Kentucky Tourism is highlighting “spooky” locations across the Commonwealth through a passport program designed to encourage people to experience some of the state’s more offbeat tourist attractions.
Tourism commissions in 12 counties teamed up with the state tourism office to debut Kentucky After Dark – a new program aimed at boosting tourism to lesser known locations in the state that have supernatural stories associated with them.
Ghost tours, paranormal experiences and other connections to the unknown have drawn visitors for years, helping many towns rake in tourism dollars during so-called “spooky season.” Hopkinsville/Christian County Convention and Visitors Bureau executive director Brooke Jung said she found inspiration for the initiative in her county’s peculiar history.
“We have a really fantastic and well known alien landing that happened here on August 21, 1955, and it really got my wheels turning when I was thinking about ways that we could connect other communities that maybe have some… like supernatural, extraterrestrial [elements],” Jung said.
Counties participating in the Kentucky After Dark passport program include Anderson, Christian, Graves, Henderson, Jefferson, Madison, Marshall, Meade, Oldham, Scott, Simpson and Trigg.
Passports – and stickers to that a location in the county has been visited – can be picked up at the local tourism commission offices. Inside each passport are insights into the different locations they can explore as a part of the initiative. The peculiar histories of the locations listed in the passport are all connected to tales of local cryptids, ghost sightings or unexplainable phenomena.
The Christian County entry in the passport centers on the Kelly Green Men Landing – a famed alien encounter story that’s alleged to have inspired filmmaker Steven Spielberg to make E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. The nearby town of Hopkinsville celebrates the Little Green Men festival every year, to memorialize the occasion. Other sites in the passport include haunted houses, a winding road where people are believed to have seen goblins, an infamous sanitorium and the hometown of a central Kentucky witch, among others.
Lawrenceburg/Anderson County Tourism director Robbie Morgan is the project manager for the initiative. She said it’s been exciting to hear communities come together to tell their campfire stories and hopes that the passport program motivates others to check out lesser known state heritage sites, like Mayfield’s Wooldridge Monuments – a set of 18 limestone statues that stand in a western Kentucky cemetery plot to commemorate the relatives of a local horse breeder who wanted his family to accompany him after his death.
“The fact that people are looking at Mayfield-Graves as a place to go to explore its paranormal history means they get on the ground in [the community],” Morgan said. “These projects have really shone a light on a lot of rural communities that I don't think get a lot of attention the rest of the time.”
Jung said that the overall goal of the program is for people to explore Kentucky.
“We've had interest from across the country,” she said. “[We’re] hoping to get people to our communities that have never been here before and show them some really cool, unique things that they're only going to find in our Kentucky communities.”
