Elements of suprise

Ty Malungani, the Sloss Furnaces education coordinator, said it’s not unusual for people to come to the 136-year-old site seeking ghosts.

What does come as a surprise to some people is that Malungani, who has given hundreds and hundreds of tours at the historic site for the last 7 years, said he has never experienced any sort of supernatural element or ghost – despite the repeated questioning by visitors from all over the world. 

“The way I see hauntings personally, if you believe in them, the odd things you hear, then you attribute it to the haunting,” he said. “It is an old site, so you hear bangs, when the wind blows through it, it makes a certain sound.”

Sloss Furnace — no longer operating as of 1971 — was once a major pig-iron blast furnace that began making iron in 1882. It is now labeled as a National Historical Landmark and known as one of the primary economic boosts that helped create the “Magic City” of Birmingham. 

For the month of October, most Birmingham locals have come to know that touring the historic Sloss Furnaces offers an element of surprise. “It’s a popular time of the year to visit,” Malungani said.

Sloss Fright Furnace is the increasingly well-known haunted attraction that runs through several parts of the furnace, including the boiler room, the loading tunnel and a section of the adjacent woods. Setup begins as early as the end of August, with an outside renter, Yarbrough Company, leasing part of the space and carefully preparing the spooky experience all through September. 

Malungani, who has been through the event several years now, said it is a unique way to scare people since the Sloss Furnace backdrop is unlike anything else in the state. It also happens to be the only times Malungani has been to Sloss Furnaces at night.

Sloss Furnaces historian and curator Karen Utz said that the Sloss Furnaces National Landmark is the first of its kind in the world to preserve this type of industrial site, as well as the only 20th century blast furnace in the nation to be preserved as an industrial museum.

Utz said that the Sloss Fright event has been taking place since the 1990s, though it’s gone through a few change of companies. Each year, she said, it brings in thousands of teenagers and adults from all over the Southeast.

Sloss Furnaces, which was created 10 years after Birmingham became an official city in 1871, has been a source of intrigue for historians and ghost-hunters alike. Birmingham was a city that once won a medal for ‘best iron pig,’ Malungani said, and working in the iron or steel industry was claimed to be the top two most dangerous jobs in the U.S.

“They love to hear gruesome stories, they ask, ‘Why would men work in those environments while the work was hard and dangerous?’” he said. 

Sloss Fright focuses on the Slag character, which their website claims to be a ruthless and cruel supervisor who made his workers take dangerous risks that ended with lost lives. It goes on to say he eventually lost his life by falling in a blast furnace, and after that, he began haunting workers and visitors alike over the years. 

Though the “revenge of Slag” has been the theme of the attraction for years, he is not based in any sort of history or fact, Malungani said. The month-long haunted attraction does capitalize on some of the most asked-about details during his tours, he said, which includes how the men lived and worked in such difficult conditions. 

“Iron and steel was dangerous everywhere, but what made it difficult in the South was that [labor] unions happened a lot later than they did in the North,” he said. The unions could have demanded safer work and higher wages. “The other difference was the huge amount of work force. If one person got injured and died, they had 50 men that wanted that spot.”

Every job at Sloss Furnaces was a difficult one, Malungani said, and it just depended on personal preference of what you could handle. Men were faced with choices like handling heat of up to 120 degrees or extremely confined spaces. This was also the time period where the South had lost its economy right after the Civil War, and people were flooding to Birmingham looking for jobs. 

But the truth is about the furnaces, he said, is that it enabled men to provide more for the city of Birmingham, and most importantly, a steady house and steady income, especially if they had a family. 

Utz said, to this day, they host a Christmas reunion party for retired Sloss Furnaces workers, “all with great stories and friendships.”

One ghost story, however, is a historic folktale that was based on an actual man who worked at Sloss Furnaces, Malungani said. There is even a book about it by journalist and author Kaythryn Tucker Windham, called “Ghost in the Sloss Furnaces,” which was published in 1997 through the Birmingham Historical Society. They keep a copy of it in the Sloss Furnaces Visitor’s Center.

The book focuses on Theo Jowers, a family man and ironworker who died when he fell into the blast at Alice Furnaces, an adjacent site to Sloss. Malungani said Jowers was well-known for his cheer and liking his job. The Birmingham Age newspaper article, dated September 1887, read "a piece of sheet iron was attached to a length of gas pipe, and with that instrument his head, bowels, two hip bones and a few ashes were fished out."

According to Windham’s book, Jowers’ son John took his own son to Sloss Furnaces after Alice Furnaces was torn down and he claimed to have seen a ghostly figure, what he thought was Theo. Other claims included Theo Jowers’ old work crew seeing him making rounds at the furnace, checking on them. 

“He loved it [working] — a lot of men loved it because it was something they could own. While it was dangerous, they had a strong brotherhood, it was steady work, in high demand,” Malungani said. 

Over the years, various paranormal TV shows and private organizations have come to check out Sloss Furnaces and see for themselves if ghosts exist in the furnace. Some include Ghost Hunters, Unexplained Mysteries, the Travel Channel, Haunted Places to Go and several others. 

“People are more interested in that [Slag] kind of ghost than the other [folklore] kind,” Malungani said, and Utz said that Sloss Furnaces does not promote or believe any of the ghost stories.

Malungani encourages people to come by and take a tour of Sloss Furnaces, or even give Sloss Fright Furnace a go if they are up to the challenge. 

“You have to remember, without something like this [site], Birmingham wouldn’t be here today,” Malungani said. 

During the Sloss Fright Furnace, Sloss Furnaces will still be open and free to the public from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Tuesday through Saturday, and Sunday from noon to 4 p.m. 

“It’s not very far from downtown, but it seems a little different over here, it’s more peaceful,” Malungani said. “It just doesn’t feel like [the site] is dead.”

To learn more about Sloss Furnaces, visit slossfurnaces.com.