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CHAPTER 3

Old Baltimore Shot Tower

BALTIMORE/JONESTOWN NEIGHBORHOOD

For many years, the Old Baltimore Shot Tower was the tallest structure in the United States.

On this site purchased in 1773 … The first permanent meeting house, a dwelling for the pastor and a school house were erected and a cemetery established for the First Baptist Church of Baltimore …

—Inscription on a plaque affixed to the Old Baltimore Shot Tower

IT IS NOT SURPRISING that many people who see the Old Baltimore Shot Tower from a distance and know nothing about it assume it is some sort of a monument, or perhaps even a lookout tower built as part of Baltimore’s early harbor defenses. It is, in actuality, the last remaining element of an innovative nineteenth-century factory that used the natural energy of gravity to fashion its products—ammunition.

Whether because of its unique architecture, events that happened within or around it, or whatever occupied its site prior to its construction—or all of these things—people have long reported all sorts of strange phenomena in the vicinity of the tower. The most prevalent incidents, which have scared unsuspecting passersby on numerous occasions, have involved voices and other sounds emanating from within the sealed tower.

Known first as the Phoenix Shot Tower, and then as the Merchant’s Shot Tower for the company that had originally owned it, the Merchant’s Shot Tower Company, the 234-foot-tall red brick structure was the tallest building in the United States and the tallest free-standing masonry structure in the world when it was built in 1828 by architect Jacob Wolfe (it held those records until 1846 and 1884, respectively).

The fourteen-story Old Baltimore Shot Tower—one of four shot towers that once graced the local skyline—is an impressive structure; the massive circular tower incorporates an estimated 1.1 million bricks, manufactured locally by the Burns and Russell Company. Its walls are about four-and-a-half feet thick up to a height of around fifty feet, after which they periodically narrow in increments of four inches, for a final thickness at the top of twenty-one inches. It has a diameter of forty feet at its base and of twenty feet at its top. Its foundation extends seventeen feet below the surface of the ground, and its interior areas reportedly contain a cast-iron spiral staircase, steel floors, and an elevator. This huge industrial edifice was, incredibly, built in just six months and without recourse to exterior scaffolding. The site also once contained a number of other affiliated factory buildings, hinted at today by the presence of an iron entryway about twenty feet off the ground that once corresponded with the upper level of an adjacent structure.

Charles Carroll, a signer of the Declaration of Independence whose mansion was located just a few blocks to the south and who at that point was about ninety-one, laid the cornerstone for the Old Baltimore Shot Tower.

Ammunition was produced at this tower and others like it through a process that involved pouring molten lead into a colander-like device at the top of the tower. These measured blobs of liquid metal would then drop toward the base of the tower like fiendish raindrops, forming into perfect spheres as they went, and then harden upon impact with the cold water in the vat at the bottom. This process was used to produce both “drop shot” for small arms like rifles and pistols and “molded shot” for larger weapons like cannons. The Old Baltimore Shot Tower typically produced 2.5 million pounds of drop shot a year, which was then dried, polished, and sorted into 25-pound bags. Its capacity could be doubled in time of war or other periods of high demand.

By 1892, a new method for producing shot had effectively made the tower obsolete and, after more than six decades, it ceased operations. It was reopened briefly a few years later but, in 1898, the Merchant’s Shot Tower Company shut down for good.

In 1921, the Union Oil Company purchased the tower with the intention of tearing it down and building a gas station on it location. Outcry from the community forestalled these plans, and by 1928 activists had raised enough money to buy the tower themselves, which they then turned over to the city of Baltimore. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1972, then was restored and opened as a historic site in 1976.

I visited the Old Baltimore Shot Tower on a Saturday in June 2009, with my friend Brendan Cass and his mother, Susan Cass. We parked in one of the many public garages located on the streets running parallel to the Inner Harbor and then walked up Lombard Street, on which the tower is located, a few blocks north of the harbor and a bit west of the city’s Little Italy. As we approached the tower, it became apparent to us that, despite its proximity to downtown and numerous tourist attractions, it was located in a somewhat marginal area. Four or five middle-aged men who appeared to live at least part of the time in Shot Tower Plaza, the little park that surrounds the structure, sat, slept, or shambled around the area.

Ghostly lore we had heard about the Shot Tower included reports by passersby of strange noises coming from within the structure. So, the first thing Brendan and I did upon approaching it was to put our ears to one of the iron doors. We immediately heard a sharp “clang” from within the sealed-up building and jumped back! That was much more than we had expected.

Ghosthunter Susan Cass investigates claims that people have heard strange sounds coming from within the Old Baltimore Shot Tower.

Cautiously, we pressed our ears to the door again and listened. We could feel a low quivering in the door itself and, beyond it, hear all sorts of ominous groaning and rumbling noises. As far as we could tell, the vast interior of the tower was amplifying the sounds of nearby traffic, which was in turn causing the iron portals of the building to vibrate faintly. That did not, however, do anything to explain the metallic clang we had heard.

I decided to ask some of the local denizens if they had ever noticed anything odd and, approaching a pair sitting nearby, asked if they had ever heard any strange noises coming from within the tower.

“Yup,” one of them said to me very matter-of-factly. “Screamin’, and hollerin’, and someone yellin’ orders.” And, he added, pointing to a nearby historical building, “If you knock on that door, a man with a key will let you inside.”

The last we had heard, the tower was no longer ever open to the public, so I was both pleased and a bit surprised to hear this latest bit of information. I thanked our confidant and headed over to the house he had indicated. It bore a placard identifying it as “9 North Front Street,” an eighteenth-century home that had once been typical of the surrounding Jonestown neighborhood and in which had dwelled a number of professional types, including Thorowgood Smith, the second mayor of Baltimore. In later years, it had been used as a hotel, a restaurant, and an auto parts store, but now seemed to be run as a historical attraction. No one, however, answered the door for us.

Moving on to nearby Carroll Mansion, which together with the tower is managed by the same historical organization, we chatted with the docent, Matt. He told us that the tower really could be accessed by appointment on Sunday mornings at 10:30, and implied that we probably could have visited that day if he had not been the only on duty. Even better, he said, it was sometimes possible to ascend to the parapet of the tower, more than two hundred feet above the streets of the city.

Matt also mentioned an industrial accident that had occurred in one of the buildings affiliated with the Old Baltimore Shot Tower when it was operational, and said that one of the workers had been mangled to death in some machinery. He also mentioned that a number of injuries had occurred in or around the tower.

Why the place might be haunted was becoming increasingly clear, and some additional discussion and research revealed a few other interesting facts. One was that a military armory had once been near the site, perhaps accounting for the spectral shouted orders we had been told about (although it was not inconceivable orders might be shouted in a factory as well). Another was that the site had, in fact, prior to the construction of the tower been the site of a church and its cemetery!

The presence of an archaic, abandoned cemetery could, of course, go a long way toward explaining paranormal phenomena at the site—especially when one considers that unmarked graves were as common as marked ones in early cemeteries, and that any attempt to relocate the interred would thus necessarily be incomplete. And the voices of their spirits, amplified by the unique construction of the tower, might be those that people can still hear calling out from within the massive structure.