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Phantoms of the Track | African Cemetery No. 2 · The Grim: Haunted Cemeteries & Graveyard Tales

0:13
Kristin: Grim morning and welcome to the Grim.
0:16
Kristin: I'm your host, Kristen.
0:18
Kristin: On today's episode, we'll be opening the gate and entering African Cemetery No.
0:22
Kristin: 2, located in Lexington, Kentucky.
0:25
Kristin: The aroma of coffee mingles in the air.
0:28
Kristin: The gates stand open.
0:30
Kristin: Step carefully.
0:31
Kristin: It's time to descend into the hauntings of history.
0:35
Kristin: When people speak of Kentucky, they speak easily of rolling hills, warm bourbon, and the thunder of thoroughbred hooves cutting across green fields.
0:44
Kristin: What they rarely speak over the quieter cities of the dead, those that exist just beyond the postcard edges of the bluegrass.
0:51
Kristin: One of those cities, African Cemetery No.
0:53
Kristin: 2, is hidden within Lexington, appearing at first glance almost ordinary.
0:58
Kristin: A strip of land, a pause between traffic and houses, a soft break in the geometry of a modern city.
1:05
Kristin: But the moment you cross its boundary, the atmosphere changes.
1:08
Kristin: Sound dulls, the air thickens, the ground feels watchful, carved crosses lift toward the sky, engravings fade gently into stone.
1:17
Kristin: Tablets lean as if though exhausted by the weight of time.
1:21
Kristin: Broken monuments hold their place with a quiet defiance.
1:25
Kristin: Each grave reads like an unfinished sentence, a life interrupted but not erased.
1:30
Kristin: This isn't a comfortable beauty, it's a hard one.
1:34
Kristin: A beauty shaped by endurance.
1:36
Kristin: Long before fences traced its edges or signs gave it a name, the slam was already learning how to hold the dead.
1:43
Kristin: The first burials took place here in the 1820s, when grief had no formal boundary, and remembrance depended almost entirely on memory.
1:51
Kristin: In 1852, protection came in the form of community.
1:55
Kristin: The Colored People's Union Belevolence Society No.
1:58
Kristin: 2 was founded by Lewis Page, Sam Breckenridge, and Leonard Fish of Lexington.
2:03
Kristin: Their purpose was direct and deeply necessary, to care for the sick, to bury the dead, and to perform deeds of charity.
2:10
Kristin: For a community denied security from others, this society became a lifeline.
2:15
Kristin: In its charter, specific provisions were written for a burial ground.
2:19
Kristin: The land the document declared would be held solely and exclusively as a cemetery and ornamental grounds.
2:24
Kristin: It could never be used for any other purpose, even in law, the dead were finally promised permanence.
2:31
Kristin: In 1869, the burial ground was formally claimed by the Society.
2:35
Kristin: Its mission would later be recorded in the pages of the Handuki Leader, which described the organization as existing to care for the sick, bury the dead, and care out acts of charity.
2:44
Kristin: But Sorrow and Lexington was not always allowed to remain where it fell.
2:49
Kristin: In 1889, 300 bodies were removed from the Presbyterian Cemetery on Limestone Street and reburied here.
2:56
Kristin: Due to the closure of the Presbyterian Cemetery, these souls needed new reinterment.
3:00
Kristin: The old cemetery found itself being redeveloped for a city in need of room.
3:04
Kristin: The disinterment was supervised by C.O.H.
3:07
Kristin: Thomas, finding a permanent place within African Cemetery No.
3:10
Kristin: 2.
3:11
Kristin: But there were no long funeral processions.
3:14
Kristin: There were just wagons, paper wreckers, and quiet labor.
3:18
Kristin: Human remains crossed the city not in ceremony, but in need.
3:22
Kristin: Strangers were laid beside strangers.
3:24
Kristin: Over time they would become family beneath the same soil.
3:28
Kristin: African Cemetery 2, though, holds a singular place in Lexington's history.
3:33
Kristin: It's the earliest recorded cemetery in the city to be organized, owned, and managed by African Americans, serving the community for more than a century.
3:41
Kristin: Among those buried within is Oliver Lewis, the first jockey to win the Kentucky Derby.
3:46
Kristin: Yes, that Kentucky Derby.
3:48
Kristin: More than 180 people buried within were connected to Kentucky's equine industry.
3:53
Kristin: The grooms, the trainers, the stable hands, and the laborers who built the state's most celebrated tradition now risk quietly beneath its shadow, recognition that faded with time is finally returning to this ground, to African Cemetery No.
4:07
Kristin: 2.
4:08
Kristin: And with it the name of a young man whose triumph once thundered across America, then slipped into silence, because Oliver Lewis was not meant to be forgotten.
4:18
Kristin: He was born on December 22nd, 1856 in Versailles, the second of ten children born free to Godson Lewis and Eleanor Keyslewis.
4:26
Kristin: In the 1870s, his family moved to Lexington, a city shaped by horses, money, and the quiet, constant labor of black hands.
4:35
Kristin: It was here, still a teenager, that Oliver Lewis learned how close glory could stand to erasure, and how fast one could follow the other.
4:43
Kristin: He was only 19 years old when history found him.
4:46
Kristin: On May 17, 1875, before a crowd of 10,000 spectators, Oliver Lewis rode to the starting line it was then the Louisville Jockey Club, today known as Churchill Downs.
4:58
Kristin: The race would later become the first running of the Kentucky Derby.
5:01
Kristin: Fifteen jockeys entered the field.
5:04
Kristin: Thirteen of them were African American.
5:06
Kristin: Lewis rode a colt owned by H.
5:08
Kristin: Price McGrath.
5:09
Kristin: The favorite horse that day, though, wasn't his.
5:12
Kristin: Lewis had been instructed to push the pace and exhaust the field.
5:15
Kristin: He was meant to help someone else win.
5:18
Kristin: For most of the race, he followed those orders.
5:20
Kristin: But in the final stretch, everything broke open.
5:23
Kristin: The favorite horse had fallen back.
5:25
Kristin: Another challenger pressed close at his side, and Lewis, reading the moment with instinct rather than obedience, drove forward.
5:32
Kristin: He crossed the line two lengths ahead.
5:35
Kristin: With that ride, Oliver Lewis became the first shockee to ever win the Kentucky Derby.
5:40
Kristin: He also set a new American record at the time for a mile and a half race.
5:44
Kristin: His trainer that day, Ansel Williamson, shared in a victory that would soon be written out of the sport's dominant narrative.
5:51
Kristin: Later that season, Lewis finished second in the Belmont Stakes.
5:55
Kristin: He won three more races at the Louisville track.
5:57
Kristin: Then, just as abruptly as he had arrived, he disappeared from racing.
6:02
Kristin: He would never ride in the Kentucky Derby again.
6:05
Kristin: He retired after that single season.
6:07
Kristin: The reasons were never recorded or found.
6:10
Kristin: The silence that followed him was not accidental.
6:13
Kristin: After leaving the track, Lewis worked briefly as a laborer.
6:16
Kristin: He later produced handicapping tables and racing forms for bookmakers.
6:20
Kristin: Eventually he became a bookmaker himself, a legal profession in Kentucky at the time.
6:25
Kristin: He also worked as a teamster.
6:27
Kristin: The man who had once carried the weight of a nation's attention across the finish line learned how quickly glory evaporates when it belongs to the wrong body.
6:35
Kristin: Shortly after 1900, Lewis moved his family north to Cincinnati, where he worked as a street asphalt laborer in the city.
6:42
Kristin: The first winner of the Kentucky Derby spent his later years laying pavement.
6:47
Kristin: He died in 1924 from mental insufficiency and kidney disease.
6:51
Kristin: He was 67 years old.
6:53
Kristin: His body was brought back to Lexington and buried in what was then known as the Blevolent Society No.
6:58
Kristin: 2 Cemetery, the ground we now know today as African Cemetery No.
7:03
Kristin: 2.
7:03
Kristin: No grandstand marked his passing, no trophies guarded his name, only soil.
7:09
Kristin: In 2010, a road in Lexington was finally renamed in his honor, Oliver Lewis Way, a thin ribbon of payment bearing the name of a man who once outran the future itself.
7:20
Kristin: His legacy also reaches quietly into modern culture.
7:23
Kristin: Lewis is the great-great-grandfather of actor Rodney Van Johnson.
7:27
Kristin: Oliver Lewis won America's most famous race, and history let him vanish anyway.
7:33
Kristin: And now, in the hush of the grounds, the first champion of the Kentucky Derby finally rests among a community that never forgot how hard it was to claim even a single perfect moment of victory.
7:44
Kristin: The cemetery, however, is more than a resting place of Lexington's everyday citizens.
7:50
Kristin: It's also home to soldiers whose service span from the Civil War through World War II, men whose sacrifices were long overlooked by history.
7:58
Kristin: Among the earliest are veterans of the United States Colored Troops, these African American men enlisted in segregated units, risking everything to fight for the Union and for the fragile promise of freedom.
8:10
Kristin: At least 112 USCT soldiers are known to be buried here, many having trained at Camp Nelson, a major recruitment and supply center for black troops.
8:21
Kristin: They fought to preserve a nation that wouldn't yet grant them full citizenship and to write that history would take decades to recognize.
8:29
Kristin: Their service endures quietly in sunfaded markers, broken tablets, and unlettered graves.
8:35
Kristin: Some of these soldiers' lives we can glimpse in fragments.
8:38
Kristin: Dennis Simpson, born into slavery in Jesamine County, joined the USCT in 1864, marrying and building a family in Lexington after the war, only to die in 1906, and rested in an unmarked grave alongside his wife and daughter.
8:54
Kristin: Others, like Arthur Black and Charlie Carpenter, served in World War I, some in units like the 369th Infantry Regiment, the legendary Harlem Hellfighters, and returned home to ordinary labor.
9:06
Kristin: Their bravery quietly folded back into the rhythms of everyday life.
9:11
Kristin: Nathaniel Calder, a Buffalo soldier who fought overseas in the 351st Machine Gun Battalion, and was returned to Lexington for burial after dying in France, a life that spanned segregation, war, and distance.
9:25
Kristin: Later, World War II veterans such as Clemen Jones, Robert McCoy, John Triplett, and Oliver Dennis took up arms again, carrying the fight to distant battlefields while facing the same inequalities at home.
9:37
Kristin: These men remind us that African American military service was continuous.
9:42
Kristin: From the fight for emancipation to the global conflicts of the 21st century, their courage runs like an invisible thread beneath the history of the city.
9:51
Kristin: Today, however, remembrance has returned.
9:53
Kristin: Each year on Juneteenth, flags are placed and names are read aloud at the graves of Civil War veterans.
9:59
Kristin: A ritual of voice and memory that restores dignity to men who were denied it in life and in death.
10:05
Kristin: The ground also holds community leaders, workers, families, and children, lives that sustained Lexington while remaining largely invisible within its official history.
10:15
Kristin: Among them are the men who secured the land itself, Louis Page, Sam Breckenridge, and Larry Fish.
10:21
Kristin: Other lives tell stories of a quiet brilliance and hard-won achievement.
10:24
Kristin: In the world of horses, a sport that would come to define Kentucky, figures like James Soup Perkins and Abraham Perry left their mark.
10:32
Kristin: Perkins, born in 1879, became one of the youngest jockeys ever to win the Kentucky Derby, dazzling the racing world before his life was cut short at 33.
10:42
Kristin: Perry, a pioneering trainer, guided the first African-American Kentucky Derby winner in 1885, shaping an industry that relied on the skill of black men, even as it erased their names from its history.
10:54
Kristin: Among the community's leaders also arrest Robert Charles O'Hara Benjamin, a man whose reach extended far beyond this plot of Earth.
11:03
Kristin: Born on March 31, 1855, on the Caribbean island of St.
11:07
Kristin: Kitts, Benderman became a journalist, lawyer, educator, poet, and activist.
11:12
Kristin: He edited newspapers across the country, practiced law in multiple states, and used his voice to challenge injustice at every turn.
11:20
Kristin: In 1897, he settled in Lexington to edit the Lexington Standard, where he confronted Jim Crow laws, exposed inequalities, and defended the rights of African Americans.
11:31
Kristin: But words carried danger.
11:33
Kristin: On October 2nd, 1900, Benjamin confronted a white election worker who was harassing black citizens attempting to register to vote.
11:41
Kristin: That night, he was ambushed and shot six times in the back, dying shortly after at 45.
11:47
Kristin: The man who murdered him faced no consequences.
11:51
Kristin: Ten years later, in 1910, a monument was erected at his grave.
11:55
Kristin: A rare acknowledgement of life spent defending basic human rights.
12:00
Kristin: The cemetery also holds educators, civic leaders, and organizers whose names may be less well known, but those whose contributions shaped the Lexington, J.
12:09
Kristin: H.
12:09
Kristin: Jackson, the first president of Kentucky Normal College, now Kentucky State University, rests here, along with founders of early African American organizations, such as the Agriculture and Mechanical Fair for Colored People, the Colored Orphan Industrial Home, and leaders who helped establish schools and churches.
12:27
Kristin: Today the grounds cover approximately 7.7 acres.
12:31
Kristin: More than 5,000 people are believed to be buried here, yet only 1,200 names are known.
12:37
Kristin: Fewer than 600 markers still rise above the grass.
12:41
Kristin: The rest remain unmarked, their stories surviving only in memory, land records, and the subtle rise and fall of the ground itself.
12:49
Kristin: For decades, quiet ruled these grounds.
12:52
Kristin: Stones leaned, grass overtook markers, and history is weighed in the soil.
12:57
Kristin: Like many African-American cemeteries, African Cemetery No.
13:00
Kristin: 2 was unendowed and in 1973 declared abandoned.
13:04
Kristin: Control passed to the city, and the cemetery, along with its neighbor across the street, teetered on the brink of erasure.
13:11
Kristin: In 1979, local citizens formed African Cemetery No.
13:15
Kristin: 2 Incorporated, rescuing what neglect and overgrowth almost erased.
13:20
Kristin: Paths were cleared, monuments stabilized, and history documented.
13:24
Kristin: A roadside historical marker was installed in 2003 with a dedicated ceremony attended by Lexington Mayor Teresa Isaac, State Representative Jesse Crenshaw, and Reverend Willis Pope.
13:36
Kristin: In 2004, the cemetery was formally listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
13:41
Kristin: Volunteers and forensic specialists mapped the land in 2002, recording erosion, headstone decay, and the subtle signs of memory pressed into the soil.
13:50
Kristin: Scholars examine how grief, weather, and neglect inspired to erase history molecule by molecule.
13:57
Kristin: Film, archival projects, and educational programming produced in partnership with the Lexington Public Library continue to stitch back a torn narrative, while the International Museum of the Horse helps recover the stories of black horsemen, whose names vanished from record books, but not from the earth.
14:13
Kristin: But the cemetery is no longer a site of just loss.
14:17
Kristin: It's become Lexington's only urban oburetum, a living laboratory for tree stewardship and ecological renewal.
14:24
Kristin: Nearly 90 of Kentucky's roughly 120 native tree species are now growing among the graves.
14:30
Kristin: Among all the state's native oaks, keystone species of pollinators, wildlife, and ecological diversity now stand sentinel, the roots moving gently through the soil that once knew only burial.
14:41
Kristin: Life has been deliberately invited back.
14:44
Kristin: The grounds, though, were never meant to be only a place to store the dead.
14:47
Kristin: It was created to protect dignity when dignity could not be found elsewhere, and to guard memory when memory was fragile.
14:54
Kristin: Even now, beneath traffic, factories, and the restless machinery of the modern city, the ground continues to keep that promise.
15:02
Kristin: It's a ledger of labor, a register of war, a silent courtroom for stolen rights, a field of names that once ran beside thoroughbreds and now lie beneath unmoving grass.
15:13
Kristin: At every unmarked grave is a question the city still is not fully answered.
15:17
Kristin: Some visitors say the air here feels heavier, as though the earth itself remembers the lives it holds.
15:24
Kristin: There are no ghost stories recorded, no legends of spectral sightings.
15:28
Kristin: Yet the silence is deep and exacting.
15:31
Kristin: Leaning stones, sun-faded tablets, and the unmarked graves seem to watch quietly, holding the memory of soldiers, laborers, and children alike.
15:41
Kristin: In that hush, you feel the presence of the past, not as spirits, but as the weight of history pressing gently against the living.
15:49
Kristin: A reminder that stories of those who were overlooked are still here, waiting to be heard.
15:55
Kristin: For now the stories of African number two slid back into stone, and the dead return to their uneasy rest.
16:02
Kristin: Yet they're never silent for long.
16:04
Kristin: Thank you for walking with us through the veil into African No.
16:09
Kristin: Descending once more into the hauntings of history.
16:12
Kristin: The gate is sealed, the veil drawn, yet death keeps no calendar, and so we shall return, as we always do, on the grim.