Theophilus Jowers: #5 in the Ghosts of Birmingham
Series
Welcome to Sloss Furnace, which is now a museum and venue for a
variety of events, including concerts, cooking contests and a
haunted attraction. The operating hours of the site are
Tuesdays-Saturdays from 10:00-4:00 and Sundays from noon-4:00. This
cache, a small lock-n-lock with room for small trade items, is
placed to focus on one of the ghosts said to haunt the furnace,
Theophilus Jowers.
Iron work was very dangerous job back in the 19th century, and
people were always getting hurt. But for some reason, only two of
the dead people have come back as ghosts. The best-known of these
is Theophilus Calvin Jowers. Jowers came to Oxmoor in 1873 around
the time that they began making pig iron with coke instead of
charcoal because all of the trees around Birmingham had been cut
down. Jowers was proud of being an iron man, but his wife didn't
like it. She was afraid that he would get killed or hurt some day.
Whenever she expressed her concerns to him, he would reply, "Don't
worry. The furnace is my friend. As long as there's a furnace
standing in this county, I'll be there."
In 1887, Jowers became assistant foundryman at the Alice Furnace
No. One in Birmingham. One day, he was trying to change the bell on
the furnace. He was using a block and tackle and was walking around
the edge of the furnace when he lost his balance. Both he and the
bell fell into the molten iron, and he was burned up. That iron is
so hot that he probably didn't feel any pain at all. He must have
been burned up almost instantly. The workmen tried to retrieve what
was left of him by using a piece of sheet iron attached to a length
of gas pipe,, but all that they found were a shoe and a foot inside
it.
It wasn't long after that happened that people reported seeing
his ghost walking around, doing his job and checking to make sure
that things were being done correctly. Jowers' ghost haunted the
Alice No. One furnace for more than twenty years. It wasn't long
after the Alice furnace was abandoned that his ghost began to be
seen at the Sloss furnaces. In 1927, his son John Jowers was
driving over the viaduct by the Sloss furnaces in a Model-T Ford
with his son Leonard. John stopped the engine of the car so that he
and Leonard could watch them tap the Sloss. All at once, John
grabbed his son's arm and pointed to what appeared to be a man
walking through the sparks. The iron was too hot for a real human
being to be standing that close to it, so it must have been a
ghost.
