Sloss Furnaces - Birmingham

On Friday May 30^th, the OPS Team took a group of about thirty guests to Sloss Furnaces to spend the night and search for any remnants of the old workers that supposedly still haunt the old antiquated structure. We arrived on site at 8:00 pm, and the security guard gave a tour of the Sloss grounds and a history of supposed sightings and unexplained things heard and seen to all the guests. We then set up equipment and the monitoring station. NOTE: The team was glad to have Trey back home safe in the United States and once again rejoining the OPS Team. Welcome back!

We decided that we would concentrate our cameras and audio on the old rail car tunnel. This was the location during our last visit when we found the candle burning on a pile of rocks in the middle of the tracks. We never did arrive at a reason for the candle being there since this area of the tracks is always covered in water which would not make for a comfortable place to sleep or stay by any homeless person(s). We believe the rocks were piled up under the candle to keep it out of the water. We have now learned that we have not been the only group or individuals to have found the candle burning in the old railcar tunnel. NOTE: We have not all together ruled out this being staged before our arrival or anyone’s else’s arrival either, we just cannot at this time explain it nor do we know the truth of it’s placement by who or what.

We placed two cameras inside the tunnel, one facing towards the direction where the candle was found burning and the other facing in the opposite direction at the other end of the tunnel. We placed a camera on the lowest tier of the tallest tower at Sloss and the other camera was placed on the wooden plank walkway that runs parallel to the underground railcar tunnel. Around 9:00 pm, we broke up into four groups to start the investigation. One group started in the old boiler room, one group walked the outside perimeter of the Sloss grounds, another group went into the tunnel and the last group stayed at the monitoring station to watch the monitor to see if anything was being captured on the DVR.

The night was full of personal experiences for many people. While watching the monitor, one of the team members noticed a mist in the old railcar tunnel. This happened on three different occasions and left just as quickly as it appeared. Upon reviewing the evidence later, we studied the mist and have no idea what it is or where it came from, furthermore, we don’t know where it went. Nobody in the tunnel that night witnessed the mist with their own eyes. One of our guests thought that they were being watched earlier in the night while they were walking around outside and later that evening believed that they were actually touched. No team member witnessed this so we can only explain it as a personal experience for them. Below is a video clip of the mist from that night as it was captured on the DVR.

Trey conducted ITC sessions in the old boiler room with three different groups at three different times. While we have not all been sold on this type of experimentation and its results, it is interesting and many people claim to hear many different things during these sessions. One of our team members did have an experience with cold chills right before an ITC session was about to take place. He said his whole body got cold with chill bumps and his eyes watered. It was very hot and humid that night with temps in the eighties for some of the hours we were investigating. He explained it as if someone had just walked through him. Below is a couple of audio clips that are examples of what you might hear during an ITC-EVP session. To read more on this, visit OPS Central and read Trey’s article on the different types of equipment used and the theories behind this type of investigating practice.

We really did not catch to much more that night other than a few different audio clips that we were able to explain away as some of the visitors whispering and then just some of our own team being captured as well and later identifying it on the evidence review portion of the investigation. We left around 4:00 am that next morning.

We want to thank everyone that joined us that night and we hope you guys had a great time. Ghost hunting is not for everyone and at times we experience long slow lulls in the action. While television takes hours and hours of video and audio and condenses it down to a 30 minute show of just all the action, it is just the opposite when you do this for real. It is like one of those fishing shows you see, you know there is no way they caught all those fish in that 30 minutes, it was a cumulative total of hours or maybe even days. We have many hours put into an investigation before we even arrive on location. Thanks to everyone who made this night possible and we hope every person that joined us had a great time and has a great respect for this way of life we love.