In Walked Mr. Ghost: the Trouble at Number 309

In The Scruffy Citizen by Jack Neelyleave a COMMENT

In late summer, as Republicans were reeling from the unexpected death of President Harding, East Knoxville was abuzz about the Ghost. At least 150 people congregated around the house at the corner of East Cumberland and McKee. Only the boldest among them peered into the old-fashioned windows, reporting what they saw.

It was a peculiar neighborhood even on a sunny day—working people, black and white, some of them immigrants, living close together, but also a piano school and artist Robert Lindsay Mason’s studio, where he taught classes in painting. It was quiet, most of the time, even though it was just a couple of blocks from the Bowery, the old saloon district that Prohibition never completely tamed. Most houses were rentals, and many neighbors, on their way up or down, didn’t stay around long. The neighborhood’s landmark, recognized by fewer and fewer as years passed, was Parson Brownlow’s house. The scathing Unionist pundit, hanged in effigy throughout the South and sometimes shot at, the governor who forced Tennessee back into the Union, had lived in that old frame house at 211 East Cumberland.

For almost 40 years after his death, his widow had maintained the house as a shrine to her husband and Unionism. Once advertised among Knoxville’s main tourist attractions, it received dutiful visits for tea from a succession of Republican presidents. Since Eliza had died there nine years ago, though, the Brownlow house, never a pretty thing, had deteriorated. By 1923 it was often vacant. Soon it would be gone.

Just a few doors to the east of the Brownlow house was the odd, old double-house at 309 East Cumberland. Two small antebellum houses linked by a vestibule. Carpenter John Stiles and his wife Alice, lived there for two years, but had unwelcome company. Suddenly they moved their family out.

Sixteen-year-old Howard Stiles did most of the talking. “I only saw it twice, but that was enough,” he said. “It looked to me like the mist of a man,” just like in the movies, he said. The silent movie The Ghost Breaker had been a sensation at the Riviera a few months before. “His teeth protruded out front.” Everyone mentioned the teeth. One reporter described a “hideously grinning ghost in gray.”

The problem started with some strange noises. “We children used to hear noises in the night when we first moved in, and we would call Papa.”

At first, Mr. Stiles assured them it was no ghost. “Go to sleep,” he said. “It was just rats running around the floor.”

It was little consolation. “He knew then what it was,” Howard said of his father. “But he didn’t want to scare us. Then we began to see it.”

It arose from the basement. It sometimes made a crashing sound in the kitchen. It ignored questions. If you stayed quiet, it would “tarry and grin.” Sometimes it would wake up Mr. Stiles by grabbing him by the shoulders and grinning into his face.

When Howard’s older sister Hazel saw it at 2 a.m. she was “scared speechless.” She fainted, as her family tried to rouse her. After that, she was able to speak only in a whisper.

According to the story, the Stiles family tolerated the ghost until it appeared in their kitchen while they were eating some watermelon. “In walked Mr. Ghost wearing his haunting grin.” Mrs. Stiles said that was it. She took her children out of the house and never went back.

***

John Stiles said the ghost looked like the late Sproul Thompson. He was the brother of the late Mel Thompson, who’d been mayor back in the 1890s. Sproul Thompson was a semi-retired real-estate developer and horseman of 66, who died unexpectedly more than a year ago, as the result of a fall.

But then other people came forward, claiming the house had always been haunted, even before Thompson’s death. It sometimes played piano. A few years before, a neighbor, intolerant of nocturnal piano playing, pulled out the piano and chopped it up.

As the Stiles family left, biracial crowds swarmed the now-empty house every evening until midnight, gazing into the narrow old windows, hoping to catch a glimpse of something uncanny. The owner of the house, Austrian immigrant Joseph Ahler, lived one block north of the trouble, at McKee and Church. Disturbed by the nightly crowds, he called the police to keep an eye on things. They arrested one 30-year-old man for trespassing.

A boilermaker at the L&N Railroad, a practical man, liked the house. “I don’t believe in haunts,” said Thad Farley, an easygoing guy who moved his family in the same week the Stiles family left. Ahler warned him about the stories. Farley said he didn’t mind. “If I was to see one I’d try to find out what it was,” he said. “If there are such things, they can’t hurt you. It’s only a flesh-and-blood haunt that will do you harm.”

The story unfolded just like it’s supposed to in the movies. Unbelievers proposed alternate theories—automobile headlights refracting weirdly though the ancient, irregular windows. Reporters offering to stay there overnight. Knoxville News reporter Bob Wilson befriended Farley, and brought a pallet to spend the night there. Nothing happened. The hubbub expired.

Five months later, Farley’s father, a man of 67, died in the house. Surely it was a coincidence. But the Farleys moved out soon afterward.

For years, 309 East Cumberland was a high-turnover address, often vacant. Its last tenant was probably its longest, a black man named John Garrett who was a waiter at Bearden’s Highland Grill.

Owner Joseph Ahler died in 1957, at age 90. He collapsed during negotiations to sell some of his land to the city to build the Civic Coliseum.

The house at 309 was one of hundreds demolished with urban renewal in 1959. It’s impossible to point to the site. It was somewhere along James White Parkway, about where the late-afternoon shadow of Plaza Tower falls.

Jack Neely is the director of the Knoxville History Project, a nonprofit devoted to exploring, disseminating, and celebrating Knoxville's cultural heritage. He’s also one of the most popular and influential writers in the area, known for his books and columns. The Scruffy Citizen surveys the city of Knoxville's life and culture in the context of its history, with emphasis on what makes it unique and how its past continues to affect and inform its future.

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