ILLINOIS ODDITIES: BOOK LOCATES THE STATE'S STRANGEST SIGHTS

The photograph on the cover of Jerome Pohlen's book "Oddball Illinois" was taken at a suburban Chicago shopping center where eight cars are piled one upon the other and skewered by a single spike like a Detroit shish kebab. If you've seen the movie "Wayne's World," you've seen the sculpture titled "The Spindle."

Subtitled "A Guide to Some Really Strange Places," the book locates such Illinois sights as the World's Largest Catsup Bottle (Collinsville), the World's Fattest (Dead) Man (Mount Sterling), the World's Tallest (Dead) Man (Alton), America's One and Only Hippie Memorial (Arcola), and the America's only Amish amusement park (also Arcola).

Among the book's Southern Illinois entries are the Bald Knob Cross in Alto Pass, the grave of a heroic dog in Makanda and a highly regarded nude statue in Cairo.

The cross claims to be the tallest Christian monument in North America. Because it's illuminated, the cross also "attracts bugs from three different states!" Pohlen writes.

Individual contributions paid for the porcelain-covered panels on the cross. Myrta Clutts' prize pig Betsy gave birth to more than 1,700 piglets sold to fatten the Cross Fund, Pohlen notes.

In Makanda, a monument marks the grave of Boomer, a train engineer's three-legged dog. Boomer was killed in 1859 when he ran into a bridge abutment while chasing the train and barking to warn his owner about a hotbox fire.

His grave is beside a basketball court a few hundred feet from the spot of the accident. Southern Illinois University named a dormitory for Boomer.

"The Hewer," a statue in Cairo's Halliday Park, "is thought to be one of the nation's greatest nudes," Pohlen writes. George Grey Barnard created the sculpture of a kneeling young man on a riverbank for the St. Louis World's Fair nearly a century ago.

The book also informs readers that Robert Stroud, the Birdman of Alcatraz, is buried in the Metropolis Masonic Cemetery, and that Bigfoot was seen in Effingham in 1912, in Shawnee National Forest in 1970, in Cairo in 1972 and around Murphysboro in 1974.

Chester, which Pohlen terms "Popeye Town," is another of Pohlen's oddities. Besides the annual picnic honoring the cartoon strip and its creator, native son Elzie Crisler Segar, Chester has many business establishments with names playing to the town's Popeye connection.

Metropolis, which claims to be Superman's hometown even though Pohlen points out that the Man of Steel grew up in Smallville, qualified for the book for many of the same reasons Chester did.

A bed and breakfast in Benton is called Hard Day's Nite because the house once was owned by the sister of Beatle George Harrison. He spent a month there in 1963. Each room is named for one for the Fab Four.

Also in Benton is the Old Franklin County Jail Museum, which houses memorabilia from the 1928 hanging of the area's most famous outlaw, bootlegger Charlie Birger. The public execution was attended by more than 5,000 people, including the photographer Birger hired to record the event.