Sloss Furnaces — The Ironmaker's Ghost
A blast-furnace complex where 47 workers died — and where 'Slag', the dead supervisor, is said to still drive his night shift.
Case File No. 100
FILE 01 The Legend
Sloss Furnaces (1882–1971) made Birmingham a steel city — and killed the men who made it. Company and newspaper records document around 47 deaths, many in the terrifying blowout accidents of the early 1900s. The legend's anchor is James 'Slag' Wormwood, a night foreman said to have driven his crew with cruelty until he fell — or was pushed — into a pool of molten slag in 1906. His ghost, 'the Slag Man', is said to work the night shift, and Sloss's haunted attraction 'Sloss Fright Furnace' runs on his name.
FILE 02 The Sightings Log
Night guards and police called to the site in the 1900s–2000s reported voices, footsteps on catwalks, moving equipment, and a figure in period foreman's clothes. The site's oral history project recorded workers' tales of the 'bad root' — workers refusing the night shift after deaths.
FILE 03 The Skeptic’s File
The deaths are documented; Wormwood's murder is not — no death record for a foreman in 1906 matches the story as told. The legend's modern form was shaped partly by the furnace museum's own storytelling and its haunted attraction, one of Alabama's largest. What is not in dispute: standing inside a black iron blast-furnace city at midnight, the case for ghosts feels structural rather than spiritual.