Sloss Furnace

James Withers Sloss opened his Birmingham pig-iron furnace in 1882, and for nearly ninety years it ran around the clock, turning Alabama ore and coke into the iron that built the modern South. The work was brutal and dangerous: twelve-hour shifts beside open flame, molten metal and machinery that gave no warning, and the furnace's accident and death records are still cited by historians as evidence of how hard a place it was to work. Its best-known ghost has a real name behind it, though not a Sloss death. Theophilus Jowers, an assistant foundryman at Birmingham's Alice Furnace, lost his balance and fell into the molten iron there on September 10, 1887. He had told his wife that as long as there was a furnace standing in Jefferson County he would be working at it. Workers began reporting him making his rounds, and as the Alice furnaces were demolished the story followed him across town to Sloss. A second figure, a foreman remembered as "Slag" Wormwood, said to have driven his crews to their deaths, has no historical record behind him at all. Since closing in 1971 and reopening as a National Historic Landmark and event venue, Sloss has drawn steady reports from visitors and staff: shoves felt on the catwalks, voices in empty buildings, and a sense of being watched that regulars say never quite goes away.