Sloss Furnaces

Sloss Furnaces rose on the eastern edge of downtown Birmingham in 1881–82, when Colonel James Withers Sloss, one of the city’s founders, built its first blast furnace on land set aside for industry. For almost ninety years the site made pig iron, the raw material of the New South. Reorganised as the Sloss-Sheffield Steel and Iron Company, it became one of the largest pig-iron sellers in the world, rebuilt its furnaces in the late 1920s and housed workers’ families in the company cottages known as Sloss Quarters.

The work was punishing. The labour force was largely African American, wages were low, and men worked beside molten iron, scalding gas and heavy machinery in Alabama heat. The company’s mines also relied on leased convicts, a system the Encyclopedia of Alabama describes as deadly: in 1890, ninety of a thousand prisoners sent into the mines died. That real history of danger and injustice is the soil from which every Sloss ghost story grows.

The furnaces shut down in 1971 and were nearly demolished before local preservationists and a 1977 city bond issue saved them. Sloss became a National Historic Landmark in 1981 and opened as a museum of industry in 1983 – the only twentieth-century blast furnace in the country preserved this way. Today it hosts metal-arts classes, concerts and history tours.

Two very different ghost stories attach to the place. The older one, collected by Alabama storyteller Kathryn Tucker Windham and folklorist Alan Brown, concerns Theophilus Calvin Jowers, a worker said to have died in a fall into molten iron at Birmingham’s Alice Furnace in the late 1880s; his spirit, the tale goes, moved on to Sloss when the Alice furnaces were torn down. The newer and far better-known story – a cruel foreman called James “Slag” Wormwood who drove dozens of men to their deaths and was himself pushed into the furnace – is the one repeated on television and countless websites.

That second story does not hold up. Sloss staff have said that “Slag” was a legend created by the crew of Sloss Fright Furnace, the Halloween haunted house that ran on the site from the late 1990s to 2019, and that a visiting TV crew took it for history. In 2023 executive director David Arias said plainly that the Wormwood tale and most of the hauntings found online were made up to sell haunted-house tickets. The museum now steers visitors toward the documented lives of the people who actually worked there.

Visitors and some former night-shift workers have described a felt presence, sudden chills, a voice ordering them back to work and the sensation of being pushed; others report a figure walking the catwalks or the casting shed. Much of the most dramatic material – including the “Slag” encounters and a claimed tally of police paranormal reports – traces back to Fright Furnace publicity rather than independent accounts.

Stories cluster around the No. 1 and No. 2 furnaces, the high catwalks and the blowing-engine and boiler buildings, mostly after dark. Night tours and Halloween events have historically produced the most reports.

Sloss Fright Furnace drew large Halloween crowds from the late 1990s until 2019, and the site has appeared on Ghost Adventures and in HGTV’s list of the creepiest places in each state. Kathryn Tucker Windham’s The Ghost in the Sloss Furnaces (2005) preserves the older Jowers tale, and the furnaces also host Furnace Fest and metal-arts programmes.