HGB Ep. 655 - Haunted Chattanooga

This Month in History - George Frideric Handel's Messiah

In the month of September, on the 14th, in 1741, composer George Frideric Handel completed his masterpiece, Messiah. The process took an astonishing 24-day period of continuous, intense composition. Working in isolation at his London home, Handel became completely consumed by the project. He frequently skipped meals and sleep to set Charles Jennens's biblical libretto (luh breh tow) to music. He worked in rapid, intense bursts of creativity. The speed of his creation was helped due to portions of the piece being adapted from some of his earlier works. The resulting 260-page oratorio, which includes the iconic "Hallelujah" chorus, went on to premiere in Dublin the following April, securing its place as one of the most celebrated and enduring works in Western classical music history.

Haunted Chattanooga (Suggested by: Matt Liese - pronounced Lease)

Chattanooga is one of our favorite cities that we have visited. This is a charming city, surrounded by the Appalachian Mountains and bordered by the Tennessee River. Chattanooga's history includes several Civil War battles, the Trail of Tears, the Chattanooga Choo Choo, the Tennessee Whiskey Trail and there are several haunted locations. Join us for the history and hauntings of Chattanooga, Tennessee. 

Chattanooga is the fourth largest city in the state of Tennessee. Native Americans were the first to settle the area and the name Chattanooga is derived from the Muskogean (muh-SKOH-gee-uhn) words for rock and dwelling. The Muskogean tribe were the first in the area followed by the Cherokee. In 1816, John Ross, who was half Scottish and half Cherokee, settled the area and so Chattanooga was originally known as Ross' Landing. Ross would find himself torn between the Cherokee and the American government. A part of the Trail of Tears came through Chattanooga. In May 1838, soldiers under the command of General Winfield Scott began rounding up Cherokee Indians in the Chattanooga area who had refused to move to Indian Territory in the future Oklahoma. About 15,000 Cherokee were placed in stockades in Tennessee and Alabama until their removal. Roughly 3,000 were sent by boat down the Tennessee River and the rest were marched overland in the fall and winter of 1838-39. This forced removal was under harsh conditions and resulted in the deaths of about 4,000 Cherokee. Ross tried his best to alleviate concerns and make the transition better and he came to be known as the Cherokee People's Moses. He would pay a heavy price as his own wife, Quatie Ross, would later die on the Trail of Tears. In 1839, Ross' Landing incorporated and became known as Chattanooga. Shortly after that, Chattanooga became a boom town. There were three battles in the area during the Civil War and after the war, industry took over and Chattanooga flourished once again. A large flood in 1867 overwhelmed the city and a reservoir system was built to prevent future flooding. The 1930s saw Chattanooga take on the nickname "Dynamo of Dixie" and the song "Chattanooga Choo Choo" by Glenn Miller was released in 1941. Being the center of battles during the Civil War seems to have left some residual energy in the area and there are many historic locations with ghost stories. 

Ross' Landing

Ross' Landing bears no resemblance to the place of utter suffering for the Cherokee people that it once was. Today, it is part of Chattanooga's revitalized riverfront area. Tourists find the Tennessee Aquarium here as well as restaurants, shops, and the Riverfront Parkway. 

The experience of the Cherokee has been honored with historical markers and interpretive displays. But nothing can really convey the conditions and suffering. There were an estimated 2,000 to 5,000 Cherokee that spent time here crammed into makeshift camps with inadequate shelter, food, and sanitation. The summer heat was oppressive, disease spread rapidly, water was contaminated and the elderly and infants died. Because of this misery, visitors claim to feel a heavy feeling on the property with profound sadness. Others feel anger and sometimes people report physical symptoms including chest tightness, difficulty breathing, and nausea. Electronics fail in the area. Phantom noises are heard, including Cherokee words, moans, weeping and children calling out. There have been some full-bodied apparitions seen. Groups of figures that are translucent or foggy are seen as is a Cherokee woman wearing a traditional dress. She looks very real until she disappears. A child spirit is seen. This ghost disappears when approached. Walking with dogs is not recommended as many seem to become distressed. 

Underground Chattanooga 

The flooding in the city caused city planners to decide to rebuild with the city higher. It was decided to build up the ground with a bunch of dirt and then they would put the buildings on top of that. So there's a lot of buildings that have basements and then sub-basements because those used to be the first floor. 

And the way they accomplished this was pretty incredible. The dirt was hauled in by horse and cart because they did not have tractors and bulldozers when they did it. The townspeople did this, not only by paying for it, but they did the work. Because of this, there are no official government records, but the city was clearly elevated. The townspeople said, our city is broken and we are going to fix it. That's awesome. This underground area was used as tunnels and hiding places. Ghost City Tours talked to a business owner along Broad Street and he told them, "I watched the ghost walk right through the door." The owner had been in the basement when he felt as though someone were watching him. When he turned around, he saw the spirit who was "wearing old work clothes and looked like he was in pain. Just as soon as he made eye contact with the apparition it turned and walked right through the doorway which leads to underground Chattanooga. Needless to say, the gentleman in question never ran faster in his life as he sprinted up the stairs. He now refuses to work in the basement after dark." 

Visitors and people who work downtown have reported strange, unexplained sounds coming from beneath the sidewalks and they have seen shadowy figures moving through old sealed archways. Sometimes there are sudden drops in temperature when entering these underground areas - like extremely cold that isn't what one would naturally expect. 

Gordon-Lee Mansion

The Gordon-Lee Mansion once housed one of the city's most prominent families and is an antebellum Greek Revival home. The house was built between 1840 and 1847 by James and Sarah Gordon on his 2,500 acre property. The grounds were the location of the Cherokee Courthouse before the Trail of Tears began. The Gordon's daughter Elizabeth and her husband James Lee would own the house after her parents passed. The mansion would be used during the Battle of Chickamauga by both Union and Confederate forces as a headquarters and then as a field hospital. James Lee was a Colonel in the Confederate Army, so he used the house as a headquarters. In 1889, the property hosted the Blue-Gray Barbeque with 14,000 Civil War veterans in attendance. At that event, a decision was made to form the Chickamauga-Chattanooga National Military Park. This would be the first Civil War Battlefield to be set aside for historical preservation in the United States. Elizabeth and her husband James' son Gordon Lee would own the house next. Chattanooga dentist, Dr. Frank Green, bought the mansion in 1974 and he restored it to be historically accurate. He sold the house to the city of Chickamauga in 2007 and now is run as a museum with 18th and 19th century antiques.

There have been several deaths in the house. Colonel Lee died in the house in 1864. No one is sure if it was from an illness or wounds sustained in battle. People have reported seeing the ghost of Colonel Lee in a Confederate officer's uniform standing in the study. He always seems to be surveying papers. He vanishes when approached. Disembodied booted steps are heard in the study as well, usually running from the window to the desk and back again. The Colonel liked a pipe and pipe smoke is also smelled. 

His wife Elizabeth is here in spirit too. The couple lost two of their children to scarlet fever in the 1860s and she spends much her time in the afterlife hanging out in the former nursery on the second floor. She also sits on a ghostly rocking chair. People say she wears a black mourning dress and is seen as a translucent figure that is sometimes cradling an invisible child. The disembodied cries of a woman are heard or sometimes there are lullabies. A family who lived here in the 1970s had a young daughter who saw what she described as a 'sad lady.' This woman would tuck her in at night sometimes and give her a smile through her tears. The Lees had slaves and then servants and some of these people seem to continue on doing their jobs, so they are probably residual. A woman in period servant's clothing is seen in the kitchen looking as though she is cooking and pots and pans would move on their own. The nose pictures of cooking and baking food are smelled. A young servant has been seen carrying linens up the stairs and she fades away at the top. Disembodied footsteps are heard. The Lee's daughter Rebecca liked to play the piano. She died of tuberculosis in her twenties and now her spirit returns to play the piano in the parlor, late at night. Ghost City Tours reported, "One resident in the 1980s recorded the phantom music on a cassette tape. While the quality is poor, a melancholy melody can be heard, along with what sounds like a woman softly humming along with the music."

A young Confederate soldier is seen in the garden near an old magnolia tree that dates back to the Civil War era. The story behind him is that he was shot while delivering a message to Colonel Lee and he died beneath this tree. The sound of a horse galloping up the drive is heard late at night and if the door is opened, the scent of gunpowder is in the air. 

The Read House

Kelly and I have both been inside the The Read House, which is not a house, but rather a hotel. It is the longest continuously operating hotel in the southeast. Before this hotel was built here, there was the Crutchfield House. This was built in 1847 by Thomas Crutchfield, and his plan was to have a place where people could stay that were traveling across the Atlantic and Western railroad lines. And he had a great location for it. This hotel was right across from the new railway terminal. So you couldn't find a better place to put it. And it had a real golden period for about a decade. Crutchfield was born in 1801, and he moved with his family to Chattanooga in the 1830s. And one of the first things that he did here was to survey and clear the streets when they were first laying down the roots of Chattanooga. He and his brother-in-law had a brick kiln that was down near the river, and they helped to contribute to building some of the first brick homes that were in Chattanooga. He became a very successful businessman, which is why he had the money to build the Crutchfield Hotel. As is the case with a lot of big historical hotels and towns, they became the center of the community. Everybody would come here for meetings, political rallies, other civic kind of things. And so the Crutchfield was just like that. They had political rallies and such that happened here.

Things started going downhill for Crutchfield and the Crutchfield Hotel when a certain Jefferson Davis comes to town. He was heading home from the Senate in 1861, and he enters the lobby of the Crutchfield and gathers all these people around them and informs them that he has left the Senate. And not only that, but he is planning to lead the South into seceding from the Union. 

Now, you can imagine an announcement like this in a hotel is not going to go over well for an owner who maybe is not really into that kind of thinking. And Crutchfield was not. He was a loyalist and he was pissed. He jumps up on the counter and he points over to Jefferson Davis and he says, you, sir, are a traitor. Get out of my hotel. Well, things go to fisticuffs and the men start throwing punches at each other, as do many of the other people who are in the lobby. Of course, they are all toting guns at that time. So you've got guns being drawn just as these punches are being thrown as well. Crutchfield's son is in the middle of the melee and he sees what's going down. He grabs his dad and drags him out of the room. And this manages to prevent any bloodshed from happening. With the onslaught of the Civil War, Crutchfield decided that he didn't want to be running the hotel anymore. And so he sells it. And right after he sells it, Union forces come into Chattanooga. They manage to take the city and they take over the Crutchfield Hotel and turn it into a Union Army hospital. As you can imagine, that hotel bore the signs of being a Civil War hospital for a few years after that. A lot of people died here. There was a lot of blood all over the place. As a matter of fact, the floors were stained with blood that they could not get clean. They managed to make it through this period. They opened up as a hotel again after the Civil War stops.

That only lasted for a couple years because the hotel burned to the ground in 1867. For a couple of years, the ground just stayed that way. There was just the ruins of the Crutchfield there for a little bit. And then John T. Read came to town. He was a doctor and he saw this plot and he saw that it was a really good spot to build a hotel and he decided to build a new hotel on top of the Crutchfield ruins. 

This would be The Read House, which opened on New Year's Day in 1872. It was a really fancy looking place. In 1884, Grover Cleveland’s presidential victory was celebrated at Read House and he was the first democrat to be elected in 28 years. In 1904, Coca-Cola was first introduced in Chattanooga at the Read House drug store. In 1904, Read House adopted the European Plan with room rates at $1.00 and up and meals were served a la carte. The unusual Turkish baths were said to be the finest in the South. In 1926, the hotel was torn down and another hotel was constructed based on the design of two architects, Holabird and Roque. And they did it in the Georgian style. It stood 10 stories with 400 rooms and was just gorgeous inside with marble floors, walnut paneling, Waterford crystal chandeliers, carved woodwork and crown molding. In 1942, Sam died at the age of 83 and Albert Couch became the manager. The Read House heirs sold the hotel to Albert Noe and Associates. The hotel was renovated in 2004. For a while, the hotel was associated with Sheridan, but that ended in 2015. And now it is just known as the Read House. Some famous people that have visited the Read House include Gary Cooper, Winston Churchill, Oprah Winfrey and Al Capone. Capone stayed here for a short time during his federal trial in the early 20th century. They actually put custom iron bars on the window for the room that Capone was staying in so that they could keep him under lock and key. When they did that renovation in 2004, they took those custom iron bars off of the window, but they were there until that time.

One of the main ghost stories told about the Reed House centers on a woman named Anna. This is a legend, so of course, there are lots of different stories that are told about her. There are some people who believe that she was here with another man and that her jealous husband came and killed her. There's another story that claims she killed herself.

But the main story that's told about Anna is that she was named Anna Lisa Netherly and she was a lady of the evening. There was a Union soldier who decided that he would like her company for the evening and he went all out. He got himself a room at the Crutchfield Hotel and he took her there. They spent a few hours having a good time with each other and then towards the end of that evening, something happened. They had some kind of a disagreement. Maybe he wasn't going to pay up and they got into a fight. At the end of the fight, poor Anna ended up with her throat slit and she was on the floor, dying. This assault took place in Room 311. This took place in the Crutchfield Hotel, not in the Read Hotel, so one wouldn't think that Room 311 would be haunted in the current hotel. But guests claim to have experienced haunting activity in that room. While on a ghost tour, we were taken in the hotel and our tour guide Jessica said, "Do the people who work here know that it's haunted? What do you think? Yes, sir. Some of them know it's haunted. Some of them do not believe the place is haunted, don't believe in things like that. And others, non-believers, have had experiences that they cannot deny. Pictures that the manager of the steakhouse showed where employees have seen things like glowing hands on their shoulders while Snapchatting with their boyfriend, while completely alone in a locked office. And Mr. Read, the original owner of the hotel, showing up when an employee who didn't believe in ghosts snapped a few photos getting on the elevator after she had gone to the third floor to see the renovations. It had taken some time to renovate the third floor. They kept having trouble keeping employees working on the third floor. They would not show up for work. In some total, like 60 people in all wouldn't come back to work on the third floor of the hotel for whatever reason. They didn't explain. Yes, the third floor has definitely been creepy. The new owner has placed photographs to give hints to the guests that the place is haunted. You might have picked up on what's down there. The reason it's that particular photo is because the ghost that haunts room 311 was murdered in the bathtub. By her jealous boyfriend. Back in the 1920s, Anna Lisa Netherly was nearly beheaded by her boyfriend. He used a steak knife and made a bloody mess of the whole thing. Didn't quite get her head off but definitely ended her life. Ever since then, she has been targeting certain men who stay in the room. Making sure that they have a miserable stay. Keeping them awake and disturbed. Her personal items often ending up in the middle of the floor. Drawers pulled out and stacked on top of each other. The bathroom faucet is being turned on in the middle of the night. No one is in the bathroom. People have also seen a figure peering out of the bathroom in the middle of the night. Standing at the foot of the bed with her arms crossed. Kind of just staring at people. And also sitting on the bed next to women. Leaving a definite impression of her behind. Once she disappears. So that you know she is actually there." 

Tivoli Theater

The Tivoli Theater is known as the "Jewel of the South." The building was designed in the Beaux-Arts style by architects Rapp and Rapp and Reuben H. Hunt and built from iron, glass and steel by the John Parks Company. The interior featured crystal chandeliers, forest-green marble, music-motif medallions and red velvet covered chairs. 

The name was from Tivoli, Italy. This began as a moving-picture palace that was one of the first air-conditioned public buildings in the US. It opened in March of 1921 and closed in 1961. The theater reopened as a new Cultural Center. The city of Chattanooga bought the Tivoli in 1976 and Chattanooga's Department of Education, Arts, and Culture owns and operates the Tivoli. Today it features live music and shows. There is a ghost here that performers are told to acknowledge by calling out "hi," especially towards the balcony. This is a patron who used to come and watch everything and apparently if he is not acknowledged, the show or production will have some problems with the lighting or the sound system. A tour guide from another tour we took named Kevin said they had a problem with the sound system during one of their productions where it shut down for about 20 minutes and it was all because they didn't acknowledge the ghost. 

Hunter Museum of American Art

One of the cool things that we found out about Chattanooga was connected to Coca-Cola and that was that the first time Coca-Cola was bottled, you know taken from the fountain into bottles, was in Chattanooga. Since Coca-Cola thought that it was going to be a complete failure to put their product into bottles, they gave them the rights to bottle it for absolutely free. We're talking about this because Coke has a connection to the Hunter Museum. 

The museum sits above the Tennessee River on land that used to be home for the Cherokee. The mansion was built in 1904 by insurance broker Ross Faxon. Benjamin Thomas bought it in 1920, and he was a part of the founding of the Coca-Cola bottling company. He and his wife moved in there. They didn't have any children to pass the house onto, so they gave it to their nephew, George Thomas Hunter. And he's the one that's really known for living in this home. He was a lover of art. He filled it with all kinds of works of art. And that's why it's a museum. It basically showcases his art collection that he had. And also, of course, they have other artwork that they put in there. Apparently, there are five different ghosts that haunt this location. George Hunter is one of them. When I was standing outside of this museum, there was one window that kept drawing my attention, and I just kept looking at it. And I don't know why at first it was drawing my attention, but I just kept looking at it, and it seemed like it had a little bit more of a misty, foggy look to the front of it, and kind of like when a window is covered over with humidity or something. And so I just kept looking at it, and the tour guide ended up telling us that that is the window that George likes to sometimes look out of. The interesting thing is they've walled up all the windows up there because they don't want the artwork to get damaged by the sun, so there's no way that anybody could actually look out of any of those windows. Another haunt is actually from next door. (pg. 63)

Battle of Chickamauga 

Chickamauga Battlefield sits just south of Chattanooga, across the Georgia state line. The name Chickamauga is believed to derive from a Cherokee word meaning "river of death." Just like the Gettysburg Battlefield, this battlefield is dotted with over 1,400 monuments marking significant events and units. 

Abraham Lincoln believed that taking Chattanooga was as important as taking Richmond. If they could capture this city with four railroads converging within it, they could stop the Confederate supply lines. In the summer of 1863, Confederate General Braxton Bragg controlled Chatta­nooga. Union General William Rosecrans was sitting across the Tennessee River and threatening the rear of the Confederates. Bragg had been outmaneuvered by September and so the Confederate Army had no choice but to abandon the city and its remaining residents. Rosecrans pursued, but found that Bragg had gotten reinforced. The Battle of Chickamauga was fought on September 19–20, 1863, and it proved to be catastrophic for both sides. The landscape was hard as there were dense woods that made it hard for soldiers to differentiate who was who. Much of the fighting was confused and units would stumble into each other with point-blank combat. There was literal fog of war from all the smoking muskets and artillery. General Rosecrans moved his troops in such a way that he left a gap in the center of his line, which the Confederates swarmed through. General George Thomas had troops that made a heroic stand on a spot called Horseshoe Ridge. The fighting was intense and the only thing that saved the Union was darkness. General Rosecrans backed his army into Chat­tanooga and the Confederates occupied Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge. This surrounded Chattanooga and a siege began that lasted for a month until General Ulysses S. Grant and reinforcements arrived to help open a supply line into the city. We;ll talk about this more in a minute.

The Union suffered approximately 16,000 casualties and the Confederates suffered over 18,000. Several days passed before burial parties arrived and they dug shallow graves, which were uncovered by rain and animals. Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park was established in 1890 as one of the first national military parks in the United States.

The National Cemetery at Chattanooga was founded and reburials were done, but not all the bones were moved. These soldiers wouldn't have proper rest and that has led to hauntings. Visitors have seen full-bodied apparitions in the tree line and in the open fields. People hear the sound of gunfire in the morning and also drums beating a cadence. Disembodied voices are heard. And then there are the Green Eyes of Chickamauga. This is a legend about a pair of glowing green eyes that appear in the woods of the battlefield at night. The eyes don't blink and are located where they would be for human height. A story is told that these are the eyes of a Confederate soldier who was decapitated during the battle. Why the eyes glow green, nobody knows. Another version of the story claims that these are the eyes of a soldier who was blinded. Science claims that people are just seeing a type of bioluminescent fungi or animal eye shine. Along with the eyes, people see unexplained lights in the woods that are not like flashlights. There were two people who claimed to wreck their car in the because of Old Green Eyes.

Lookout Mountain

Six miles southwest of downtown Chattanooga is Lookout Mountain. Diane camped here in 2015. The Confederate Army had a tactical victory at Chickamauga and that had been the most significant Union defeat in the Western Theater of the Civil War. 

The Confederates controlled Chattanooga and Confederate General Braxton Bragg had his army on the high ground surrounding the city at Missionary Ridge to the east and Lookout Mountain to the southwest with plans to starve the Union forces. On the morning of November 24, 1863, Major General Joseph Hooker took his force of 10,000 men to Lookout Mountain and they climbed up it on the west and south. The fight would be called the Battle Above the Clouds as a fog moved in making visibility tough. Units couldn't see signals and they couldn't see the ground around them, so they stumbled blindly in both sight and what they were supposed to do. Muzzle flashes became the only way to see where the enemy might be. The battle was a bunch of independent skirmishes as everyone fought blind. The Union persisted and broke through the Confederates and gained the summit of Lookout Mountain. The siege was broken. A total lunar eclipse witnessed the retreat of the Confederates that evening. Almost immediately, Lookout Mountain became a tourist destination. Lookout Mountain is part of the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park. Point Park was established as a ten acre memorial park that overlooks the Lookout Mountain Battlefield and the city of Chattanooga. There are several monuments, with the New York Peace Memorial being the most prominent, and walking trails and a home that had been on the mountain during the battle, The Cravens House. Most of the fighting took place near the house and it was badly damaged. Robert Cravens returned with his family and they rebuilt the home. The underground caverns at Ruby Falls served as a field hospital. 

Unexplained activity has been reported, of course, and seems to increase during foggy conditions. Visitors can become as disoriented as the soldiers were. Could this be why people think they see and hear things? There are the muffled sounds of battle heard and figures are seen and many people feel like they are being watched. 

Newell Sanitarium

This was a private hospital and sanitarium founded in 1908 in downtown Chattanooga by cousins Dr. Edward T. Newell and Dr. Cecil Newell. They built a new building in 1911. The hospital resembled a colonial plantation home with massive columns and white porch railings and it was built from red bricks. The place was later named Newell Clinic Hospital. The first X-ray equipment in Chattanooga was here and one of the doctors trained in Boston and returned in 1938 with a hip pinning technique to fix fractured hips. In 1969, the hospital was purchased by a Nashville-based healthcare corporation and a new hospital building was built. The original colonial-style building was demolished and a modern medical wing replaced it. This is now called Kindred Hospital. The ghost tour we took told us that the typical controversial psychiatric treatments of the 1940s and 50s were employed here, including lobotomies, but there is no record of any of this. It's just a legend. 

However, we had something interesting occur. We had been told about the lobotomies and then we were told that a little girl ghost likes to hang out on the stairs there and had even been captured on camera holding a doll. We were using the Ghost Radar App outside the building. We first got doll and then we got brain. Coincidence? 

Chattanooga Choo Choo 

The Chattanooga Choo Choo is said to be one of the most haunted places in Chattanooga and we made the effort to check it out. Obviously, the railroad is significant in Chattanooga's history. The name Chattanooga Choo Choo is a nickname for the Cincinnati Southern Railways passenger train that went from Chattanooga to Cincinnati. It launched in March of 1880. 

The Southern Railway decided to build a grand Terminal Station in 1909, and this was done in the Beaux-Arts style. The station was open until 1970 and today it is a hotel complex that features restored train cars. People also say it hosts the spirits of railroad workers and passengers. Ghost City Tours had stopped by the hotel when planning out their tours and they took some photographs. They share on their website, "After photographing the inside of the building, I went out back to where the trains are. I was the only one out there, pretty perfect. So, I went about my business, setting up the tripod and taking photographs of anything that looked interesting. As I was photographing the main train body, I had my eyes trained to the camera. Through the glass, I watched a white figure come out from between two of the train cars. I immediately lifted my head to see it, but it was gone...I had just seen a ghost moving through the trains at the Chattanooga Choo Choo." The black porter ghost (pg. 68)

Cherry Street Tavern

The building that houses the popular restaurant and bar Cherry Street Tavern started as a boarding house in the 1870s. As was the case with historic buildings in bustling downtown areas, this one went on to be used for a variety of uses. There was a dry goods store and a tailor shop and during Prohibition, rumors claim it was a speakeasy. The Cherry Street Tavern opened in the 1970s and it features live entertainment.  

Staff and patrons all report experiences and it seems as though there are several ghosts here. Objects like pool balls and bar stools move on their own, lights flicker and there are unexplained cold spots. Wait staff claim to find their tips arranged with coins stacked upright and their name tags disappear and reappear later in weird places. One of the spirits is a woman in a period dress that likes to appear in a mirror at the end of the wall and she stares down at patrons as they eat at the booths. She's been nicknamed The Lady. Some people claim to have seen her sitting by herself at a corner table and she is often described as looking sad. Could she have run the boarding house? There is also the Phantom Bartender who shows up near closing time. Staff have seen him behind the bar wearing clothes of another time period and he seems to be working, cleaning up the bar back. When staff tries to go up to him, he vanishes. Bottles get rearranged overnight. There are ghosts in the basement as well and this seems to be the most active area. There are disembodied voices down there and one worker reported hearing a child's voice say his name when he went down to get more beer. He could actually see his breath when he heard his name and this freaked him out so bad, he left the beer and won't go into the basement unless someone goes with him. Disembodied footsteps are heard on the stairs. It is thought that the secret speakeasy was in the basement.

Chattanooga is a great city to visit, especially if you are into history and ghosts and the natural surroundings are just breathtaking. Dolly Parton taught us all that Tennessee is a great place and Chattanooga proves that to be true. Are these locations in Chattanooga haunted? That is for your to decide!

Source: Haunted Chattanooga by Jessica Penot and Amy Petulla, 2011 

HGB Ep. 654 - Thurber House

Moment in Oddity - Standard Wing Nightjar

Most of our listeners know that Diane and I are animal nuts, and birding is one of our favorite things to do when we are camping. The Standard Winged Nightjar is a nocturnal bird that transforms into something otherworldly during the breeding season. Found in the savannas of Africa, the male of this species sprouts two absurdly elongated feathers from the middle of its wings. These feathers grow up to twice the bird's actual body length, ending in large fantastical, flat flags that trail behind it like flying kites. During courtship displays, the male flits through the sky at dusk, making these detached-looking paddles flutter above him to mesmerize nearby female Nightjars. When it lands, the bizarre appendages fold back awkwardly, blending in with its perfectly camouflaged, bark-like plumage. There are many bizarre courtship rituals in the avian world. But a bird that flies with its own trailing banners to find a mate like a cessna pulling an advertisement banner looking for love, certainly is odd. 

Thurber House

The Thurber House in Columbus, Ohio is a charming home that is now a museum and meeting place for those with literary interests. There is a tragic and haunted history to the abode. The house sits on the outer border of the former Central Ohio Lunatic Asylum, which burned down in 1868, killing seven women in the fire. Jeweler Thomas Tracy Tress accidentally shot and killed himself in the house when he lived here. Writer, humorist and cartoonist James Thurber lived in the house for a time and he had a ghostly experience that he wrote about. Spirits do seem to knock about the place. Join us for the history and hauntings of the Thurber House. 

Columbus is the capitol of Ohio.  The city is nearly smack dab in the center of the state and so it made sense to make this the center of the state government. It was planned in 1812 and named for Christopher Columbus and quickly absorbed the nearby settlement of Franklinton that had been founded in 1797. When a branch of the Ohio and Erie Canal opened in 1831, the city grew and this growth skyrocketed with the arrival of the railroad in 1850. Columbus would become one of the country's major manufacturers of horse-drawn vehicles and the story of Columbus would continue to be one of transportation and industrial growth. The town took on the difficult task of caring for the mentally ill by building the Central Ohio Lunatic Asylum. The original hospital building was completed in 1838. In 1868, a fire burned the asylum to the ground. Seven patients were killed and over 300 patients had to be moved elsewhere. A new building was built in the Kirkbride style and opened in 1877. It was the largest building in the US until the Pentagon was built in 1943. The hospital would remain open for over a hundred years, closing in the late 1980s. It was eventually demolished. The Thurber House was built on the outer edge of the hospital's property in 1873.

So clearly, the land beneath the Thurber House already had its memories long before the first brick of the house was set. There were the asylum patients who had died. But more tragedy would be added to that after the house was constructed.

Thomas Tracy Tress was born in 1865 and he worked hard in jewelry, becoming the owner of Tress Diamonds. He opened a jewelry shop in downtown Columbus. He and his wife were prominent members of the community. Tress was a member of the Mt. Vernon Commandery, the Columbus Club, the Board of Trade and the Aladdin Temple. He was also the President of a dancing club. We don't know when he and his wife moved into the house at 77 Jefferson Avenue, but they were living there on April 27, 1904.It was a few minutes before 8pm when he had returned home and was in an upstairs room having a conversation with his wife and a woman named Tine Ackerman. Dinner had just been announced and Tress told his wife that he wanted to change his collar and then he would be down for dinner. Before the women left the room, Tress walked over to the dresser and picked up an .38 caliber Iver Johnson revolver that was sitting on it. He whipped around with thew gun in his hand and scared his wife. He laughed and said that the gun wasn't loaded, but she insisted that he put the gun down. He said, "Why, it's not dangerous. Look at me." He put the gun muzzle to his left chest and pulled the trigger. The gun, unfortunately, was loaded. Tress managed to walk himself across the room to a couch and he laid down. He said that he had been foolish and then passed out. Medical help was called, but it wouldn't help. Tress died at the age of 39.

The house was named for its most famous resident. James Thurber was one of the foremost American humorists of the 20th century. He was born in Columbus, Ohio on December 8, 1894 to Mary Agnes "Mame" Fisher and Charles Leander Thurber. 

Thurber's father was a civil clerk and he used to change jobs a lot. Every time he would change a job, he would change the home they lived in. So they moved from house to house to house through most of his childhood. Much of Thurber's humorous writing was inspired by his mother because she was considered a brilliant humorist. Her jokes and theatrics were immortalized by Thurber in a lot of his own writing. Thurber had two brothers, an older one named William and a younger one named Robert. And it would be William who would shoot James' eye out. Apparently the guys were playing a childhood game of William Tell and as part of the game seven-year-old James turned around and waited for his brother William to shoot at him with what was apparently a blunt arrow. His brother was taking a long time so Thurber turned back around just as his brother let the arrow go and he was accidentally shot in his left eye which irreversibly blinded him and he had to have a prosthetic put in that eye. Later on in life Thurber would lose the vision that he had in his remaining eye due to a medical condition but he always continued to write and draw.

From 1913 to 1918, Thurber attended Ohio State University and he wrote for the college paper, The Lantern. He also became editor in chief of the Sun Dial which was a humor and literary magazine. It was during this time when he was going to OSU that the Thurbers rented the house at 77 Jefferson Avenue. 

We'll come back to this time at the house as it entails the most famous ghost story about the house. Throughout the years Thurber worked for the federal government first in Washington D.C. then at the American Embassy in Paris. He eventually came back to Columbus in 1920 and worked for the Columbia Dispatch as a reporter. James got married and move to New York and in 1926 he began his career as a freelance writer. There he became friends with E.B. White who was the author of Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web and it would be E.B. White who would introduce him to the editor of the New Yorker, Harold Ross, and Ross hired Thurber. E.B. White and Thurber shared an office at the New Yorker and Thurber had been working on some drawings, which he ended up throwing into a trash can. White looked at them and thought they were pretty good, so he submitted them to the New Yorker for publication and they did publish them and this began Thurber's decades-long career of contributing drawings and writings to the New Yorker. The two men also worked on their first book together which was called "Is Sex Necessary" and it featured a number of Thurber's cartoons. Thurber collaborated in 1940 on a comedy play that  was called The Male Animal. This made its way to Broadway, became a hit, and then was turned into a 1942 movie starring Henry Fonda and Olivia de Havilland. In 1947, Thurber probably published one his most popular works, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, and this was adapted into a feature film that starred Danny Kaye and Boris Karloff. 

Thurber was prolific and he wrote other plays and dozens of books. In his later years, he struggled with a thyroid condition and then he was stricken with a blood clot in his brain in October of 1961. While a surgery to deal with the clot was successful, James ended up dying on November 2nd of that year due to complications from pneumonia. He was 66 years old at the time. 

Now looking back at the Thurber House, when the Thurbers moved out of 77 Jefferson Avenue, the home changed hands many times. It became a music school, a beauty shop, and a boarding house. Eventually, it fell into disrepair and it was set to be demolished in the 1970s. But before the house could be torn down, attorney Arthur Worreys purchased all of the properties on the Jefferson Avenue ellipse and his intention was to restore all those homes and turn the block into a community of non-profit organizations. There were several historic Victorian homes. 77 Jefferson was going to take a lot of work because it had extensive deterioration. The woodwork had been painted over, the floorboards were rotted out and the fireplaces had been covered up. They have managed to restore it and Robert Thurber, who was the younger brother of James, helped with some of the restoration and actually donated some items from the family. So some of the items that are in the house today, did belong to them. It now looks the way it did when the Thurber family lived here from 1913 to 1917, with the same kind of wallpaper, antique furnishings, and the woodwork has been preserved. Today, the Thurber house is a non-profit literary arts center that offers creative programming for adults and children and has the James Thurber Museum that's available for public tours. Rooms on view include the former parlor, the living room and its alcove, the dining room, five bedrooms, and the bathroom that Thurber hid in to avoid the ghost running up the back stairs. Wait, did we just say "to avoid a ghost?"

Not only did James Thurber claim to have heard a ghost in the house on November 17, 1915 and believed to his dying day that the home was haunted, but other people who have visited and worked in the house have had experiences themselves. People believe there are several spirits, including the asylum patients, the jeweler Tress and some believe that Thurber returned to this home, perhaps because of his ghostly experience or because it is a museum dedicated to him and his writing. 

The museum embraces the fact that they have a haunted history here and talk about it on their website. People have experienced unusual phenomenon over the years which included a clock chiming despite not being operational, the glass in a picture frame inexplicably shattered all over the floor, there's been sightings of glowing orbs, a full-bodied apparition of a man in a collared shirt has been seen, disembodied footsteps have been heard, people have had the sensation of being touched or poked, and witnesses have report books flying from their shelves and disembodied footsteps on the back staircase, which is also where James Thurber had heard some ghostly footsteps as well. James Thurber wrote a short story about his experience and it was entitled, "The Night the Ghost Got In." Here's how the story went: 

"The ghost that got into our house on the night of November 17, 1915 raised such a hullabaloo of misunderstandings that I'm sorry I didn't just let it keep on walking and go to bed. Its advent caused my mother to throw a window of the house next door and ended up with my grandfather shooting a patrolman. I'm sorry therefore, as I've said, that I ever paid any attention to the footsteps. They began about a quarter past one o'clock in the morning, a rhythmic quick cadence walking around the dining room table. My mother was asleep in one room upstairs, my brother Herman in another. Grandfather was in the attic in an old walnut bed which, as you will remember, once fell on my father. I had just stepped out of the bathtub and was busily rubbing myself with a towel when I heard the steps. They were the steps of a man walking rapidly around the dining room table downstairs. The light from the bathroom shone down the back steps, which dropped directly into the dining room. I could see the faint shine of plates on the plate rail. I couldn't see the table. The steps kept going round and round the table. At regular intervals, a board creaked when it was trod upon. I supposed at first that it was my father or my brother Roy, who had gone to Indianapolis, but were expected home at any time. I suspected next that it was a burglar. It did not enter my mind until later that it was a ghost. After the walking had gone on for perhaps three minutes, I tiptoed to Herman's room. Psst! I hissed in the dark, shaking him. Ah, he said in the low, hopeless tone of a despondent beagle. He always half suspected that something would get him in the night. I told him who I was. There's something downstairs, I said. He got up and followed me to the head of the back staircase. We listened together. There was no sound. The steps had ceased. Herman looked at me in some alarm. I had only the bath towel around my waist. He wanted to go back to bed, but I gripped his arm. There's something down there, I said. Instantly the steps began again, circled the dining room table like a man running, and started up the stairs towards us, heavily, two at a time. The light still shone palely down the stairs. We saw nothing coming. We only heard the steps. Herman rushed to his room and slammed the door. I slammed shut the door at the stairs' top and held my knee against it. After a long minute I slowly opened it again. There was nothing there. There was no sound. None of us ever heard the ghost again. The slamming of the doors had roused Mother. She peered out of her room. What on earth are you boys doing, she demanded. Herman ventured out of his room. Nothing, he said gruffly, but he was, in color, a light green. What was all that running around downstairs, said Mother. So she had heard the steps, too. We just looked at her. Burglars, she shouted intuitively. I tried to quiet her by starting lightly downstairs. Come on, Herman, I said. I'll stay with Mother, he said. She's all excited. I stepped back onto the landing. Don't either of you go a step, said Mother. We'll call the police. Since the phone was downstairs, I didn't see how we were going to call the police, nor did I want the police, but Mother made one of her quick, incomparable decisions. She flung up a window of her bedroom, which faced the bedroom windows of the house of a neighbor, picked up a shoe, and whammed it through a pane of glass across the narrow space that separated the two houses. Glass tinkled into the bedroom occupied by a retired engraver named Bodwell and his wife. Bodwell had been for some years in rather a bad way and was subject to mild attacks. Most everybody we knew or lived near had some kind of attacks. It was now about two o'clock of a moonless night. Clouds hung black and low. Bodwell was at the window in a minute, shouting, frothing a little, shaking his fist. We'll sell the house and go back to Peoria, we could hear Mrs. Bodwell saying. It was some time before Mother got through to Bodwell. Burglars, she shouted, burglars in the house. Herman and I hadn't dared to tell her that it was not burglars but ghosts, but she was even more afraid of ghosts than of burglars. Bodwell at first thought that she meant there were burglars in his house, but finally he quieted down and called the police for us over an extension phone by his bed. After he'd disappeared from the window, Mother suddenly made as if to throw another shoe, not because there was further need of it but, as she later explained, because the thrill of heaving a shoe through a window glass had enormously taken her fancy. I prevented her. I think I love his mother. The police were on hand in commendably short time, a Ford sedan full of them, two on motorcycles, and a patrol wagon with about eight in it, and a few reporters. They sent out the cavalry, it sounds like. They began banging on our front door. Flashlights shot streaks of gleam up and down the walls, across the yard, down the walk between our house and Bodwell's. Open up, cried a hoarse voice. We're men from headquarters. I wanted to go down and let them in since there they were, but Mother wouldn't hear of it. You haven't a stitch on, she pointed out. You'd catch your death. I wound the towel around me again. Finally the cops put their shoulders to our big heavy front door with its thick beveled glass and broke it in. I could hear a rending of wood and a splash of glass on the floor of the hall. Their lights played all over the living room and crisscrossed nervously in the dining room, stabbed into hallways, shot up the front stairs, and finally up the back. They caught me standing in my towel at the top. A heavy policeman bounded up the steps. Who are you, he demanded. I live here, I said. Well, what's the matter, you hot, he asked. It was, as a matter of fact, cold. I went to my room and pulled on some trousers. On my way out, a cop stuck a gun into my ribs. What you doing here, he demanded. I live here, I said. The officer in charge reported to Mother, no sign of nobody, lady, he said. Must have got away. What'd he look like? There were two or three of them, Mother said, whooping and carrying on and slamming doors. Funny, said the cop. All your windows and doors was locked on the inside tight as a tick. Downstairs we could hear the tromping of the other police. Police were all over the place. Doors were yanked open, drawers were yanked open, windows were shot up and pulled down. Furniture fell with dull thumps. A half dozen policemen emerged out of the darkness of the front hallway upstairs. They began to ransack the floor, pulled beds away from walls, tore clothes off hooks in the closets, pulled suitcases and boxes off shelves. One of them found an old zither that Roy had won in a pool tournament. Looky here, Joe, he said, strumming it with a big paw. The cop named Joe took it and turned it over. What is it, he asked me. It's an old zither our guinea pig used to sleep on, I said. It was true that a pet guinea pig we once had would never sleep anywhere except on the zither, but I should never have said so. Joe and the other cop looked at me a long time. They put the zither back on a shelf. No sign of nothing, said the cop who had first spoken to mother. This guy, he explained to the others, jerking a thumb at me, was naked. The lady seems historical. They all nodded but said nothing, just looked at me. In the small silence we all heard a creaking in the attic. Grandfather was turning over in bed. What's that, snapped Joe. Five or six cops sprang for the attic door before I could intervene or explain. I realized that it would be bad if they burst in on Grandfather unannounced or even announced. He was going through a phase in which he believed that General Meade's men, under steady hammering by Stonewall Jackson, were beginning to retreat and even desert. When I got to the attic, things were pretty confused. Grandfather had evidently jumped to the conclusion that the police were deserters from Meade's army trying to hide away in his attic. He bounded out of bed wearing a long flannel nightgown over long woolen underwear, a nightcap, and a leather jacket around his chest. The cops must have realized at once that the indignant white-haired old man belonged in the house, but they had no chance to say so. Back, you cowardly dogs, roared Grandfather. Back to the lines, you goddamn lily-livered cattle. With that, he fetched the officer who found the zither, a flat-handed smack alongside his head that sent him sprawling. The others beat a retreat, but not fast enough. Grandfather grabbed Zither's gun from its holster and let fly. The report seemed to crack the rafter, smoke filled the attic. A cop cursed and shot his hand to his shoulder. Somehow, we all finally got downstairs again and locked the door against the old gentleman. He fired once or twice more in the darkness and then went back to bed. That was Grandfather, I explained to Joe out of breath. He thinks you're deserters. I'll say he does, said Joe. The cops were reluctant to leave without getting their hands on somebody besides Grandfather. The night had been distinctly a defeat for them. Furthermore, they obviously didn't like the layout. Something looked, and I can see their viewpoint, phony. They began to poke into things again. A reporter, a thin-faced wispy man, came up to me. I'd put on one of Mother's blouses, not being able to find anything else. The reporter looked at me with mingled suspicion and interest. Just what the hell is the real low down here, bud, he asked. I decided to be frank with him. We had ghosts, I said. He gazed at me a long time as if I were a slot machine into which he had, without results, dropped a nickel. Then he walked away. The cops followed him. The one Grandfather shot, holding his now-bandaged arm, cursing and blaspheming. I'm gonna get my gun back from that old bird, said the zither cop. Yeah, said Joe. You and who else? I told them I would bring it to the station house the next day. What was the matter with that one policeman, Mother asked after they had gone? Grandfather shot him, I said. What for, she demanded. I told her he was a deserter. Of all things, said Mother. He was such a nice-looking young man. Grandfather was fresh as a daisy and full of jokes at breakfast next morning. We thought at first he'd forgotten all about what had happened, but he hadn't. Over his third cup of coffee, he glared at Herman and me. What was the idea of all them cops, tarry-hooting around the house last night, he demanded. He had us there." 

Thurber always maintained this happened and he changed the address of the house so that it wouldn't bring too much attention to the original house. We have to wonder what was all that running around the table about? And boy, what a commotion it started there. We find it interesting that it never seems to have happened again while they were there.

Anne Touvell, who was the Thurber House Deputy Director, told the Columbus Monthly in 2015, "... a ghost group came in here once, and the electronic voice phenomenon they recorded was clear as day. They asked the air, 'Did you accidentally shoot yourself in this house?' And, I swear, the voice came back on the recorder saying, 'Ask her.' A volunteer named Jan Williams stated in the same article, "Our cleaning people, who also clean the other buildings on the block, they say they've had stuff happen. They won't clean at night anymore. One of our writers had a dog, and it kept barking and barking at the corner in the front room; it wouldn't let her near that corner." Amy Drake shared in a Medium article about a short film that she shot in the Thurber House called Showdown in Amherst. She wrote, "I silently asked for Mr. Tress’s blessing for our filming. As it turns out he had quite a sense of humor. We used authentic late 19th century clothes from my personal collection as costumes for the film. The man’s coat, worn by actor Douglas Fries, had secure buttons when it left my house. During the shoot, one of the buttons fell off. The back of the button was engraved with the name Tress(e), as, I discovered, were all the buttons. After the shoot, I was notified via email that a bookseller had a silk advertising ribbon from Tress Diamonds for sale on Ebay. I purchased and framed the ribbon. In the film credits, I thanked Mr. Tress for his cooperation. I believe he just wanted to be remembered and involved." 

Tom Moore wrote in a News and Sentinel article about visiting the museum and the docent "began telling us a few things that have happened there including the clock that opened on its own, along with people claiming to have seen a gentleman standing behind them with a white collar when they look in the mirror above the fireplace in the parlor."

Did James Thurber really have this ghostly experience? Have other people experienced unexplained stuff here? Is the Thurber House haunted? That is for you to decide.

HGB Ep. 653 - The Life and Afterlife of Jimi Hendrix

This Month in History - The Lawrence Massacre

In the month of August, on the 21st, in 1863, about 450 irregular Confederate raiders attacked the pro-Union town of Lawrence, Kansas. The bushwhackers were led by William Quantrill, with the group being known as 'Quantrill's Raiders'. They were a brutal party of men that operated along the Missouri-Kansas border. The band of partisan rangers were created to fight Union forces and pro-Union civilians using ruthless tactics. Some of the more infamous members were the future outlaws, Frank and Jesse James, as well as Cole Younger. The notorious Confederate guerrilla group targeted Lawrence, Kansas due to the location being a center for anti-slavery Jayhawkers, and also a Union stronghold. This attack became known as the Lawrence Massacre. It resulted in the deaths of roughly 150 men and boys, as well as the burning of much of the town. The raid led Union authorities to issue the General Order No. 11. This determined the fundamental rules governing the actions of military sentries, covering duties, safety, and conduct. The order forced the depopulation of rural areas in several pro-Confederate counties in western Missouri to cut off support to the guerrillas. The U.S. Army also built temporary military posts around Lawrence to protect the area. Despite the immense devastation, the surviving residents of Lawrence refused to abandon the settlement. Instead, they rallied and rebuilt their city. 

The Life and Afterlife of Jimi Hendrix 

Jimi Hendrix was one of the greatest and most influential guitarists of all time. His band, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, was just that, an experience. They blazed a path through music like none other with Jimi leading as band conductor, conjuring music magic. Hendrix music genius burned intense, but not for long as he entered the storied 27 Club when he died at the age of 27. Many claim that Jimi's spirit continues on in the afterlife, haunting several locations. Join us for the life and afterlife of Jimi Hendrix.

Hendrix was born as Johnny Allen Hendrix on November 27, 1942 to James Allen Hendrix - who went by Al - and his wife Lucille in Seattle. The couple had married on March 31, 1942, three days before the senior Hendrix was sent off for basic training after being drafted into the Army during World War II. Johnny was born eight months later. The military didn't allow Al to go see his newborn son. As a matter of fact, he wouldn't meet Jimi for three years and Lucille struggled to raise Jimi on her own. She gave him to family members for those first couple years. In 1946, Hendrix's parents changed his name to James Marshall Hendrix to give him his father's first name and his uncle's first name became his middle name. 

These early years for Jimi Hendrix were tough with his dad unable to find good work after getting out of the Army. Both Al and his wife Lucille were alcoholics. This led to violent fights that would have little Jimi hiding in his closet. Jimi was joined by four younger siblings: Leon, Joseph, Kathy and Pamela. 

Joseph, Kathy and Pamela were given up to the foster system and adoption. Leon was bounced around quite a bit as well, occasionally being reunited with Jimi who obviously lived in constant fear of separation from Leon and his parents. Jimi would later tell a girlfriend that he had been sexually molested by a man in a uniform, so he had that on his plate as well. When he was nine, his parents divorced and Leon and Jimi went to Al. It was at about this time that Al started noticing that Jimi had a serious interest in music. Young Jimi would sit on the end of his bed and as Al shared, "I used to have Jimmy clean up the bedroom all the time while I was gone, and when I would come home I would find a lot of broom straws around the foot of the bed. I’d say to him, `Well didn’t you sweep up the floor?’ and he’d say, `Oh yeah,’ he did. But I’d find out later that he used to be sitting at the end of the bed there and strumming the broom like he was playing a guitar." Jimi was interested in B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Buddy Holly, and Robert Johnson. Al found an old one-string ukulele and he gave it to Jimi, so he had something better to strum. Al saved up some money and in the summer of 1958, he bought a five-dollar, second-hand acoustic guitar from a friend. Jimi practiced on it and learned some licks from a guitar playing friend named Billy Davis and then joined his first band, which was named The Velvetones. The acoustic guitar was hard to hear over the rest of the band. Jimi decided to leave the band a pursue his own interests.

The year 1958 would also bring the death of Jimi's mother from cirrhosis. He was fifteen at the time. His father poured him and his brother Leon some whiskey and told them that was how men dealt with loss. A little later, Jimi started begging his dad to buy him an electric guitar. At first, Al refused, but he finally relented and bought a Supro Ozark 1560S. Jimi then joined The Rocking Kings.

That electric guitar ended up getting stolen backstage a few months later, but Al was so proud of what his some was doing, he bought him another guitar, a red Silvertone Danelectro. When Jimi wasn't playing, he was getting himself into a bit of trouble. His friends liked to hotwire cars and he was caught in stolen cars twice. The authorities told him that he had two choices when he was 19. He could go to jail or he could join the Army. He opted to enlist in the United States Army in 1961. Jimi did well and in November 1962 earned the right to wear the “Screaming Eagles” patch for the paratroop division. Music was still his thing while he was enlisted and at Fort Campbell in Kentucky he Jimmy formed The Casuals with bassist Billy Cox. Jimi wrote his dad about his experiences at Fort Campbell, "There's nothing but physical training and harassment here for two weeks, then when you go to jump school...you get hell. They work you to death, fussing and fighting." Then came a parachute jump that didn't go well and Jimi broke his ankle. The injury was bad enough that he was medically discharged. At least according to some reports. There doesn't seem to be any official records reflecting this and there are other stories that he was discharged because his platoon sergeant, James C. Spears, filed a report that said, "He [Hendrix] has no interest whatsoever in the Army...It is my opinion that Private Hendrix will never come up to the standards required of a soldier. I feel that the military service will benefit if he is discharged as soon as possible."

Whatever was the true story, Jimi was out of the army. Billy Cox was a fellow service member who had been in The Casuals with Jimi and when he was discharged, he joined up with Jimi and they reformed the group and changed the name to King Kasuals. 

They performed in Tennessee and while there, Jimi saw a guitarist playing with his teeth. After watching another guitarist do the same thing, Jimi took it up. He said of this, "The idea of doing that came to me...in Tennessee. Down there you have to play with your teeth or else you get shot. There's a trail of broken teeth all over the stage." For some time, the group played small venues for very little money and then they decided to head to Nashville and they set themselves up on Jefferson Street, which at the time was the heart of the rhythm and blues music scene and where the black community gathered. The street served as a legendary stop on the "Chitlin' Circuit" and a place that began to fuel the Civil Rights Movement. The Jefferson Street Sound Museum's website shares, "Retail, restaurants, pharmacies, funeral homes and churches were opening on Jefferson. You could be born, marry, raise your family, and be buried without ever leaving your Jefferson Street neighborhood." Locations like The Silver Streak ballroom featured Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Count Basie, and Ella Fitzgerald and the Blue Room at Del Morocco had Little Richard, Ruth Brown, Nat King Cole and Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald performed here as well. The Golden Age of Jefferson Street lasted from the 1930s until 1965. The King Kasuals had a brief residency at Del Morocco.

Jimi needed extra money and he worked as a session guitarist under the name Jimmy James for acts like Ike and Tina Turner, Sam Cooke, the Isley Brothers, and Little Richard. Jimmy parted ways with Little Richard to form his own band, Jimmy James and the Blue Flames, shedding the role of back-line guitarist for the spotlight of lead guitar. 

In 1964, Jimi decided to break out on his own and he ended up in Harlem. There he met Lithofayne Pridgon who went by Faye. The two started dating and with Faye's connections to the music scene in Harlem, he made some friends. Faye encouraged him to compete in an amateur contest at the Apollo Theater in February 1964 and he won first prize. Shortly after that, Ronnie Isley gave Hendrix an audition and the Isley Brothers asked him to become their guitarist. He toured with them for most of 1964 and then jumped to Little Richard's touring band. It would be during a performance with Little Richard's band on Night Train in July of 1965 that Hendrix would have his first live footage of him performing. Later that month, Little Richard's brother Robert would fire Hendrix for tardiness, wardrobe and the way Jimi conducted himself on stage. Hendrix joined Curtis Knight and the Squires and played with them for eight months. Hendrix got a recording contract with Sue Records that lasted for two years, but before it was over he signed a three-year contract with entrepreneur Ed Chalpin. This would cause legal problems for Hendrix later. 

In 1966, Hendrix moved to Greenwich Village and he played the rounds of smaller venues there. During a July performance, he met the Animals’ bassist Chas Chandler during a performance at Caf‚ Wha? and he was impressed with Jimi’s performance. In September, Chandler returned and signed Hendrix to an agreement that would take him to London to form a new band. 

It was at this time that Chandler had Jimi change his name to the J-I-M-I spelling. Drummer Mitch Mitchell and bassist Noel Redding were brought on board and the Jimi Hendrix Experience was born. London fell in love with the group and they soon became the talk of the town. Jimi had formed his style and material shortly before this in a short lived group he put together called Jimmy James and the Blue Flames. This style was described as mesmerizing and would become his trademark. The Experience recorded their first single, "Hey Joe" and it spent ten weeks on the UK charts, topping out at spot No. 6 in early 1967. This gave the band the encouragement they needed to record a full-length album, which would be "Are You Experienced." This was a psychedelic musical compilation with the tracks “Purple Haze,” “The Wind Cries Mary,” “Foxey Lady,” “Fire,” and “Are You Experienced?” Purple Haze opens the album with those first strums of the signature Hendrix chord on the electric guitar and before long you are kissing the sky in a purple haze. This isn't about drugs although many people assume it is. Rather, it's a dreamlike love song. The song is from the perspective of a man infatuated with a woman to the point of being dazed and confused. The descriptor of purple haze probably was inspired by the science fiction he liked to read. A Philip Jose Farmer story called "Night of Light," Farmer describes sunspots that produce a purplish haze that has a disorienting effect on people. Purple haze also appears in Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead." Purple Haze would be the second single released by The Experience. 

Some of the inspiration for the love songs on the album, specifically "Foxey Lady," came from writer Kathy Etchingham whom Hendrix met in London and the couple dated for nearly three years. This would be his most significant relationship. When they met in 1966, she was a DJ in London and knew everybody there was to know in music at the time like The Beatles and The Who. The couple drifted apart at the end of 1968.

Hendrix second album was "Axis: Bold as Love" dropped in 1967 and is lauded for its melodic guitar work and revealed that Hendrix was a poetic genius of songwriting. "Castles Made of Sand" really reveals this. The album is a psychedelic and funk trip that generated controversy over its album cover featuring Hindu religious iconography. That imagery actually was not from Hendrix and he publicly expressed his dissatisfaction with it. The album was certified platinum and is ranked number 92 on Rolling Stone's 2020 list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time." Hendrix returned to America in June 1967 and performed at the Monterey International Pop Festival. His performance of "Wild Thing" drove the crowd nuts and from then on, The Jimi Hendrix Experience became one of most popular and highest grossing touring acts in the world. The iconic image of Hendrix setting his guitar on fire and conjuring flames from it came from this festival. Rolling Stone's Alex Vadukul wrote of this moment, "When Jimi Hendrix set his guitar on fire at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival he created one of rock's most perfect moments. Standing in the front row of that concert was a 17-year-old boy named Ed Caraeff. Caraeff had never seen Hendrix before nor heard his music, but he had a camera with him and there was one shot left in his roll of film. As Hendrix lit his guitar, Caraeff took a final photo. It would become one of the most famous images in rock and roll." 

Back here in America, Jimi built himself a studio in New York City named Electric Lady Studios. The album "Electric Ladyland" dropped in 1968 and would be Jimi Hendrix's third and final studio album and it is considered his best. This was a double LP and the top single off of it is a cover of Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower." This would be The Experience's only number one album. 

The demands of touring and studio work really took a toll on The Experience and by 1969 the band had disbanded. The band members were tired of Hendrix's unpredictable work ethic and he could be a tyrant in the studio wanting everything his way. The band had mostly just become a back-up band and they wanted more. There last performance together was at Barry Fey's Denver Pop Festival hosted at Mile High Stadium. The show got crazy with police having to use tear gas on the audience and fans nearly crushed a rental truck that had to carry the band away. The break-up wouldn't hurt Hendrix at all. He was the world's highest-paid rock musician at that time. In the summer of 1969, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair was hosted and Hendrix headlined the line-up. Jimi was joined by Mitch Mitchell, Billy Cox, Juma Sultan, and Jerry Velez. He was apprehensive about playing when he heard how large the crowd was because he liked to play in more intimate settings. The mud-soaked audience loved the performance.

Hendrix formed a new band with bassist Billy Cox and Electric Flag drummer Buddy Miles and they called themselves the Band of Gypsys and they did four New Year’s performances that were compiled and later released on the1970 album Band of Gypsys. Billy Cox stuck around and Mitch Mitchell came back and the Jimi Hendrix Experience was reborn. 

There were some bad feelings about this because Noel Redding had not been told that Jimi had no intention of having him in the re-formed Experience and so he showed up in NYC expecting to participate in rehearsals and was told Billy Cox had replaced him. Redding had every reason to be shocked as he had just been interviewed by Rolling Stone with both Hendrix and Mitchell and they talked about how they were re-forming. Albums have been released posthumously. One of the best that reveals the direction that Jimi was probably heading was "Blue Wild Angel at the Isle of Wight." This was a live album released in 2002. It's a great listen and Hendrix almost sounds like he has a bit of an English accent he has adopted. One of my favorite performances of Hendrix is his "Star Spangled Banner" at the Woodstock Festival in August 1969. It's cool how he wove in pieces of "America the Beautiful" and "Taps" in the feedback and distortion he played. Woven through all of this success was a demon the Hendrix couldn't beat. He started off like his parents in 1962 with alcohol. Alcohol was described as the scourge of his existence. It would drive him to occasional outbursts that could get violent. Pot, hashish, heroin and amphetamines were other drugs he used throughout the 1960s, with a little cocaine here and there. There are discrepancies as to when Hendrix first took LSD, but there is no doubt that he was on it at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. Kathy Etchingham wrote of his use of LSD, "Like most acid-heads, Jimi had visions and he wanted to create music to express what he saw. He would try to explain this to people, but it didn't make sense because it was not linked to reality in any way." Some intoxicated outbursts got him arrested and he even once hit a girlfriend above the eye with a vodka bottle and she needed stitches. It would be these drugs that were blamed for his death.

The standard narrative around Jimi's death is that he overdosed on drugs, which caused him to choke to death on his own vomit. But many people dispute this as the cause. The main witness to everything was a German artist named Monika Dannemann (DAHN eh mehn). On September 17, 1970, Hendrix was staying with her at her apartment in the Samarkand Hotel in London. Dannemann made dinner for the couple and they shared a bottle of wine at 11 pm. Jimi wanted to go to a party at a friend's house, so she drove him there around 1:45 am. After about an hour, he called her to come pick him up and the two arrived back to her apartment at 3 am. They stayed up and talked until around 7 am and then decided to get some sleep. Dannemann said she thought that Hendrix took around nine Vesparax sleeping pills.  Dannemann woke up around 11 a.m. and found Hendrix unconscious and unresponsive, but still breathing. She called for an ambulance at 11:18 am, and it arrived nine minutes later and they took Hendrix to St Mary Abbots Hospital where he was pronounced dead at 12:45 p.m. on September 18th. An autopsy by Coroner Gavin Thurston revealed that Hendrix had aspirated his own vomit and died of asphyxia while intoxicated with barbiturates. But he ended it with "insufficient evidence of the circumstances." This left an open verdict. Hendrix embalmed body was flown to Seattle and funeral services were held at Dunlap Baptist Church with his body being interred at Greenwood Cemetery in Renton, Washington where his mother was buried. He was exhumed and reburied under a better memorial in 2002. His father and step-mother were buried in the vault there with him.

But not everybody believes that Hendrix died from an accidental overdose. With an open verdict on the autopsy, it left doubts. Then Dannemann’s story changed multiple times with changing timelines, inconsistencies and conflicting statements. The paramedics who responded to her call said that she wasn't in the apartment when they arrived. 

There seemed to be a significant delay of several hours before emergency services were contacted. Kathy Etchingham disputed claims Dannemann made about her relationship with Jimi. Dannemann claimed they were engaged. A friend named Philip Harvey had been talking to Jimi at the Samarkand around 10 pm when Dannemann stormed out of the place screaming that she was leaving. Hendrix followed after her wondering what was going on and the couple fought outside, making a scene. Harvey went out and asked them to come inside and Dannemann told him to mind his own business. He said, "At around 10:30 p.m. Jimi came back into the house alone and walked into the reception room. … He apologized profusely for Monika’s behavior and said that she was very embarrassed. He said he didn’t really know what was wrong with her but she had obviously had too much to drink. He said that Monika refused to come back into the house and that, as he couldn’t abandon her, he would have to leave with her. … Monika was still screaming at Jimi as they left and she did not say a word to me. The time was about 10:40 p.m.” How could she be making dinner for him and drinking wine at 11 pm if they had already left? A woman at the party named Angie Burdon wrote a letter to Kathy Etchingham that said, "That chick [Dannemann] came back about half an hour later. Jimi got Stella [Douglas] to put her off. She called up on the intercom. She came back again. Jimi put her off his time. By then he seemed quite uptight. I know Jimi, so I knew what he was feeling. She came back again. He got angry because she wouldn’t leave him for long enough. In fact, she was begging him...He asked Stella again to put her off. Stella was rude to her, and the chick asked to speak with Jimi. Well, when he finally got to the intercom, he mumbled something, and then without saying anything, just got into the lift and split. That was around 3 a.m." 

The picture we are getting here is that Dannemann is unreasonable and extremely jealous, thinking that she and Jimi have some kind of relationship that they do not have. Some people claim she was simply an employee who assisted him by driving him places. A breakdown of Jimi's last few hours reveals inconsitencies in Dannemann's version of events. 

After getting back to her apartment, she said she made a tuna fish sandwich for Jimi. The autopsy only revealed long grain rice in his stomach from a vegetarian meal served to him at the party. There was no tuna in his stomach. The coroner based the time of death at 5:30 am because of the level of digestion of the rice. At 6:30 am, Dannemann starts making calls to friends, the first a woman named Alvenia Bridges who isn't available. She then calls Eric Burdon who said in an interview later that “It was still dark” when he got the call and that Dannemann was distraught because she said Jimi was unconscious and she couldn't wake him. Burdon tells her to call an ambulance. He then said, "She argued about it, saying that there were incriminating things in the flat, which I guess she took care of." In a deposition, Dannemann claimed that Jimi was awake at 7 am and that she took a sleeping pill and went to sleep at that time. She claimed to awaken at 9 am. 

A former roadie of The Animals who was friends with Hendrix, dashed off to a hotel called the Cumberland where he thought Hendrix was staying because he had heard Jimi was having trouble. This was between 8 and 9 am. When he doesn't find Jimi, he heads over to Burdon's hotel and hears him on the phone with Dannemann telling her to call an ambulance at 9:30 am. So we have a timeline issue here. It wouldn't be dark at 9:30 am, so was Burdon misremembering? 

Mitch Mitchell is told Jimi is dead at 9:30 am, but he hasn't been to the hospital yet. Dannemann claims to awaken at 10 am and she leaves to get cigarettes with Jimi sleeping soundly. So she couldn't be on the phone with Burdon and him telling her to call an ambulance at 9:30 am. Unless she's lying about her timeline. On the day Hendrix died, Dannemann told the police she woke up at 11 am and Jimi had vomit on his face and she couldn't wake him up. She retracted that in a 1994 deposition in Seattle. We know for sure that an ambulance was called for at 11:18 am based on phone records. The ambulance arrives at 11:27 am. Dannemann reports that the paramedics check vitals and say everything is fine, nothing to worry about. The paramedics remember the event quite differently. One said, "It was horrific...He was covered in vomit. There was tons of it all over the pillow – black and brown, it was. His airway was completely blocked, all the way down. His tongue had fallen back...John ran up and radioed for the police. He got the aspirator too. We felt his pulse between his shoulders, pinched his ear lobe and nose, shone a light in his eyes. But there was no response at all. I knew he was dead as soon as I walked in the room." The other paramedic said, "I knew it was hopeless. There was no pulse, no respiration. We knew he was gone...But we are not doctors. It’s our job to keep trying until we get him to the hospital. As soon as the police arrived, we were off. When they arrived, the door was wide open and no one was with Hendrix. The vomit was dry, so they figured he had been dead quite a while. 

Now why would somebody lie about these events? Could Hendrix have been murdered? Some people think that is the case. Brad Schreiber co-authored the book "Becoming Jimi Hendrix" and he thought that Hendrix was murdered and claimed evidence suggested large amounts of red wine were forced down his throat, and the wine filled his lungs, leaving little in his stomach. 

Did Dannemann kill him in a jealous rage? Some people think it was his manager, Mike Jeffrey, who was facing financial ruin. He may have owed the mob money and so he decided to cash in on Hendrix's life insurance. A roadie named James “Tappy” Wright said that Jeffrey had confessed to him that he arranged Hendrix’s death. What is the truth? We'll probably never know. Maybe that's why his spirit is hanging around. We will say that the sleeping pills were from Germany with German directions, so if Hendrix helped himself to them, he didn't know how much he was taking. And if he was already drunk or high, his judgement would be marred. Jimi Hendrix had a strong connection to the paranormal. He seemed to have a premonition about his own death. He knew he wasn't going to live a long life. He knew he would never see 30-years-old. Hendrix seemed to carry a sense of doom and he liked to call himself Jinx Hendrix. Some of his lyrics also reflected his sense of an early death. 

Hendrix actually had encounters with UFOs. Jimi and his brother Leon claimed they saw a UFO with pulsating lights over their home state of Washington when they were young boys. Another experience was in 1965 when he was a member of Curtis Knight and the Squires. The group was stranded in a blizzard near Woodstock, New York when they saw a glowing cone-shaped UFO land nearby. The UFO had a door that opened up and out walked a tall, yellow-skinned being that radiated heat. The heat melted the snow and they were able to get their van out of the snow. Knight said that Hendrix claimed to have a conversation with the alien telepathically and that he thanked the being for its help. Or were they just all on some acid trip? 

Electric Lady Studios was Hendrix's beloved studio in Greenwich Village. It started as a nightclub called The Generation that hosted Big Brother & the Holding Company, B.B. King, Chuck Berry, Dave Van Ronk, and Sly & the Family Stone. When it closed, Hendrix wanted to buy it and reopen it as a club, but a couple of advisors suggested that he convert it into a professional recording studio. The studio was unique in that it was the only one owned by an artist at the time. Today, it is considered hallowed ground for recorded music. The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Stevie Wonder, David Bowie, and Patti Smith all had sessions here in the 1970s. Modern sessions include Sabrina Carpenter, Taylor Swift and Kendrick Lamar. Jimi is said to still be here. Staff have claimed through the years that the televisions will suddenly go to static. They have heard doors slam on their own and heard disembodied footsteps. A shimmering figure has been seen. Michael Brauer is a Grammy-winning mixer and he told the New York Post in 2024, "Pretty much every assistant I know has had some kind of sighting late at night when they are alone." He thought his assistant had walked into the lounge and he said, "I called out to him because I needed him to patch something, but he didn’t respond. I called out again, nothing, so I got up and as I was heading to the door, [my assistant] came walking in from the other direction. I [investigated] the live room; it was empty. My assistant had been in the bathroom." Nearly every artist who has recorded here from the 1970s until now, claims to feel Jimi’s presence guiding them. 

The Handel Hendrix House is located at 23 and 25 Brook Street in London. This is where Jimi lived while in London from 1968 to 1969. This is two houses separated by a wall. Hendrix lived in the upper floor of 23 Brook Street and 200 years previously, Handel lived in 25 Brook Street. Today, this is a museum featuring live music and tributes and displays to both musicians. It was here that Hendrix met the ghost of Handel. A legend claims that Hendrix was brushing his teeth one night and he saw Handel’s ghost in the mirror. Rather than feeling fear, he felt inspired. 

Jimi Hendrix has an amazing grave at Greenwood Memorial Park in Renton. It features a towering marble dome gazebo. There are several engraved granite tombstones around the burial. People leave flowers, guitar picks and incense. Ghost hunters have attempted to contact Hendrix’s spirit using EMF detectors and spirit boxes and some interesting things have come through. Speaking of trying to contact Hendrix, Guitar World magazine and ABC’s Good Morning America staged a séance on the 23rd anniversary of his death in 1993. They had an amulet that was formed from some of Hendrix's hair and one of his Flying V guitars to use as trigger objects. No answer seemed to come from Hendrix. A bronze statue of him on the Isle of Wight is said to have Hendrix's music sometimes playing around it from the beyond.

There is no doubt that Hendrix was a master of funk grooves. His playing and production was innovative and has inspired scores of musicians. He died far too young. Is that why his spirit might still be hanging around? Is Jimi Hendrix hauntings these various locations? That is for you to decide.