public

Heavily Investigated

They'll tell you the foreman never clocked out. Stand inside the cold furnaces after dark and the air goes wrong — a shove between the shoulder blades, a voice growling at you to get back to work, footsteps on the catwalks where no one walks. Workers swore James 'Slag' Wormwood drove men to die in the heat, and that he died in it too. Police, they say, still field the calls. Linger by the boiler room long enough and you start to feel it: the iron remembers, and it is not done with you.

In the record, Sloss Furnaces was lit in 1882 by Colonel James Withers Sloss, smelting pig iron that built the city above it until the fires went cold in 1971 — later named a National Historic Landmark in 1981, one of the few blast-furnace sites preserved whole. The legend of 'Slag' Wormwood, a tyrannical foreman who supposedly died in the works, is just that: a tale unbacked by the payroll. But a place that swallowed men for ninety years, the narrator notes dryly, hardly needs help inventing its ghosts.