A dragged keg, flickering lights, and a dark-cloaked figure
by Jack Neely
There's always been something askew about the Old City. The rest of downtown has always been a right-angle kind of place. But down there, the angles aren't quite square. Central intersects Jackson at a disreputable slant, leaving slightly acute and slightly obtuse angles in its wake. The buildings on the corners aren't quite square, forced to be Victorian trapezoids.
The new Urban Bar and Corner Cafe is on the northwest corner of Jackson and Central. Previously known by several other names, it's a place of uncanny angles. Walk in from Central Avenue, which seems for all the world like the street entrance. But then turn right, go up a few steps, and you'll see a window flush to the right that looks as if it should look out onto the street you just walked off of. But it doesn't. It looks down into some other place, the inside of a building, deep down into an atrium: in this same building, maybe, or another building, in some other dimension.
It may be better if you don't look toward the bar. The long yellow lights above it may flicker off and on again for no particular reason. If it gets to be too disorienting, just have a seat. In a round room, the waitress will serve you oval sandwiches on triangular plates.
The staff of the previous restaurant at this location used to watch as freezer doors opened and then closed. The current staff is just getting used to the place. Besides the bar lights, the sound system has a will of its own. They usually keep an alternative-rock station playing softly. But Peggy, the waitress, says that one Saturday night just after they opened, "it switched, by itself, to this loud techno-Mexican music."
Much of the evidence has come from its darker, more elegant neighbor below, the basement restaurant known as the Melting Pot. Down there, for four years or so, they've been seeing ghosts. Restaurant manager Victor Phillips says he has repeatedly seen a "dark-cloaked figure," both out of the corner of his eye and on the security cameras, often in the vicinity of the bar.
He says he never believed in ghosts before. "I do now," he says.
Angela Smith, another manager, has seen the same thing in her four years here. "I thought from the beginning it was a woman," she says. "It's about 5'7", 5'8", always cloaked. I've started calling it her."
She has seen it only once in the dining room, when she and a server both saw it at the same time. Usually it's back in the kitchen area. It seems particularly interested in an old storage room. "Sometimes the door will just come open," Angela says. "We'll shut it. You'll feel some resistance, and then it'll come open again."
A colleague decided to choose the path of least resistance. "If it's a ghost," she said, "let it come out and play." And she left the door open. But then, of course, the door swung shut. There are urban legends, unconfirmed by this columnist, that sometime long ago, men died in there, trapped in that makeshift dungeon.
Other things happen. Fondue pots stacked securely suddenly topple over. A wine bottle is resting on its side on a shelf, but look away for a moment, and you may find it standing upright.
"Down here, the only light of day is a two-by-one-foot window. It's a little spooky when you're the only one here." But she adds, "I think it's a very friendly ghost that's just stuck here."
Early this year, Victor and other seasoned staffers heard a variety of noises from upstairs: something like a pool stick hitting the floor, and something like a keg being dragged across hardwood.
Ordinarily those sounds wouldn't have been that surprising; after all, there are beer taps and a pool room up there in the space that's now the Urban Bar. The only thing strange about it is that at the time, the space above was dead empty, closed and locked tight.
The owner of the Melting Pot called property manager Ben Woodson who investigated a couple of times, and found no one there. One time, in the walk-in freezer, he found four large, commercial-size ice bags taken off the shelves and arranged, totem-like, in a circular pattern on the floor.
There are ghost stories all over downtown, of course, especially in the Old City. The folks at HooRay's, now the ThInQ Tank, used to swear that joint was haunted. The Tank's new employees have already been spooked by the place. The folks who live in the upstairs apartments next door are convinced their place is haunted, too.
If spirits like to hang around where they were murdered, as many crypto-scholars suppose, Central Avenue at Jackson would look like Times Square on New Year's Eve. The ghost of a fire marshal would have to shut the neighborhood down. A century ago, Central was known as the Bowery, condemned by reformers as one of the most dangerous streets in the South. Lined with saloons and poolhalls and brothels and cocaine parlors and gambling dens, Central asked for trouble, and, nearly every night, got it. Murder sometimes visited more often than the mailman.
But not so much, you'd think, on the northwest corner of Jackson and Central. The building at 109-111 North Central may have been the quietest, safest spot in the whole neighborhood. The building's official history is unusually prosaic. It's hard to know for certain, but as near as I can tell, it's the one address that was never a saloon or a pool hall or a house of ill repute. Built maybe a century ago, it was C. Wilson Henderson's wholesale produce concern for about four decades. Then it was a warehouse for several businesses: the Knoxville Foundry, Rochat Plumbing. Compared to its exotic neighbors, this building seems like an Iowa Republican lost in Shanghai.
Of course, it doesn't mean something horrible never happened down here. After all, long before the building was built, the bottomland was the site of a swamp whose evil vapors were blamed for the unidentified "pestilence" that killed hundreds of Knoxvillians in 1838.
After the swamp was filled in, beginning about 1867, the property belonged to the Burr & Terry Planing Mill, owned by George H. Burr. This carpetbagger from Connecticut was a descendent of patriot/statesman/conspirator/killer Aaron Burr. A successful businessman in Reconstruction-era Knoxville, he made his fortune in the western half of what's now the Old City. He sold his mill around 1887 when the demand for commercial real estate in Knoxville outstripped the demand for planed lumber.
Burr seems to have led a conservative life here until his death on Market Street in 1902, but his family had strong Gothic tendencies. George's aunt was Aaron's daughter, Theodosia. Grief-stricken after the death of her only child, she was lost at sea off the Carolina coast in 1812. Reportedly she still gets around; she's now one of the lovelier ghosts of the eastern seaboard.
The wholesale concern followed. In this neighborhood many buildings, often without the permission of the owners, had basements or upper rooms that hosted prohibition-era speakeasies. Still, the most interesting era in this building's history may have been the 1980s, when it was home to a nightclub called Ella Guru's, the basement club that took up the space now occupied by the Melting Pot.
Several of Ella's most interesting performers are no longer with us. Jazz bandleader Sun Ra, for example. He's not a her, but he was an otherworldly sort even when he was alive, and believed that he had a mystical connection to Knoxville; he played at Ella's several times in his latter years, and he often wore a cloak. Maybe he's still playing there, and has developed an interest in techno-Mexican styles.
But that's wishful thinking. Ella Guru's co-owner Ashley Capps remembers there was talk of a troubled spirit down there even in the 1980s, when Sun Ra was still performing. He says one artist channeled the spirits as those of three black prisoners who were "massacred" on this spot, perhaps in the 1920s.
Such incidents are often hard to confirm without more information. It sounds like a version of the bizarre mob violence of 1919, when an unknown number of blacks were shot to death on Central by white guardsmen with machine guns. The epicenter of that violence was about a block south, along Vine, but the unrest spread all over the neighborhood. This building certainly witnessed it.
Whatever's troubling this corner, we'd better figure it out. Considering the haunted corner of Jackson and Central is the intersection from which most Knox County addresses are numbered, if something's askew here, it stands to reason that something's a little awry all over the county. It may have a lot to answer for.
October 30, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 44
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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