Oak Grove Cemetery And Mausoleum

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by Amy Sullivan

PADUCAH PERFORMERS PERPETUATE THE PAST AT OAK GROVE CEMETERY AND MAUSOLEUM

HE REMAINS OF FRANK M. FISHER REST AMONG OTHER FAMOUS FELLOWS OF LOCAL T The lore within the marble walls of the West Kentucky Mausoleum in Oak Grove Cemetery. Frank was the son of Paducah’s second mayor and founder of The Paducah Sun newspaper. John Fisher committed suicide in 1923 after grieving the loss of his son, Robert, who had died of heart failure at the age of 34. Frank is said to still roam the haunted halls of Fisher Manor on Jefferson Street. Irvin Cobb’s sister, Reubie Cobb Rudy, and mother, Manie Saunders Cobb, are also entombed in Oak Grove’s mausoleum. In the early 1900s, Manie allowed the favored Reubie to join banker Richard Rudy for a weekly buggy ride, resulting in a 40-year courtship. When Manie died, Reubie and Richard finally married, just three days after Manie was laid to rest, but they both mysteriously died a year later.

The monument at the entrance to Oak Grove Cemetery’s mausoleum was unveiled at the dedication ceremony. It reads, West Kentucky Mausoleum; Dedicated to the Memory of Those Who Rest Within; Built 1914 The Southern Mausoleum Co. Nashville, Tennessee; Renovated 2008 Ohio Valley Monument Co. Paducah, KY; City of Paducah-Mayor Bill Paxton, Commissioners-Robert Coleman, Gayle Kaler, Buz Smith, Gerald Watkins; City Manager-Jim Zumwalt; Public Works Director-Earnie Via.

OAK GROVE CEMETERY AND MAUSOLEUM

For almost 15 years, Michael Cochran, Executive Director at Market House Theater, and his cryptic colleagues have been leading lantern-lit walking ghost tours in Paducah during the month of October, coupling histories with legends, playing and dressing the parts. The first three weekends feature downtown tours while the final weekend focuses on an Oak Grove outing through the cemetery and its moonlit mausoleum.

Michael Cochran explained the evolution of these evenings. “Paducah’s Downtown after Din-

ner events used to end on Labor Day weekend. Former Main Street Director and now City Commissioner Carol Gault asked me to create downtown ghost tours to keep attracting people to downtown Paducah on fall weekends. Having written ‘Oak Grove Triumph and Tragedy’, a living history of Oak Grove Cemetery, we set out with a group of volunteer researchers led by Cindy Miller to collect stories of the darker side of Paducah history for the downtown tours and rework the Oak Grove tours to be hosted by the theatre. This evolved into our annual October River City Ghost Tours downtown and Oak Grove Cemetery after Dark Tours.

The mausoleum in Oak Grove, maintained by the City of Paducah Parks and Recreation, is known as the West Kentucky Mausoleum. It was built in 1914 by the Southern Mausoleum Company of Nashville, Tennessee. Built to house 300, so far 162 crypts have been sold.The mausoleum was closed to the public in 1991 due to safety issues. The Ohio Valley Monument Company started renovating the mausoleum in November 2007. On

November 12, 2008, a rededication ceremony was held inside the newly renovated mausoleum featuring a repaired roof, new and repaired marble, electrical outlets, and sanded and painted ceilings.

With only a few small windows at the top and corners of the crypt, very little light enters, setting the stage for the spooky Ghost Tours led by Michael Cochran. A rainy night enhances the atmosphere, and guests are invited to bring their umbrellas – the show must go on!

Guests return annually to relive the mausoleum residents’ tales. While undertaker Cochran guides the lantern journey through the mausoleum, Cat Tilker plays the ghost of Della Barnes, and Roy Hensel acts as Doctor Reuben Saunders, pioneer physician and curer of cholera – also Irvin Cobb’s grandfather.

“It’s intended to be a living history experience filled with strange stories,” says Michael Cochran. The tours are oral histories of many of the legends and lore of Paducah and Western Kentucky’s darker history drawn from newspaper accounts, books, letters and eyewitnesses to

Michael Cochran plays the undertaker during the Oak Grove Mausoleum tours. events. We offer theatrical, narrated presentations about unsolved deaths, reported ghost sightings, and the mysterious lives of some of this area’s past residents.

“There are no people jumping out during the tour,” he added, “but it gives residents a sense of the history of life and death in Paducah since its founding. There are some very famous people buried in Oak Grove that have changed the course of history.”

The tours are offered multiple times during the final weekend in

October, last around 90 minutes, and usually sell out. They cover about one mile of walking through the cemetery and the mausoleum after dark.

You won’t find a script online – you’ll have to come in person to hear the haunting histories of Oak Grove.

Loved ones or other visitors may check out the key to the mausoleum from the Paducah Parks Office during the day. You can purchase a crypt on the ground tier all the way up to the fifth tier, or in the alcove in the mausoleum, for $4,000 – $5,000, depending on the area.

Mark your calendar for the downtown River City Ghost Tours offered every weekend in October, with Oak Grove tours October 2830. It’s an annual tradition, and spooky fun! Contact the Market House Theater for more information.

Give the gift of LIFE!

PADUCAH LIFE

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Visit paducahlife.com or call 270.442.3338.

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Toward The Corner Of Mercy& PEACE

by Tracey Buchanan

THE MOST-ASKED QUESTION ABOUT MY DEBUT novel is: “How long did it take you to write it?” Straightforward, understandable question. My answer, not so much. For this novel I didn’t sit down at my desk and bang out words day after day until—voila!—a complete manuscript emerged. It didn’t even start out as a novel. In the late 1990s I wrote a series of scripts for a tour of Oak Grove Cemetery that the city sponsored. Characters, dressed in period costumes, “came to life” at their gravesites and told their stories. I researched each character and time period and then imagined them to life, similar to the main character in Toward the Corner of Mercy and Peace. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Over the course of several years I had developed around thirty characters. They rested in the files of my Word documents, biding their time it turns out. One day—who knows what got into me—I decided to clean up my files and there they were . . . Alben Barkley, Irvin Cobb, Della Barnes, Evitte Dumas Nix, Captain Joseph Fowler, among others. I couldn’t resist revisiting them and when I did I knew I had to do something to give these people breath again. Originally, I polished each character and planned to feature them as independent stories, like a short story anthology. But that didn’t work. They had all been Paducahans and they now shared a final resting place, but I wanted to knit them together more tightly. Enter Mrs. Minerva Place. She was to be the narrator. Now, I don’t know why I didn’t choose Irvin Cobb to be the narrator. He had been the guide on the cemetery tours so he would have been the logical choice. But logic can be overrated. (Don’t tell my engineer husband I said that.) I have no idea why, but after years of driving past the street Minerva Place, after walking up and down it, after enjoying friends’ homes on this street, I got it into my head that it would make a great character name. And I knew she would be quirky, misunderstood, a little afraid, and funny without knowing she was. Once I started writing with her as the narrator she just took over. Minerva had her own story to tell. And I really, really loved her and wanted to bring her to life. Life and death, it turns out, is one of the book’s major themes. But I didn’t know that yet. First, I structured the manuscript by starting each chapter with one of the historic character’s stories. My idea was to use their lives to reveal who Minerva was. But it was too much. All these people populating my manuscript overwhelmed it. So, several (13?) rewrites ensued. Let me tell you, it’s painful to delete. Words you’ve struggled over. Words that flowed. Words that emerged from hours of research. Words of pure imagination. So many words snipped out as if they didn’t matter. But that’s the nature of the beast. Rewriting, cutting, adding, moving, reshuffling—every good writer will do it all, sometimes many times. And I don’t consider anything I write as pointless. It all informs the final story. Besides, I file the material away in a special folder, where it optimistically waits to be folded into future novels. Henry Shelton, for example. He started out in Toward the Corner of Mercy and Peace, but I eventually cut him. His story is rich with thematic elements I was not pursuing in Mercy and Peace. But he’s patiently waiting. He will play a prominent role in the sequel to this novel. All along the way, I was asking for input from willing readers. Having cut my writing teeth in the newspaper business, where nobody really cares about your feelings, I learned to value good critiques. Granted, my first readers were friends (like editor Darlene Mazzone) and my mother— ha!—and they were very encouraging. But as I got more involved with

the writing world, my readers expanded into people who don’t know me, don’t know Paducah, and don’t mind pointing out what absolutely does not work. Every bit of the feedback I received—even from those who know me—was helpful. The encouragers’ comments fueled me to continue working on it and to believe that it was worthwhile. The writing partners helped me dig deeper. Eventually, when it got to an editor, I could polish the valuable, if sometimes rough, stones I had mined. I’ve got to tell you, I love it all. I love the entire process of writing a book. I love sitting down with a blank screen and launching out with the first sentence. I adore seeing who the characters are and what they want to do. And nothing beats getting the whole story out and typing THE END. But I love the rewriting too. It’s fun to solve problems, to tweak words until they are exactly right, to make the work stronger. Epiphanies—those out-of-the-blue “ah-ha” moments that reveal how something could be improved—are so rewarding. So, in answer to that question, “How long did it take you to write it?” I can only say, I have no idea. Years. Since it’s my first, I was learning as I went. I attended workshops and writing camps. I read craft books. I listened to podcasts. I tried things that fell flat while other things came easily to me. Hopefully, in the end I developed Toward the Corner of Mercy and Peace into a novel you will love. That was my goal. And, like everything else about the publishing world, now I have to wait. The hardest part of the whole endeavor.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Toward the Corner of Mercy and Peace will be published by Regal House Publishing in June 2023.

A Taste of What’s To Come At The Corner of Mercy and Peace

IT’S 1952 IN THE SMALL BUSTLING TOWN OF PADUCAH AND Mrs. Minerva Place would prefer everyone mind his own business, follow the rules, and if dead, stay dead. Nosy neighbors and irritating church members are bad enough, but when residents of the local cemetery start showing up, the quirky widow wonders if she’s going crazy. If that weren’t enough, a new boy in the neighborhood seems intent on disrupting her life. Minerva, aggravated by precocious six-year-old George, holds him and his father Robert at arm’s length as long as she can. Nevertheless, with charming perseverance they find a way into her closed-off life and an unlikely friendship starts to blossom. But just when Minerva starts to let her guard down a tragic accident shatters her emerging reconnection with life. Now more than her sanity is at stake. With the help of the living and the dead, Minerva’s forced to face issues she thought she had buried. With gentle humor and a cast of charming characters, Toward the Corner of Mercy and Peace explores the power of forgiveness and trust and why it’s worth it to let others into your life, even when it hurts.