The Kentucky Derby has 146 years' worth of stories behind it.
Some of the tales are spookier than others.
Sitting across from Ronnie Dreistadt, the manager of education services at the Kentucky Derby Museum, is almost like flipping through a racing book of horrors.
He's the in-house expert on racing-related murders, lingering specters and gruesome injuries that bloodied the historic Churchill Downs track back in the days where jockeys didn't wear helmets. It's not all crushed skulls and broken bones, though.
“Some of them are just really horrible stories of people doing really horrible things,” he told me.