Back in 2018, WVTM 13's Lisa Crane joined a group on one of the Birmingham Ghost Walks, led by self-proclaimed history nerd Wolfgang Poe, to get a chilling glimpse into the city's haunted history. One thing Poe touched on was the Redmont Hotel's bloody past, including a shootout with police that left a criminal dead in the lobby and the ghostly presence of Hank Williams, as well as a phantom woman in white. "She felt someone walk up behind her and heard a lady's voice in her ear say hello," Poe recounts.
"When she went out in her room, the stool at the front of the bed was actually moving in front of the bed." Poe carries gruesome memorabilia, such as a tooth from a body found buried under the former Thompson House Hotel, possibly the mistress of Mr. Thompson.
"There was also a rusty iron fireplace poker, probably the murder weapon because the skull had been greatly damaged," Poe explains. The infamous 1921 murder of Father James Coyle is another highlight of the tour. Coyle was shot by a Methodist minister after officiating the marriage of the minister's daughter to a much older man.
"If you have a steady picture and you have a streak of light in it, you got yourself an orb, a ghost," Poe says. The downtown YMCA, built on the site of the old jail where Richard Hawes was hanged, is another haunted location on the tour. "The YMCA is definitively haunted," Poe asserts.
"The lockers are said to occasionally pop open and disgorge their contents, and there are shadows that go arou.
