Beyond Dusk

Recording the history behind the cases in Dusk

[beyond-dusk]

Paranormal Lockdown - S3E4

I figured since I've already done posts featuring Buzzfeed Unsolved and Ghost Adventures, I figured I would keep the ball rolling and find other shows that investigate Bobby Mackeys.

As a side note, to keep things brief I cherry pick the moments I can discuss using established facts. I don't like spending time making fun of people like this when they pretend to feel a ghost in the room, its just not worth it.

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Oh my god! I looked for a picture of the rooftop to help identify the different additions to the buildings over the years but I couldn't find a good picture. I should have watched these ghost shows as a visual reference!

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So it turns out that one of the men who was on the Ghost Adventures episode covering BM's is the host for Paranormal Lockdown. Not only that, it was the was the dude who said that a spirit that followed him home after the hunt ruined his marriage. Ghost Divorce.

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I do want to thank this show for not bringing up satanism when they first introduce the story of Pearl Bryan. They did slip up by saying the murder followed a botched abortion, which Scott Jackson planned to do, but it never actually happened (the coroner made note that there was no trauma beyond her decapitation and cut hand, and that her baby was healthy when she died).

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"But as Nick and Katrina dug deeper, they found that the facts of Pearl Bryan's death may conflict with the rumors."

Wait so they ACTUALLY did research? Is this going to be a nice post and not me getting angry over dumb satanic rumors???

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So this nice looking gentleman is said to have done extensive research in to Pearl Bryan's murder and I'm already in love (intellectually, though if I was 40 years older...). They don't show much of what he says but now I'm determined to find a way to contact him to compare notes.

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So they clearly establish that there is no factual basis for Pearl Bryan's head being thrown down the well! I only used that idea as part of the Dusk comic to give the story a short plot, but in reality it's very, very, VERY unlikely that her head ever entered that building. My personal theory is that Jackson threw it into the Licking River like he did with her luggage.

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So during the clips of the Ghost Adventures episodes, Bobby Mackey mostly talked about what he's heard happened at the club but he says he doesn't believe in ghosts. Here, he seems to say that he heard rumors of the building being haunted all the way back when he bought the building in 1978. This is the first time I've heard this and I'm intrigued.

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OH MY GOD THIS WOULD HAVE MADE A GREAT PANEL IN THE COMIC. I NEED TO WATCH SHOWS LIKE THIS TO GET VISUALS

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Okay, so I did make fun of this guy for blaming ghosts on his divorce, but I have to give him credit that he climbed into the fucking well and looked around inside it. I don't believe its a portal to hell but damn, its unnerving.

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So this show did much, MUCH better dealing with the facts. Instead of interviewing some asshat author who claims Scott Jackson was a satanist and killed Pearl Bryan as a sacrifice, they met a real historian and asked him about the case. I learned that there were already rumors of the building being haunted before Bobby Mackey took over and that makes me happy.

Nick Groff, I'm going to stop making fun of you for your ghost divorce. You went back and dispelled some of the rumors and I always give people who do that credit.

[beyond-dusk]

Ghost Adventures part 2

So I already did a post on the Ghost Adventures episode on Bobby Mackeys, and it turns out they went back in season 4 to shoot another episode. By now I feel the need to keep criticizing these shows, since I put in so many hours researching the nightclub and Pearl Bryan.

HOLY SHIT THIS BRO IS CLAIMING THE FIRST HUNT HE DID AT BOBBY MACKEYS WAS A BIG FACTOR IN HIS DIVORCE. HOLY SHIT.

So a detail I find funny is that in Bobby Mackeys song 'Johanna', he sets the scene as being in the 1930s, and Zak Bagans always says that the version of the nightclub she worked at was the Latin Quarter. Jokes on him, the Latin Quarter wasn't established until 1947. The building was known as The Primrose club in the 1930s.

"What we've discovered in our experiences is when you go into an abandoned building, thats been sitting there for 10, 20, 30 years, the spirits, the ghosts, they've taken ownership of that building."

"This building was abandoned until Bobby Mackey discovered it."

So the building had not sat abandoned for more than a few years between business ventures. Before Bobby Mackey's opened in 1978 it was known as the Hard Rock Cafe (likely not part of the famous chain of restaurants), and there were only a few weeks between the Cafe closing and Mackey's opening. Before it was the Cafe it was the Latin Quarter, and I found a newspaper suggesting that the Latin Quarter stayed in operation until at least 1970. I couldn't find an opening date for the Hard Rock, but articles suggested it was open for a number of years. The building has not sat abandoned for more than a decade for the past hundred years. I doubt it was abandoned for more than a year or two.

"Confirmed devil worshiper Scott Jackson decapitated his pregnant girlfriend Pearl Bryan right here in this basement as a blood sacrifice to the devil."

NO! NO NO NO NO NO! WRONG! Pearl Bryan was murdered at the intersection of the Alexandria Pike and Highland Ave, several miles away! It's confirmed it happened there because she was found in a large pool of blood that formed when her head was cut off when she was still living, several doctors confirmed it, and I would say modern doctors would agree. And also SCOTT JACKSON WAS NOT A FUCKING SATANIST. HE WAS AN ASSHOLE WHO MURDERED HIS PREGNANT GIRLFRIEND BECAUSE HE WANTED SEX BUT NOT A BABY FROM HER.

This is why you do your own research people. You can enjoy the TV show or movie all you want, but if you really want to know history you have to find real sources for the answers.

[beyond-dusk]

Ghost Adventures - Bobby Mackeys

A while ago I made a post criticizing the Bobby Mackey's episode of Buzzfeed Unsolved, and I cant believe that I haven't made a post about the Ghost Adventures episode set there. Thats actually where I first heard about Bobby Mackey and Pearl Bryan, when my AutoCAD teacher in high school put on Ghost Adventures in the background while we worked on the computers. This was back when my brain still had a part that was afraid of impossible things and I lost a lot of sleep that night because I was so terrified of ghosts. I killed that part of my brain in college so now I'm all about haunted stuff!

The classic haunting sign! This sign has been updated to a more modern one, but I prefer this one.

Okay, this jackass has no idea what hes talking about. Hes talking about the investigation into Pearl Bryan's murder and how blood hounds were used to track the killers scent. Hes saying that it was tracked to the building where Bobby Mackey's is now. That is completely false, all police activity reported in newpapers at the time said that the killers were tracked to a nearby reservoir but then they lost the scent. In fact, there's not a single contemporary source that directly ties this murder to Bobby Mackey's building.

To make things worse, he believes that the head was brought to the building to act as a sacrifice to the devil. Scott Jackson was not a satanist! He murdered Pearl because she was pregnant and wanted to keep the baby and marry him, and he wanted to abort it and cut off contact. He removed her head to prevent identification and it worked until her identity was proven by using her unique shoes.

His last blatant lie is that Scott Jackson swore on the gallows that he would haunt the area around Bobby Mackeys. A newspaper at the time reported that his last words were him still insisting he was innocent. Alonzo Walling said the same thing.

Okay, he makes another lie later in the episode where he repeats the legend of Johanna and her lover Robert Randall. In my research, there's no evidence of anything in the legend bring real. All the Johannas and Robert Randalls who died in the area during the 1930s were either very old or babies.

"We came in here one night, I was the first one down here. Right in this general location right here there was a satanic circle. It was glowing green." Dude, can you give me a bit of what you were smoking that night? I don't want to tear into people's personal stories but the claims of satanic activity happening just annoys the hell out of me.

Oh my god theres a staircase there?! I couldn't see that in any of the reference pictures I found! Thankfully I don't think I had to draw the room at that angle so its not really missing from the comic.

Someone claims that Pearl died at 3am, which is considered the witching hour, but theres no solid proof of that. She died between 10pm Friday night (it was raining until then and she was dry when her body was found) and 4am (she was dead at least 4 hours when she was found at 8am). So its possible, but no proof.

So here is what I've been excited to address, the mysterious pipe! So part of my research involved looking at Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, which show structures across cities and towns going back over a hundred years. I have a fire map from 1894, two years before Pearl Bryan's murder, and it shows both the slaughterhouse and all the pipes in the area.

There is no pipe coming out of Bobby Mackey's. There IS a pipe coming out of the distillery that was there. I have maps going into the 1940s that show no pipe connected to the building. I'm not 100% sure that the pipe is the one in the distillery, but a pipe that large would show up on a map like this.

So Zak is saying that the caretaker found a piece of a skull while digging up the well? This is the first I've heard of that. Did he hand it over to the police? What happened to it? They do not answer this in the show. You would think they would elaborate on this.

So theyre claiming that these are blood stains under their black light, but blood shows up black under black light unless they spray luminol fluid. A LOT of fluids glow under black light, including sweat, spit, urine, and other non-biological stuff like tonic water, whiteners, laundry detergent, and vaseline.

Conclusion: I know this show purposefully played up the spookiness for the viewer, I just like directly addressing things with evidence and truth. You can enjoy shows like this, just keep in mind they exaggerate a lot and shouldn't be taken too seriously.

And a message to Douglas Hensley: Fuck you, Scott Jackson wasn't a satanist and he killed Pearl to get rid of her and their baby so he wouldn't have to marry her.

[beyond-dusk]

Well, I'm unemployed, so now I'm working on pages again and damn near close to finishing this thing.

Next post will cover the legend of Johanna and her lover Robert Randall. I had to take some creative liberties to tie it into this story, but I still kept as close as I could to the truth.

[beyond-dusk]

Well, after several months of struggling to work on anything, I'm back in the saddle to finish Issue 1 of Dusk. I've finished all the research I need, so now all I have to do is actually draw the damn comic.

And since my research into the Pearl Bryan case is over, I'm now moving on to learn about the Lizzie Borden case. I've found a very helpful news article from the day after the murders and some maps drawn up a year after the incident to help me plot out people's movements.

I'm not going to elaborate right now but I am very suspicious of Maggie the maid.

[beyond-dusk]

Drawing Pearl Bryan

So like when I drew Bobby Mackey’s, I wanted to make sure that my drawings of Pearl Bryan and the time period she came from. There were very limited images of everything related to the crime itself, so I had to find creative ways around it.

First, there's only one photo of Pearl which is 100% confirmed to be her. There's a few other images that have her in it but there's so many people in them and the quality is low enough that you can't tell who she is.

I will be the first to admit that I’m not very good at drawing real people. I tried to focus on her hairstyle and round face to make her recognizable. I tried to make the dress look like how it was described in newspaper articles, but there are no images available of the actual dress online. The only detail I had to leave out was the fact that it was gingham patterned. Fuck drawing that.

My favorite detail is her gloves here. When she was found, her left glove and hand were sliced right open across the fingers, likely from trying to grab the knife used to kill her. I feel like it shows how determined she was to fight back, especially since it supposedly cut down to the bone. You can see a bit of the cut around her fingers.

Now there's an issue with the valise used to transport Pearl’s head. The common belief is that the alligator skin valise pictured above was used to transport it, but a newspaper article published in the Cincinnati Enquirer recounted Scott Jackson being questioned by the police and that confirmed Pearl had two Valises and a tan leather one was used to carry her head. (the patches of blood were added by me as an extra punch.)

Like the dress, there are no photographs of her shoes, so I had to go by the description in the articles. I had several ideas for this panel, the first being a straight up shot of her head being cut off, but I decided to go the subtle route. I paired that text with this panel because yes, the police found it near impossible to identify her without her head. However, her shoes were able to lead them to her identity. She had unusually small feet for a grown woman and after making asking a few shoe salesmen and some factory foremen, the sale of those specific shoes were traced directly to Pearl. Also, the shoes were mostly black, like her stockings.

Finally, the biggest pain in my ass. I was so determined to make everything as accurate as possible, I decided to use the 1894 Sanborn map to recreate the slaughterhouse. Sanborn maps show the structure of buildings and their materials to help fire insurance salesmen determine how likely a fire will happen in a location. The pink part was easy enough because the map legend said it was brick, but the yellow parts didn't explicitly state what the materials were. I assumed it meant it was wood so I took it from there.

These drawings only go up to page 10, I still have 10 more pages to go! Wish me luck!

[beyond-dusk]

Drawing Bobby Mackey’s

I knew drawing Vol 1 of Dusk would be challenging due to having to draw Bobby Mackey’s Music World over and over. I have a few tricks to save time, but I started this comic to get into the details, and that includes in the drawings.

This one panel took me an ungodly amount of time to draw, but its an important establishing shot. Most photos you find of the front of the building are taken at this angle so it looks familiar to those who know this case.

I stole two panels from Buzzfeed Unsolved’s episode of Bobby Mackey’s as i really like the shots. There's not a whole lot of still pictures of this hallway so it was a helpful reference.

Another important shot I wanted in there was of the bar. The bar design is fairly unique and recognizable. After I drew this I also came across a very interesting photo on the website for the Kenton Library

This is the bar from when it was still the Latin Quarter. You can clearly tell its the same place! I was amazed when I found this.

Finally, the well room doesn't have a whole lot of detail to it, but its still interesting. You can see that the well used to be covered up and then the floor was torn open to reveal it. You can even see where the foundation sits on top of it. I wish I knew the layout of the bar so I could see which section its sitting under. That would help date when it was covered, as the bar is made of up several different buildings built together and expanded.

There will be more but I haven't finished those pages. Next art post will be about drawing Pearl and related images.

[beyond-dusk]

So to address the story of Johanna and Robert Randal and their supposed deaths at The Latin Quarter/Bobby Mackey's, I will tell what bit of research I did do for this.

I gained access to an archive of death certificates issued in Kentucky going back centuries. I confined the search by putting in the years The Latin Quarter operated, 1946-1961, and then searching around the different areas surrounding the nightclub.

Not a single result came back with a Johanna, and if it did, the age was always listed around 60-70 years.

Now, one R Randall did die in Newport or Wilder within that time period, and he was a young man. But it was in a car accident. Go figure.

And to directly address the 'Johanna was the daughter of a mobster' rumor, mobsters kept their families far away from their work. They had to, to keep them safe. They wouldn't have ever let one of their daughters perform at one of their clubs, let alone be a dancer.

The cherry on top is the fact that among all the mobsters that were involved in operating The Latin Quarter, not one had a daughter named Johanna. A few had daughters, but they all had different names. The closest Johanna associated with The Latin Quarter was when one of the men who operated the nightclub died in a plane crash with another mobster. That other mobster had a daughter named Joan.

Now I do feature a bit of Robert Randall and Johanna in Dusk, but mostly played for laughs. Everything written in the comic is fictional and made up by me

[beyond-dusk]

Buzzfeed Unsolved: Bobby Mackeys

So while I was researching the history behind Bobby Mackey’s Music World and Pearl Bryan’s murder, I found that there’s a LOT of misinformation out there about these topics. I set out to find as accurate details as possible for Dusk, and now I want to set some things straight.

Now I LOVE Buzzfeed Unsolved, so this will not be me just tearing the whole show apart. I’m just going to make a few... corrections. This is not me calling anyone an idiot or a liar or criticizing them, I’m just dispelling the much recorded rumors. I’m only going to focus on the history of the building itself and Pearl Bryan, so no demons or Johanna here.

Lets get started

“Would it have killed them to make this any closer to the city? Does it have to be on the of a weird creepy road?”

Well, that area used to be its own small town called Finchtown. It used to have at least a dozen buildings dedicated to a distillery along with several saloons, slaughterhouses, and homes. Floods and fires destroyed most of the buildings.

“Originally, Bobby Mackey’s Music World was believed to be built as a slaughterhouse and meatpacking plant in the 1850′s.”

So in another post on this blog I carefully detailed out the history of the nightclub and I addressed this issue. Yes, the building was once a slaughterhouse, but it was not built in the 1850s. A slaugherthouse owned by Peter Enslen Sr was just south of BM’s, and that one was in use for several decades. There was a slaughterhouse once on the sight of BM’s, but it only stood for around a decade in the 1880s and 1890s. It had been a home before and later changed to a saloon.

“Let’s examine one last bit of dark history. On January 31st, 1895, 20 year old Pearl Bryan was brutally murdered by her boyfriend Scott Jackson and his friend Alonzo Walling”

Pearl Bryan was murdered in 1896, and was 23 at the time. Her exact birthday is up for debate, but census records place it around 1872/1873.

“... legend has it that they felt their medical knowledge was sufficient enough to perform an abortion. If that was the case then obviously things went horribly wrong and they eventually decapitated Pearl in an attempt to conceal the body’s identity.”

So this is one of the biggest misunderstandings about the case. Scott Jackson had tried to abort Pearl’s pregnancy, but by giving her certain ‘medicines’. None of them worked and there was a plan to perform the procedure on her, but that never happened. Her autopsy report said that besides the decapitation and some defensive wounds on her hands, there were no other injuries on her body.

“Though, some believe this wasn’t an accident and Jackson and Walling intended to murder Pearl the entire time”

Jackson brought Pearl to the middle of nowhere with a scalpel and very cleanly took her head off without causing any other injury (besides some cuts on her hands when she tried to grab the scalpel). It was clearly planned.

“Some believe that Scott Jackson... was a member of this occult and that he tossed Pearl’s dismembered head down the well in the basement at Bobby Mackey’s as part of a satanic ritual.”

No

I wish they had looked into more primary sources around this case and not modern articles about it. Contemporary articles clearly state the date of the murder, Pearl’s age, and the circumstances around the death. There was even a 3rd man involved, Pearl’s cousin William Wood. He had introduced Pearl and Scott and was arrested as part of the murder investigation but was later let go due to lack of evidence.

So some issues stem from rumors, some from misunderstanding over time, and a few straight up mistakes. This is why you do your own research, kids.

[beyond-dusk]

The History of Bobby Mackey’s

Theres a lot of misinformation behind the history of Bobby Mackey’s Music World. Rumors run abound when it comes to what used to stand on the land where the nightclub now stands.

So I did my own investigation and I found some very interesting information. I need to thank the Library of Congress for digitizing several Sanborn Fire Insurance maps. Sanborn maps were made to help fire insurance salesmen determine the degree of hazard for a particular area. It’s extremely useful to historians because they record every building, the materials it is made out of, its use (dwelling, store, saloon, barnes), and even features around it.

So lets start with modern day Bobby Mackey’s

Take note of Jumping Jacks Awesome, particularly the shape of the building. This will be important.

Lets jump back in time when the nightclub was The Latin Quarter

So the building has gone through a lot of renovations. You can see in the modern picture that its not one building, but several buildings combined into one location. Pieces were added and torn down over time. I believe that this map shows the club at its largest. We can see that JJA (green building) used to be a moving and storage business.

Lets jump back a little more... Lets say 1910

So the area used to have a lot more buildings! This section of the Licking Turnpike used to be known as Finchtown and a majority of the buildings were for a distillery. If you compare the images, you can see that the green building above is the same shape as the orange building below.

Now its hard to see, but the buildings to the right of the image are whats supposed to be Bobby Mackeys. They are the same distance from Jumping Jacks Awesome/Green Building/Orange Building.  At this point all the buildings are their own separate entities and theres even a cow shed that was later removed. You can still see that the building labeled ‘sal’ (Saloon) matches up with the pink portions of the nightclub above it.

Lets jump back 16 years, and change the orientation

Oh shit, this is very different and all the buildings are shaped differently. Let me do a bit of editing...

Wow, that's a lot easier to understand! I took cutouts from the 1910 to make the comparison easier to see. You can see that JJA/Green building/Orange building was much smaller then, and you can only tell where it is thanks to the saloon across the street staying the exact same shape.

So looking to the right of the map you can see there were some changes were done over time. The building to the right of the then skinnier cow shed (the saloon) was then a slaughterhouse. On Buzzfeed Unsolved’s episode covering Bobby Mackey’s, Ryan says that the slaughterhouse had been in use since the 1850s, but this is incorrect. To the far right of the map there is another slaughterhouse, owned by Peter Enslen Sr. That is the slaugterhouse that was in business for decades, the unnamed one (Owned by William Kraus Jr, going off the 1896 business directory for Newport, KY) was only in use for at most 8 years. It could only be 8 years because back in 1886...

Shit, this again. Give me a sec...

Much better! So at this point, the building that was once labeled as slaughterhouse, later saloon, later ‘The Latin Quarter’, later ‘Bobby Mackey’s’ is now labeled as a dwelling. Now this wasnt same exact same building every time, several fires and floods destroyed the buildings in this area (as they sit right next to the Licking River), but they kept being rebuilt over the ruins, likely using the foundations as a guide.

If we now take our journey in reverse, we see what was a home in 1886 then became a slaughterhouse in 1894. In 1910 that slaughterhouse had become a saloon, and that saloon had become The Latin Quarter. Then the nightclub expanded the building and incorporated other structures around it to create one large area. Later some of the parts were torn down and became the nightclub we recognize today as Bobby Mackey’s Music World.

There is a lot more history to the site, such as the time it was The Primrose Country Club and why it changed hands to become The Latin Quarter, but thats for a different post.

[beyond-dusk]

Where Pearl Bryan Died

A surprising issue I’ve found among articles recounting Pearl Bryan’s death is that the location of her murder is placed over a mile away from where she was really killed. Even the Wikipedia page lists her death scene at the wrong place.

Wikipedia (and other sites) claim that the murder occurred where there is now a YMCA in Fort Thomas. This is at the intersection of Alexandria Pike and Ft Thomas Ave. Thankfully, these street names haven’t changed over the last century.

But during my own research, I found a very interesting drawing printed in a newspaper:

The drawing clearly places the crime scene at the intersection of Alexandria Pike and Highland Ave, on a piece of land owned by a J H Locke. The article does not give the artists name or when it was drawn, so I had to initially take it with a grain of salt. It did pique my interest, so I looked further into the info presented. I found a very helpful blog where a series of articles concerning the case were collected and transcribed for easy searching. These articles confirmed that the body was found on the farm of a Mr Locke/Lock.

A very important source of info for me was a directory for the wider area around the crime scene, circa 1895-1896. Under the Fort Thomas, there was only one person with the surname Locke/Lock

Here is a visual using an 1910 map of the area showing the distance between the sites (Approx 1.2 miles)

And then in modern times

So the current day location of Pearl Bryans murder is actually a series of residences.

Wait, did the location get changed to keep the real estate value up? is this a conspiracy created by realtors so they dont have to disclose a murder happened on the land?

THE HOUSING BUBBLE IS GOING TO BURST ONE OF THESE DAYS! YOU CAN’T KEEP HIDING THE TRUTH!

[yayneloveart]

EVERYONE SHUT UP I FOUND OUT SOMETHING AMAZING

I've been researching the murder of Pearl Bryan for a comic I'm working on, and as I was reading newspaper articles one name kept popping up. It was spelled a few different ways, since it was 1896 and no one could spell names back then. I couldn't tell which was the correct way, so I looked it up in the directory for the city the crime took place in, Newport Kentucky.

The name I kept seeing was Dr. F W Fischbach.

Now I remembered that another man I know of with the last name Fischbach had grown up around Cincinnati Ohio, which was less than a mile from Newport. Thanks to someone contributing family ties to the website Find a Grave, I was able to collect a few names of ancestors of the modern day Fischbach through his late father's entry. Though some information was missing, a record of death proved the connection.

Dr Frederick William Fischbach was the great-great-uncle of Mr Mark Iplier Fischbach.

And Dr Fischbach was important to the case of Pearl Bryan because he was one of the physicians who performed an autopsy on her body. He testified at her killers trial that she was still alive when her head was cut off. His testimony aligned with the other doctors who were there for the autopsy, besides a few facts about blood coagulation that another doctor said was different.

Pearl Bryan is only known today for supposedly haunting Bobby Mackeys Music World, but her murder was a huge case in her day. It's amazing that this case that I've been doing so much research for has a connection to Markiplier.