Pope Lick Monster

The Pope Lick Monster is a Kentucky legend about a part-man, part-goat creature said to live beneath a railway trestle east of Louisville, and it is the only entry in this atlas that has to open with a safety warning. The bridge is real: 742 feet long, some 90 feet above Pope Lick Creek at mid-span, and an active Norfolk Southern freight line with no walkway, no handrail and nowhere to shelter when a train appears. The legend, in which the creature lures trespassers onto the track, has been putting people on that deck for decades. A man was killed there in 1994, a nineteen-year-old in 2000, a twenty-six-year-old visitor from Ohio in April 2016 who had come to Louisville looking for the creature, and a fifteen-year-old local girl in May 2019. No evidence of any such animal exists, and no version of the story can be traced to a first teller: the oldest public appearance we have been able to date is a short film from 1988, and American newspapers digitised up to 1963 do not mention it once. What this entry documents instead is the bridge, what the authorities ask of visitors, and how folklorists account for a story that kills.

The Pope Lick trestle is neither a ruin nor a relic. It is a working steel railway viaduct on Norfolk Southern's Louisville District, carrying heavy freight over Pope Lick Creek in the Fisherville area of eastern Louisville, Kentucky, close to the junction of Pope Lick Road and Taylorsville Road and near Interstate 265. The Courier Journal, which has reported on the bridge repeatedly, gives its length as 742 feet (226 m), with a drop of about 90 feet (27 m) from the deck at mid-span and 20 to 30 feet nearer the ends. There is no walkway, no handrail and no refuge bay: a person caught in the middle when a train appears has nowhere to stand. The line is in use, and the most persistent error about the place is the belief that it is abandoned. It is not. The creature said to live beneath it is described as part man, part goat — locally just "the Goat Man" — with a human torso, goat's legs and either horns or a misshapen head. Beyond that the retellings agree on very little. In some it mimics the voices of loved ones or hypnotises trespassers into walking out onto the track; in others it drops from the girders onto the roofs of cars on the road below, or carries an axe, or is an abused circus performer bent on revenge, or a farmer transformed after a bargain with the devil. No version has an identifiable first teller, and no two of them are compatible. Our earlier text said the legend "took shape in local oral tradition around the mid-20th century". We cannot support that, and we have removed it. The oldest public appearance we can put a date on is 1988, when the Louisville filmmaker Ron Schildknecht released a short film called The Legend of the Pope Lick Monster; the Courier Journal, looking back in 2019, treats that film as the moment the story broke out of the neighbourhood. Before it, we found nothing in print. A search of the Library of Congress collection of digitised American newspapers, which runs to 1963, returns zero hits for "Pope Lick Monster". The same corpus returns four hits for "Pope Lick" — the creek and the road were on the page — and 11,358 for "Fisherville", so the silence is not an artefact of thin coverage of this corner of Kentucky. Full-text search of digitised books returns about 150 hits for "Pope Lick", the earliest of them from 1998. None of this proves that nobody told the story before 1988; oral tradition leaves no page to search. It does mean that the mid-century date had nothing behind it. The age of the bridge itself is also unfixed, and here we were the ones circulating a bad figure: our previous version dated the trestle to 1929, and we can find no source of any kind for that year. The bridge database Bridgehunter.com dates the steel structure to 1925, a figure that has been copied into Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons; we could not corroborate it against an engineering or county record, so we give it as the database's claim and not as established fact. What is documented is the lineage of the line: it was opened in the 19th century by the Louisville Southern Railroad and has passed by successive mergers to Norfolk Southern, its present owner. The trestle has a life in print that has nothing to do with the monster. Naomi Wallace's play The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek was first produced on 14 March 1998 at the Humana Festival of the Actors Theatre of Louisville. John E. Kleber's Encyclopedia of Louisville gave the creature an entry in 2000. The Kentucky storyteller Thomas Freese published a first-person account of adolescent trips to the trestle in 2009, in which his informant Jeff Stevenson recalls that "there had long been a legend" and that "at the time there was an old, rickety fence". ABC-CLIO's reference work American Myths, Legends, and Tall Tales carries an entry on the monster in its 2016 edition. And people have been killed on the bridge. Between the early 1990s and 2019, the Courier Journal and WAVE 3 News documented a man killed in 1994 when his all-terrain vehicle overturned on the track, a 19-year-old who fell to his death in 2000, a 26-year-old visitor from Ohio struck by a freight train in April 2016, and a 15-year-old Louisville girl killed in May 2019, whose 16-year-old schoolfriend survived with serious injuries. Sean Dreisbach, fire chief in Jeffersontown and the officer who has attended these calls for more than thirty years, told the paper he could recall at least half a dozen such incidents, most of them involving teenagers. Those deaths are not part of this legend's atmosphere and this entry does not use them as one. They are the reason the entry is written the way it is.

The short version, and the one that matters: do not go onto the trestle. It is private property of Norfolk Southern, it is an active main line, and there is no safe place on it. Everything below is written so that the practical information does not have to be looked up somewhere that will make the crossing sound like an adventure. Where it is. The bridge crosses Pope Lick Creek near the 3100 block of South Pope Lick Road, close to Taylorsville Road and Interstate 265, in eastern Louisville. There is a park at the Pope Lick Road and Taylorsville Road entrance, and the trestle can be seen and photographed from the roads and open ground below it. That is the whole of the legal visit, and in daylight it is a perfectly good one: a long steel viaduct over a wooded creek. What is in the way, and what is not. Reporting by the Courier Journal in 2020 described the situation frankly: at the park entrance there is a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire and two small warning signs, and an access gate bolted shut — with a well-worn path running through it. Other approaches are worse. From the Taylorsville Road and English Station Road area a walk of about nineteen minutes reaches the tracks, and at that entry point no warning or trespassing signage is visible from the road. Fencing and signs exist; they are not a barrier, and nobody involved pretends otherwise. What it costs. Trespassing here is prosecuted, and not only as a minor matter. After the April 2016 fatality, the companion who survived was charged with a felony for unlawfully disrupting and delaying the operation of a train. Anyone on the deck also stops traffic on a freight artery into Louisville, which is what that charge is about. What the people responsible for the site ask. The clearest statement on record comes from Sean Dreisbach, fire chief in Jeffersontown, speaking to the Courier Journal after the 2019 deaths. "Stay off the tracks," he said. "These tracks are very dangerous. A train comes with little to no warning, you have nowhere to go once you are on the trestle other than to outrun the train. And when you see or hear that train it's too late." He added the arithmetic: a train needs between a third and half a mile to stop, and "it is going to hit you, and it is going to kill you." In May 2020 the parents of the girl killed in 2019 sued Norfolk Southern in Jefferson Circuit Court, arguing that the trestle was left unsecured and easily accessible; the company declined to comment on pending litigation. Whatever a court decides about the fencing, none of it changes the physical facts of a 742-foot deck with no refuge. If what you actually want is the legend rather than the bridge, it is available on paper and costs nothing but a library card: the entry in The Encyclopedia of Louisville (2000), the entry in American Myths, Legends, and Tall Tales (2016), and Thomas Freese's collected Kentucky testimony (2009), which includes a first-hand account of what these trips were like from someone who came back.