Rare execution ticket to be on display at Knox County Historical Society

MOUNT VERNON — As you may have seen in the preview article, I will be giving a talk at the Knox County Historical Society on Wednesday, Oct. 1, at 7:30 pm, about my new book, In These Haunted Hills.

With eerie timing, a rare historical artefact has come into the possession of KCHS, and it will also be on display during my talk.

I first heard about it during the Mound View Cemetery Tour on Sept. 7.

While Larry Evans and I were in the midst of our presentations of Lecky Harper and R. C. Kirk, my old friend David Greer snuck up to me and whispered that the historical society had just come into possession of a piece of history that I would no doubt be eager to see.

The item in question is said to be one of the original tickets to the Dec. 7, 1877, hanging of William Bergin for murder, as detailed in an extensive series I did for this column a couple of years ago.

Is it real? I have never seen one of these before, so it could be very difficult to authenticate the ticket.

We do know from newspaper accounts of the hanging that Knox County Sheriff John Gay only printed up 150 tickets for the public, and additional spaces were available for media and local officials.

If this is one of those original 150 tickets, it is rare indeed. The ticket is preserved in remarkably good shape for its age, too, if it is original.

The ticket gives Bergin’s initials, W. S., and Sheriff Gay’s middle initial, F., correctly. The ticket appears to declare the bearer as an “assistant” at the event, which may have been the sheriff’s workaround to justify meeting at least a little of the high public demand to see this event.

It was conducted at gallows built for the occasion, surrounded by a wooden wall, also built for the occasion to block the view of outsiders. The tickets were distributed, but not sold.

That tracks with what we know about the event.

The only thing on the ticket that strikes me as questionable is the listing of the time of the hanging as “12 M.” My first thought on seeing that was that it meant “12 midnight,” but the hanging was actually conducted at noon … and again, a few minutes later, after the rope came untied during the initial attempt.

But it is possible that in 1877 there could have been a local understanding to use “12 M” to mean “12 midday.” I can’t see that I’ve seen it used that way, but I can’t rule it out.

It could also be a mistake, originally intended to say “12PM,” but a letter fell out of the printing press.

But the single detail that sells me on the authenticity of the ticket is the use of a capital ‘N’ within the lowercase printing of the word “execution.” It is a capital ‘N,’ but it is not the larger capital type used in the rest of the ticket, it is instead a smaller ‘N’ that matches the smaller typeface.

In the haste to have these tickets printed up, such an error could easily occur. In 1877, this ticket would have to have been printed at a professional printer’s shot, of which there were a number in Mount Vernon at the time, including the prominent Republican News newspaper.

When I worked for the Mount Vernon News from 2007 to 2010, the printing press was in the basement, and they regularly printed jobs for others, as well. I remember the smell of the ink occasionally wafting up the stairs to us reporters on the main floor.

Today, if someone were faking this ticket, you’d have to go outside the main point-size of the typeface on the computer and do the capital in a smaller point size to get it to look like this.

Back in the days of typesetting, it could have been a hasty mistake by the typesetter, or it’s even possible that the lower case ‘n’ was missing, and the tiny capital letter was introduced as a quick fix.

Now, one could argue that a forger might go to this trouble to make us think it shows an authentic typo, but that starts to sound more than a little conspiracy-theory-ish to me. It’s the kind of historical curiosity that is so off-the-beaten-path, there’s no market for forging it.

I’m inclined to think it’s real, and was kept flat and dry over the years, preserving it.

Want to take a look yourself and make your own call? Come out for my talk and the KCHS will have this ticket on display.

If anyone has ever seen another one of these tickets, let us know. It would be helpful to have some outside confirmation of its authenticity.

I look forward to kicking off spooky season with stories of ghostly encounters, historical and otherwise, alongside this macabre artefact. See you there!