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HAUNTED
PLACES
Baldwin Hill Birmingham Public Library
Archives Brown Hall Burrelson House Cedarhurst Mansion Cleveland House Founders Hall Gainswood King
House Leehaven Main Residence Hall Marengo McCandeless Hall Palmer Hall Pickens County Courthouse Reynolds
Hall Sloss Furnaces Sturtivant Hall UNA Bookstore Upchurch House |
Sloss Furnaces A lot of the company owners lived up in the mountains where they could look out on the city, and the majority of the workers lived here. What they would notice was that you couldn't see anything, just smoke. And you could just barely see thousands and thousands of fires from the blast furnaces and steel. And the men would say, "Boy, from all the smoke and pollution, and all the fires that you see and the sulfur smell, [we] felt like [we] were in hell." So I guess you can see the mind set of these people.
Well, in 1887, he became assistant foundryman at the Alice Furnace No. One; I think it was, in Birmingham. One day, he was trying to change the bell on the Alice furnace. He was using a block and tackle and was walking around the edge of the furnace when he lost his balance. Both he and the bell fell into the molten iron, and he was burned up. That iron is so hot, in fact, that I doubt that he even felt any pain at all. He must have been burned up almost instantly. The workmen tried to retrieve what was left of him by using a piece of sheet iron attached to a length of gas pipe,, but all that they found were a shoe and a foot inside it. Well, it wasn't long after that happened that people reported seeing his ghost walking around, doing his job and checking to make sure that things were being done correctly. Jowers' ghost haunted the Alice No. One furnace for more than twenty years. It wasn't long after the Alice furnace was abandoned that his ghost began to be seen at the Sloss furnaces. In 1927, his son John Jowers was driving over the viaduct by the Sloss furnaces in a Model-T Ford with his son Leonard. John stopped the engine of the car so that he and Leonard could watch them tap the Sloss. All at once, John grabbed his son's arm and pointed to what appeared to be a man walking through the sparks. The iron was too hot for a real human being to be standing that close to it, so it must have been a ghost. |
| Last updated 07/24/01 |
Well, quite a few people have died at the Sloss
Furnaces over the years. Iron work was very dangerous job back in the 19th
century, and people were always getting hurt. But for some reason, only
two of the dead people have come back as ghosts. The best-known of these
is Theophilus Calvin Jowers. Jowers came to Oxmoor in 1873 around the time
that they began making pig iron with coke instead of charcoal beaus all of
the trees around Birmingham had been cut down. Jowers was proud of being
an iron man, but his wife didn't like it. She was afraid that he would get
killed or hurt some day. Whenever she expressed her concerns to him, he
would reply, "Don't worry. The furnace is my friend. As long as
there's a furnace standing in this county, I'll be there."