A Life with Ghosts: True, Terrifying, and Insightful Tales from My Favorite Haunts by Steve Gonsalves

Author:Steve Gonsalves [Gonsalves, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-08-22T00:00:00+00:00

Sloss Furnaces slag pots, circa 1906

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS PUBLIC DOMAIN ARCHIVE

The most terrifying accounts are the stories of a sadistic foreman named James Wormwood, who was called “Slag” by the factory’s crew. Known for being cruel and uncaring, he was intent on impressing his bosses, ramping up productivity, and pushing workers beyond their limits. Slag would shove, slap, scream at, and hit workers with any object he had close by. Anyone who dared challenge or disobey him would be placed in the harshest sections of the facility, without any water breaks, and forced to work until they collapsed. As night shift supervisor, Slag was responsible for the deaths of forty-seven men, ten times more than any other Sloss manager. His own life would also end abruptly in 1906 when, after becoming dizzy from inhaling fumes, he fell off the highest furnace, called Big Alice, and landed directly in a vat of hot molten iron. Slag’s body instantly burned and melted as he screamed and reached for help from the men he abused; they rendered no aid, content to watch him incinerate.

At least, that’s the story the workers told. There are others who have insisted that Slag, being a supervisor, never climbed the furnace towers. They hold the theory that the workers finally had enough of his cruel ways and threw him into the vat, making it look like an accident. It’s also believed that Slag still roams the Sloss property, pushing people and demanding they work. Shortly after the foreman’s demise, reports of hauntings at Sloss Furnaces started surfacing. Around the 1920s, one watchman was shoved and told to get back to work by an unseen force. In the forties, three supervisors went missing—they were found hours later, unconscious and locked in a boiler room. All three stated that the last thing they recalled was a badly burned man shouting at them to “push some steel!” In the 1970s, another watchman said he came face-to-face with an “evil presence” that pushed him up some stairs and then beat him. These eerie stories of Slag—or something that’s attributed to him—remain a constant mystery. Along with the countless tortured and lost souls in this place, the callous controller’s evil presence is considered among the most prevalent at Sloss Furnaces.

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