Can’t wait to check this out. Press release here:
Asheville native Joshua P. Warren has finally opened his Tourism Center & Free Museum, featuring our city’s most unusual and extreme history. Displayed inside the “Old Jail & Gallows” building behind Pack’s Tavern, 20 South Spruce Street, much of the content is dark and strange, including local criminology and spooky stories. As the author of 12 books, including the regional best-seller “Haunted Asheville,” Warren feels it’s about time our city’s quirky and mysterious side is properly presented.
“People who have lived here a lifetime will not know most of this,” Warren grins. “My friends and I have spent years compiling stories that make Asheville look like a small Ripley’s Museum.”
On display is a life-size recreation of “The Dook,” a mummified con-artist who was paraded around town twice a year in the early 1910s, including Christmas time. There is a blow-up of the bullet-riddled corpse of Will Harris, who committed the city’s largest mass murder. A model of the Battery Park Hotel reveals the Helen Clevenger murder room, from 1936. Displays present clear facts regarding the gallows, bootlegging, Brown Mountain Lights, WW2, Civil War, and “The Witch’s Tree,” a magnolia at the center of great controversy when developer Stewart Coleman debated local Wiccans. Special sections of the Museum include a small theater where one can munch popcorn and view clips from Asheville’s first movie, shot in 1921; a room with the world’s only life-size model of the creepy Newby Phantom; and a small chamber, called a “psychomanteum” designed for spiritual communication with “the other side.”
The Museum opening coincides with the debut of Warren’s new winter tour, “Weird Asheville,” that leaves daily at 3pm. Guests stroll around town while learning odd history, like how Buncombe gave rise to the word “bunk,” and Asheville’s connection to the Hope Diamond. Warren hopes an afternoon tour can survive through the cold-weather season.
“All of this is new and one-of-a-kind,” he says. “I hope we’ll be embraced by residents. We want anyone with unusual artifacts related to the city, especially dealing with criminology, to please contact us.”
The Museum is usually open around noon each day, but given the erratic, off-season hours, Warren suggests guests email or call before visiting. His website is www.AshevilleTourCenter.com and questions can be answered at (828) 335-6764. The Museum is in the 1920s gray, rock building, with barred windows, behind Pack’s Tavern.
Warren has appeared on the National Geographic Channel, Discovery, Travel Channel, History Channel, Sy-Fy Channel, TLC, Animal Planet, and has been covered by CNN, Fox News, and the New York Times. He frequently appears on the “Coast to Coast AM” overnight radio program. In 2004, his team made the cover of the “Electric Spacecraft” scientific journal due to their groundbreaking lab experiments on the Brown Mountain Lights.
For more information, see www.AshevilleTourCenter.com on the internet.
