By JOHN NORTH

Joshua P. Warren

Joshua P. Warren’s Asheville Tourism Center & Free Museum recently opened in a small stone building with bars on the windows that once served as a jail at 4 Marjorie St., around the corner from Pack’s Tavern on Spruce Street, in downtown Asheville.

Reportedly, the former jail annex he is renting from Pack’s Tavern was the site of an unusual number of suicides and deaths. Indeed, there is an eeriness in the former holding cells in small rooms with no windows in the back of the building, where Warren said the most cantankerous prisoners were held.

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A replica of an Australian con artist, whose remains were rolled around by Asheville’s angry citizenry after his death, is exhibited atop the museum’s roof.

The building was used as a jail “into the 1960s — and they kept black men in this building.” It was used as the Buncombe County Teen Court up until February of 2009.

As a macabre twist, he noted the museum is located along the same street — and near — the old city jailhouse and gallows. “This whole street had many executions over the years,” Warren said excitedly, as he recalled having seen illustrations showing roughly where the scaffolds were located on Marjorie Street.

The last “legal” hanging in Buncome was in 1908, he said, as the unfortunate man “choked for 21 minutes until he died.”

Warren, an Asheville native and Alexander resident who is a nationally known paranormal investigator, has spent his life probing what could be termed the dark and hidden side of Asheville’s past.

He has chronicled his findings in the 12 books he has written, and shared them via ghost tours he oversees. Warren hosts “Speaking of Strange” on Saturday nights on Asheville’s WWNC-AM (570) and is a frequent guest — as a paranormal expert — on the nationally syndicated “Coast to Coast AM,” an esoteric all-night radio show.

The museum will provide a base for his operations, featuring exhibits of a mass murder, a brutal killing of a woman at an Asheville hotel, paranormal vortexes in the mountains (especially the Brown Mountain lights), and the local connection to the Hope Diamond.

The museum is open from noon to 8 p.m. daily, although visitors are urged to call ahead to confirm, at 335-6734, or visit www.ashevilleTourCenter.com.

The exhibit promotes Warren’s various local tours as as well as exhibits of the bizarre and ghastly.

Warren said his museum features a lesser-known side of Asheville. His goal is to create a museum that, when Asheville natives finish touring it, they will have learned aspects of local history even they did not know.

Among the exhibits of Asheville criminals infamous in their day for their exploits is one featuring Will Harris, who committed the city’s largest mass murder.

Harris’ exploits, on the night of Nov. 13, 1906, have been chronicled most notably by Bob Terrell in his book, “The Will Harris Murders,” promoted as “A Night in Which Asheville Was a Tougher Town Than Tombstone and Dodge City Rolled Into One.”

According to one account, “Harris escaped from a chain gang (in Charlotte) and came to Asheville looking for his girlfriend. Along the way, he purchased a rifle and a bottle of whiskey. He was unable to locate his girlfriend, some say she had been tipped off that Will was in town and went into hiding. Will Harris arrived at the apartment of his girlfriend’s sister, drunk and belligerent.  Will Harris left the apartment and started shooting at people on the street, screaming he was the Devil. A neighborhood dog came out of an alley and was shot by the crazed gunman.”

Helen Clevenger’s brutal murder in Asheville was national news in 1936.

Harris’ rampage along Eagle Street and Biltmore Avenue in downtown Asheville left five people dead. Supposedly, there is a bullet hole in the Vance Monument from the melee. Warren noted that, even today, the Eagle Street/Biltmore Avenue area pulses with paranormal activity. At nearby Barley’s Tap Room, there have been numerous reports of apparitions and voices.

For the record, the posse searched — and finally found — Harris in a rhododendrum thicket in Fletcher, where he was shot to death. No one knows where Harris was buried, but the speculation is that his body lies somewhere in an unmarked grave.

Shortly thereafter, Asheville was the first city in North Carolina to ban alcohol sales, with Warren noting the move likely was prompted by Harris’ drunken murder spree.

Another exhibit, featuring a model of the Battery Park Hotel, explains the brutal-but-unsolved death of Helen Clevenger, a story that made national headlines in 1936.

Warren noted that the Clevenger case ranks as Asheville’s “most famous brutal murder.”

Specifically, the comely young woman was beaten, slashed with a knife and then shot to death, he said.

Thereafter, “supposedly, the murder room (where she was staying) was haunted,” Warren said, adding that the original room number was 224, but the hotel, which now is used as housing for the elderly, has renumbered its rooms, perhaps to avoid drawing unwanted attention to the room.

Other displays depict local lore regarding bootlegging, Asheville’s gallows and, on the museum roof, a replica of a mummified corpse of a con man that was once paraded through the streets.
Warren noted that literary icon F. Scott Fitzgerald, who stayed at the Grove Park Inn in 1935-36, was fond of Lottie, a “high-class” prostitute.

She was strikingly beautiful “with movie-star looks,” Warren noted, and strolled around with two white poodles and an armload of unread books (she met many clients in the hotel book shop).
Once, when Lottie upset him, Warren said, Fitzgerald sat in his room despondently and fired a pistol shot into the ceiling, prompting a warning from the inn’s staff.

F. Scott Fitzgerald tried — unsuccessfully — to sober up while in Asheville. He shot a hole in the ceiling of his room at the Grove Park Inn.

The museum also features a small theater, where visitors can see clips of the first movie filmed in Asheville — 1921’s “Conquest of Canaan.”

Another room called a “psychomanteum” is designed for direct communication with spirits.
Warren recently spent a night in the room during a snowstorm, noting that he felt a ghostly presence there.

The museum’s opening coincides with the start of a new winter tour led by Warren, called “Weird Asheville.”

In closing, Warren told the Daily Planet, “I’d like to inspire people to bring us artifacts. We’ve got a place to display them."