Spirit in the streets

Halloween isn’t really my holiday. I hate horror movies; I don’t believe in ghosts, and I don’t trust people who like candy corn. But when ghost tour-guide Edward Wolfgang Poe said, “two-and-a-half hours of murder, suicide and hookers” awaited me — well, my interest was piqued.

Poe started the Birmingham Ghost Walk five years ago. He couldn’t find a job fitting his executive chef background, and he realized no ghost tours existed in Birmingham. After six months of research and buying an oil lantern to set the right mood, he started offering tours every night of the year. Hundreds of tours later, the South East Lake resident said the job is still one he loves.

“My name is Wolfgang Poe, so I’m going to cook and write horror novels,” he joked.

The Ghost Walk starts across the street from the Tutwiler Hotel. In the early years of Birmingham’s history, it was a wilder place. Poe noted in his introductory speech that at one point in the 1800s, the city had 111 bars, 89 brothels and more than a few gunfights.

From there, the walk loops around about a mile of downtown Birmingham and touches on architecture, history and politics alongside the ghosts that may — or may not — haunt the city. Some of the ghosts I have heard of before, such as the little girl in the Tutwiler Hotel and the Sloss Furnaces ghost. Others, such as the East Lake Park Mermaid, were new to me.

As Poe and his lantern led my tour group through nearly empty streets, he told us about ghosts occupying churches, hotels, jails and — surprisingly — more than one parking lot. It became a recurring theme through the night that many of the buildings where tragedies had once spawned local legends were now replaced by flat pavement. The original Tutwiler Hotel, which Poe saw demolished as a child in the 1970s, is among those long-gone buildings.

Poe’s tours draw local residents and tourists alike, as well as paranormal researchers toting bags of gear from site to site. A few people on the tour have caught what appear to be ghostly figures and “orbs” on camera, and Poe said paranormal researchers have found electromagnetic fluctuations and recorded voices. Poe himself has encountered what he believes to be the ghost of Linn Henley Research Library, and has sat in the lobby of the Tutwiler and listened to guests complain about supernatural activity on the “haunted” floors.

Though most of the tour feels like Poe is speaking off the cuff, it’s clear he knows his stuff as he rattles off details about deaths both brutal and heartbreaking. He’s also a natural performer, at one point using a parking garage to give his voice an ominous echo as he talked about the city’s previous nickname of the “Murder City.”

No matter the crowd, Poe said there’s always one point on the tour that brings gasps of disbelief: when he pulls a small vial from his pocket containing a human tooth. The tooth is said to belong to a murdered woman found in the demolition of the Mabson Hotel at Third Avenue North and 22nd Street. Based on local legend, Poe said he believes the woman was the unlucky mistress of J.M. Thomson, who built the hotel in 1895. She was killed by his jealous wife.

I didn’t hear any unearthly voices or find orbs in my pictures beyond a lens flare from a streetlight. However, two hours of talk of death and hauntings had their effect on me. When we paused in a dark alley for a story near the end of the tour, Poe remarked that previous tour participants had seen shadows move through the alley without bodies connected to them. I watched the tour members nervously check the ground for runaway shadows — then looked to make sure my own shadow was still attached to my feet.

The Ghost Walk is what has given Poe his local notoriety, but his enjoyment of history and the “wonderful, dark stories” of hauntings extend beyond his night job. Poe said he is in the middle of restoring his Victorian home in East Lake, which currently has no electricity and only recently got updated plumbing. Preserving Birmingham’s history was just one of the reasons that he got started.

“I wanted to show the locals that downtown is not the hellhole that the media makes it out to be,” Poe said of his initial motivation in 2011.

Halloween is undoubtedly the busy season for ghost tours. Poe is already ramping up to two tours per night, and this year he is looking at having two different ghost tours with new stories and paths through the city. Since he recently accepted a new chef job, Poe is also training a couple of new tour guides to help with the fall busy season.

Poe said he doesn’t mind supernatural skeptics like myself on the tour, though he asserted that enough time spent in the more haunted portions of Birmingham could convince any nonbeliever. And everyone, he said, secretly enjoys getting scared.

“Everybody likes to get their little heebie-jeebies on,” Poe said.

Learn more about the walk at bhamhistory.com/the-birmingham-ghost-walk.