Local TV ghoul haunts Opry House ‘catacombs’

From the Oct. 30, 1985, Nashville Banner

By Bernie Arnold

Sir Cecil Creape has been tickling Nashville’s funny bone since 1971 when he first shuffled from the catacombs under WSMV-Channel 4 and went before the TV cameras.

The humped figure with a balding dome slashed by a wicked, half-healed gash became a familiar image to local TV viewers as host of the late-night Creature Feature.

At first, the public thought the bumbling, semi-malevolent character was Channel 4’s happy features reporter Huell Howser, or political reporter Floyd Kephart.

Once viewers zeroed in on the real Sir Cecil Creape (pronounced creep), his alter ego, Russ McCown, had to change his home telephone number and stop mowing the lawn. “I got phone calls at all hours,” said the then-Channel 4 film director, “and when I was cutting the grass, I would suddenly become aware of dozens of little eyes starting at me.”

Although McCown treats Sir Cecil as a separate person, he maintains some underworld humor when cooking for his above-ground friends. The food tends to have names like Chill-ee, Deep Down Devil’s Food Cake and Quick and Dirty Casserole. Aunt Lucretia Creape’s White Fruit Cake is a favorite holiday desert.

“Dear old Auntie Lou always said,” McCown said as he slipped into Sir Cecil’s role, “when you’re in a black mood, make a white fruit cake.”

Like Frankenstein’s famous monster, Sir Cecil was the brainchild of a fertile imagination. He was also created to fill a need.

McCown explained that back in the old days, airtime was always set aside for the broadcast of the Nashville Vols baseball games. When games were played here at Sulphur Dell, they could not be shown on local TV.

“We had to think of something to run in place of the ball games,” McCown said. “So, we came up with characters like ‘Happy A. Clown,’ ‘Grandpa Moses’ and ‘Sir Cecil Creape.’”

McCown injected a macabre sense of humor into the ghoulish, stumblebum character. Sir Cecil’s mid-movie antics always revolved around his attempts to construct a female monster like Dr. Frankenstein’s.

He might spend an entire show working on a pair of long-stemmed legs he ordered from a Dr. Lucifur, only to find one six inches longer than the other. Sir Cecil’s attempt to saw off one to fit the other ended in a pair of ankles.

McCown could also inject a little local humor into his character. Frustrated with the ankles, Sir Cecil would order a female from Rainbow Room owner/manager, Skull Shulman “because everybody knows he’s the biggest provider of bodies in Nashville.”

McCown retired Sir Cecil to his dungeon-like catacombs for almost 10 years. He was resurrected in 1983 for the Nashville Network as Phantom of The Opry, after McCown had become audio-visual director for the Opryland USA complex.

McCown explained, with tongue in cheek, that Sir Cecil’s move from Channel 4 to the Opry occurred when Sir Cecil tried to ship himself from the television station to the Grand Opera House in Paris.

Neglecting to write “France” on the casket, Sir Cecil wound up in Paris, Tenn. The only opera folks there knew about was the Grand Ole Opry, Sir Cecil said, so they shipped him to Nashville. He rests in peace in the catacombs—that’s the third-sub-basement underneath the Opry House stage—emerging on Sunday nights at 12:30 a.m. to do a show.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

Editor’s note: For more about Sir Cecil Creape and fellow TV horror host Dr. Lucifur, listen to Episode 07 of the Nashville Retrospect podcast. This article appeared in the October 2015 issue of The Nashville Retrospect.