ASHEVILLE, N.C. (828newsNOW) – 12 miles. That is the combined length of the tunnels Pack’s Tavern General Manager Tyler Brown believes are underneath downtown Asheville.
From his personal experience, Brown has good reason to suspect something is going on beneath the streets and buildings on the Land of the Sky. He sees the tunnel in his restaurant’s basement every day. With two sets of iron doors, its former purpose is obvious to him. Prohibition era whiskey moonshiners smuggled their goods into a speakeasy there through the tunnel.
Read more about Asheville’s tunnel system by clicking here.
But where does the tunnel go to? “It connects to the police station,” Brown emphatically believes. As the story goes, an electrician was making repairs in the subterranean passageway in the 1960’s when he accidentally popped up in the Asheville Police Station. Needless to say, the officers were not amused, sealing the tunnel at about eight feet from the Pack’s Tavern entrance.
Another possibility is the tunnel terminates in the Westall Building, the Jackson Building’s younger sister. William H. Westall operated both the lumber mill in the building that now houses Pack’s Tavern and the building that bears his name.
“We know it’s going to collapse eventually,” Brown stated, refraining from entering the passage due to safety concerns. Water leaks through the ceiling on rainy days, pooling on the tunnel floor.
Another safety issue he worries about is the police not knowing about the tunnel network under their city. “They don’t tell the cops about it,” Brown said. Who “they” are is unclear. Correspondence with top city officials indicates they are either unaware of the tunnels or unwilling to admit their existence.
Click here to watch a video of the Pack’s Tavern tunnel.
The tunnel is not the only oddity at Pack’s Tavern.
“We have a lady in white,” Brown shakily reported, holding his arm up to show the goosebumps he received whenever thinking about her. He has seen this apparition on several occasions while opening and closing the restaurant for the day.
Apparently, ladies who wore white during the Prohibition were in favor of the Eighteenth Amendment. One day, a woman in white found her husband at the speakeasy under Pack’s Tavern floorboards. Reprimanding him, the woman soon became the victim of a matricide. According to Brown, her ghost wanders the basement. “You’ll occasionally hear her flushing the toilet,” Brown claimed.
Behind Pack’s Tavern is another building, possessed by the same owners as the restaurant. Brown is confident it is “one of the most haunted buildings in Asheville.” Supposedly, it was once the site of Asheville’s jail. A guard fell asleep one night clutching onto a candlestick. The jail burned to the ground and no survivors lived to tell the tale. Despite being centrally located adjacent to City Hall and Pack Square, the owners of Pack’s Tavern cannot find a tenant due to how haunted the structure supposedly is.