In 1992, a new doorman at the hotel, Alec Hunt — having heard stories of sightings of the Lady in Blue — did some research on the story. He located a newspaper article confirming the story that a young girl named Patricia Wilson fell down an elevator shaft to her death at the Seelbach Hotel in 1936.

Through the years, there have been several sightings of the Lady in Blue, particularly on the eighth floor of the hotel. As recently as 1987, a hotel employee, James Scott, saw the Lady in Blue. While preparing waffles and omelets during one of the Seelbach’s famous brunches outside the Oak Room Restaurant on the mezzanine level, Mr. Scott saw the Lady in Blue walk into the elevators on the north side of the hotel — while the doors were closed. Security was immediately notified. The elevator was checked only to find it was not working. Engineering was notified and they pried the doors open and recalled the elevator to the first floor. The problem appeared to be resolved.

A short time later, one of the housekeepers at the hotel, Sharon White, also saw a person on the eighth floor of the hotel walking off the elevator — a person who met the description of the Lady in Blue.

No one knows if the Lady in Blue simply fell, was pushed, or jumped to her death. However, she was clearly heartbroken by the loss of her estranged husband, and her restless spirit seems to still walk the halls of the hotel.

Stories like these, haunted tales steeped in history, fit the season. But it’s also the season for treats, and the Seelbach is known for the chocolate chip cookies that are left on the hotel guests’ pillows during the turn down service.

Vintage photograph of Seelbach Cookies published alongside a recipe

Those famous cookies are still around at the Seelbach, served at brunches and special occasions at the hotel. I located the recipe while researching this article, and the Seelbach kindly confirmed it. Here’s the batch I whipped up, followed by the recipe, if you want to give it a try. They are a treat!

Cookies made using the Seelbach Hotel recipe

Seelbach Hotel’s Famous Chocolate Chip Cookies

9 ½ oz. unsalted butter
7 oz. granulated sugar
5 oz. light brown sugar
3 eggs
1 tsp. vanilla
½ tsp. lemon juice
1 tsp. baking soda
½ tsp. cinnamon
1 ½ oz. dry oatmeal
7 ½ oz. cake flour
7 ½ oz. bread flour
16 oz. chocolate chips
12 oz. pecans

Blend butter and both sugars together until creamy. Add eggs one at a time, then add vanilla and lemon juice. Mix all dry ingredients and incorporate into sugar mixture. Add chocolate chips and pecans, mixing just long enough to blend evenly. Bake at 350 deg. F. until outside layer is slightly firm and inside is still soft. Makes approximately 24 cookies.

The Kentucky Bridge Thousands of Endangered Gray Bats Inhabit

Bats gathered in a crack in the bridge, 2021. Credit: Kentucky Transportation Cabinet.

In the spirit of Adam West and Burt Ward, Holy Batman!

You’re looking at the underbelly of a bridge in rural Kentucky that is a first for the state.

It is a bridge for motorists, but was designed to double as an animal habitat to help protect this endangered species, gray bats.

A gray bat, 2021. Credit: Kentucky Transportation Cabinet.

And before you go looking for the bridge, you need to know its whereabouts are being withheld so the bats can have some privacy.

The bridge needed some repairs earlier this year, which is when Kentucky Transportation Cabinet (KYTC) workers found the bats nestled in the cracks.

When the bats left to hibernate elsewhere, new beams were installed to make the bridge safe, but extra space was left between the beams to accommodate the bats.

The bridge and the bat activity will be monitored for the next five years.

For more information, watch this video from the KYTC.

Staff Pick

A Dark Room in Glitter Ball City

As someone who is fascinated by true crime mysteries and the history of Old Louisville, I was incredibly excited to hear about the release of David Dominé’s latest book, A Dark Room in Glitter Ball City. Dominé has written twelve other books in addition to his latest, and he has a particular knack for telling stories about the secrets and scandals of Old Louisville.

A Dark Room in Glitter Ball City centers the mystery surrounding a murder that took place in a notorious Victorian mansion in Old Louisville and the subsequent court case that captured the attention of curious locals. I was fortunate enough to get my hands on an early copy of the book, and let me tell you — I was not disappointed! The book had me hooked from beginning to end with fascinating historical anecdotes, a swiftly moving plot, and concise observations made by Dominé as he researched this disturbing case.

It was particularly appealing to me as a Louisville local, because I have easy access to several of the landmarks that Dominé indicated throughout the story. However, I would highly recommend for anyone outside Louisville who is intrigued by true crime and wants to learn more about the history of the city. I enjoyed this read so much that I am tempted to go out and purchase his other twelve books!

If you are interested in reading A Dark Room in Glitter Ball City, you can purchase a copy from Carmichael’s Bookstore.

And to learn more about David Dominé’s ghost tours in historic Old Louisville, visit Louisville Historic Tours.

Poe 2.0 and Uranium Glass, Paranormal Museum in Somerset, 1931 Film Still of Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula, and More

Rachel Grimes Film Screenings, Tyler Gerth Photography Exhibit, Frazier Museum Permanent Collection Web Pages, and More

Independent Spirits, a Brief History of Waverly Hills Sanatorium, Composer Rachel Grimes’s Film “Along the Way Forth,” and More