#bobby mackeys

[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.

[gnarlygrace]

kentucky gothic

- driving past bobby mackeys

that's it. that's the post.

[alyisdead]

me arriving in hell

[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.

[betweenthelines1975]

All that remains of Bobby Mickey’s Music World in Wilder Kentucky.

For those who don’t know, “Promoted in popular culture as “the most haunted night club in America”, Mackey claims the site was originally used as a slaughterhouse in the early 19th century and later torn down for construction of a roadhouse that took on various names, such as The Brisbane, until he purchased it in 1978. Various urban legends and modern folklore claim that the site features a “gateway to hell” and is haunted by spirits including Pearl Bryan, whose corpse was found in a field 2.5 miles from the site in Fort Thomas, Kentucky.” (from wikipedia)

[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.

[yayneloveart]

Page 5 of Dusk is finally finished. Finally

You can read this page and the preceeding 4 if you pledge to my patreon

(each volume covers different famous haunted places or historical events. Vol 1 is about Bobby Mackeys, Vol 2 will be the Lizzy Borden House)