Stories of ghosts and murders continue to haunt Asheville

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Stories of ghosts and murders continue to haunt Asheville
October 20, 2010
by Hal Ledford
The Blue Banner

Joshua P. Warren walked down Eagle Street Friday night retelling the story of Asheville's largest mass murder, in graphic detail, pointing out the exact spots where six people were randomly shot and killed by Will Harris in 1906.

Warren, an Asheville native, along with his other tour guides, operates Haunted Asheville, giving tours around the city based off Asheville's ghost stories that Warren helped popularize with his book Haunted Asheville.

"When I look at ghostly phenomena I take two angles," Warren said. "One is that ghost stories are a very interesting way of passing along history that otherwise would be forgotten, and secondly, I have seen for myself that there is sometimes an external anomaly that can be measured objectively at places where these stories generate."

Warren's passion for spooky stories began at a young age, and he published his first book of fictional ghost stories at 14. After his first publication, Warren began writing columns for The Asheville Citizen-Times about scary happenings around town for Halloween, which eventually led him to publish Haunted Asheville.

"I found there was a craving for these kinds of stories to be documented," Warren said. "I got tons of mail from people all the time saying, ‘Man, if you're investigating this stuff, please come spend a night at my house and see what's going on.' So I started following up on this, and once I saw how much was available and how fun it was for me, and knowing that so much of this had never been recorded, the next natural step was to write Haunted Asheville."

Warren spent two years performing paranormal investigations and documenting research for Haunted Asheville while enrolled as a student at UNC Asheville.

"I didn't graduate. I spent about two and a half years there, and I was bored silly," Warren said. "I got to a point where I was doing all this stuff that I wanted to do and I had all these opportunities coming my way, and I had to balance that with trying to stay awake in the morning after being up all night. I talked myself into taking a little break and I never went back, but honestly, for me, it was the best decision I probably have ever made, because I believe that if I had limited myself at that point in time, I might not have ever been able to gain the momentum that I have been able to use to keep this going, which is what I enjoy a lot more than what most people get out of a degree. I'm not saying it's for everybody, but it worked for me."

The Pink Lady

Not everybody who stays at The Grove Park Inn Resort and Spa leaves. One guest still walks up and down the halls of the famous inn built by E.W. Grove, wearing a pink gown, according to Warren.

Nobody knows who the woman was that fell from the balcony and died at the Grove Park. It is unkown if she committed suicide or if she was pushed to her death by someone else, but she is now known as the Pink Lady, according to Chris Sorrells, Haunted Asheville tour guide and UNCA industrial and engineering management student.

The Grove Park invited Warren to be the first person to perform a paranormal investigation of the Pink Lady around the time he was working on Haunted Asheville in the ‘90s. He spent months interviewing people who had encountered the ghost of the Pink Lady.

"For a guy who is 18, who is just starry eyed and amazed by all this stuff, to be given the keys to the Grove Park Inn to wander and spend the night in whatever room I wanted to and talk to people who worked there 80 years ago was huge," Warren said.

Murder at the Battery Park Hotel

On July 17, 1936, a beautiful young woman named Helen Clevenger was found brutally murdered in room 224 of the Battery Park Hotel, another property built by Grove.

Clevenger had been beaten, her face mutilated and she had been shot. Police officers arrested Martin Moore, an employee of the hotel, for the murder and executed him using the gas chamber, Warren said.

The Battery Park Hotel has also been the site of numerous suicides, in which people have gone to the top of the 13-story building and jumped to their death, according to Warren.

"Grove's properties are often connected with weird stuff," Warren said.

The hotel now stands as a home for the assisted living, but plenty of paranormal activity still takes place, making it one of the creepiest buildings in Asheville, according to Sorrells.

"I had the privilege of running into one of the residents. He said that weird things happen in this building all the time," Sorrells said. "Apparently, when people first move in, they are stricken with insomnia and they cannot sleep. That goes on for about six months. He said the elevators like to work on their own accord, and people hear voices and see shadows going down the hallways late at night as well."

Helen's Bridge and Zealandia

The story of Helen's Bridge and Zealandia Castle at the top of Beaucatcher Mountain is one of the most well-known ghost stories of Asheville's history, according to Warren, who refers to it as his favorite story.

According to Warren, in the late 1900s a young woman hanged herself from the bridge after her daughter was burned alive in a fire at the castle up the hill.

"When we have done our investigations there, some really freaky stuff has happened,"

Warren said. "We have captured the strangest luminous forms zipping around those hallways.

We have had a group of people down in the basement and all of our equipment go bonkers at once. I have seen enough in that castle up there, personally, and documented enough that I would have to say it's pretty creepy. The idea of spending the night alone in that castle even sends chills down my spine."

Legend has it that Helen still walks the property late at night, looking for her daughter. Those brave enough to try it drive up the mountain, park under the bridge and call out three times
‘Helen, come forth.' Some people, like Warren, have experienced car trouble after doing so.

"Some of these things are not mere coincidence," Warren said.

After Warren published stories such as these in Haunted Asheville, he started getting phone calls from readers asking how they could find the places referenced in his book.

"It was almost like a travel guide. I started gradually arranging the tours, and over the years they have continued picking up as I have expanded them into other areas that I find interesting," Warren said.

Warren offers many different tours that take thrill seekers all over Asheville to places he deems haunted, including Church Street, the site of the ghostly nun, Zambra, the only building in Asheville to have an exorcism performed inside it, and the Jackson Building, where many men committed suicide during the Great Depression by jumping from the roof. Warren takes groups inside the old jailhouse and gallows, where he said people experience a sick feeling upon entering the building because of its dark history.

"It's a personal degree of original information that makes what I do important because I don't just regurgitate what somebody else has done. This is my home, and the things I do here I'm going to have to live with the rest of my life," Warren said. "I've been self-employed since I was 18, writing books, doing TV and radio and tours and events. I'm very fortunate that, so far, I have been able to continue doing what I enjoy and what other people seem to find rewarding."

Visit HauntedAsheville.com for tours and more information.