Kentucky: Day 4 – Ghost Distilleries

Driving down the road near Woodford Reserve outside of Versailles, you'll come upon the former Old Taylor Distillery which operated from 1936 to 1982. It's right on the road. You can't miss it. There's a barbed wire fence surrounding the site, but it's easily navigable.

Before Old Taylor Distillery was known as Old Taylor Distillery, it was known as James C. Johnson distillery. No one is sure when the distillery along Glenn's Creek was founded, but it's believed that a distillery of some sort was located here from about 1816 on. It was sold in 1879 to Jacob Taylor, whose brand of whiskey was called, originally enough, J.S. Taylor. Jacob's father was a man known as Edmund H. Taylor and in 1882 he bought his son out of ownership. The name was quickly changed to E. H. Taylor & Co. and he operated it with his sons from that point on until Prohibition.

You've got to be careful if you approach the old Taylor site because there are holes surrounding it that drop down dozens of feet into oblivion. It's a completely abandoned facility, to the point that it feels like you're in a horror movie just waiting to happen. Silent Hill or Resident Evil could easily be filmed on location here. It's a very uneasy feeling.

The giant warehouses still stand solemnly in the distance with broken windows revealing nothing but darkness. The campus itself is huge and it goes on down the road for a mile or so.

Across the street from the main entrance are a few fully accessible office buildings. The windows are broken and the roofs are caving in, but you can easily enter at your own risk.

If you've got the guts you can really explore the facility. But you are in the middle of nowhere without help if you should need it.

Please, feel free to navigate from room to room. If you feel like being butchered by a hockey mask-wearing psychopath, that is.

Ka-kaw! Ka-kaw! Yep. Something bad is about ready to happen.

There is so much debris still relevant to the old operation that it's a wonder no one has come to clean it up and dispose of it all. 

There are all kinds of ledgers, receipts, and records dating as far back as 1968 just sitting there on site. It's totally surreal. 

And then there's this house just sitting back deep in the woods, totally abandoned and waiting for some silly tourist to come wandering in. If there are such things as ghosts then this is most definitely where they live.

Keep driving down the road, however, and you'll turn up at ghost distillery number two: Old Crow. Oscar Pepper built this distillery on Glenn Creek in 1860 and his primary brand was Old Crow. Four years later, however, Pepper died and E. H. Taylor was made executor of the estate. By 1870, Pepper's son, James E. Pepper, was able to take control of the operation with the help of Taylor, until the site was bought by the W. A. Gaines Company in 1878. After Prohibition, the distillery was bought and renovated by AMS and then run by its successor: National Distillers. National folded in 1985 and the site is now used by Beam for warehousing space.

Beam may be using the Old Crow warehouses for maturation, but they're sure not using this one.

The stillhouse is visible, but only from far behind a chain link fence. The whole area is totally creepy, so don't go alone. Especially this close to Halloween.

-David Driscoll