Hales Bar Dam, a powerhouse on the Tennessee River below Chattanooga, leaked from the day it opened and drowned a whole town when engineers gave up on it. Ghost crews who film inside keep recording the same faint flute, on land a Cherokee chief called dark and bloody.
Two investigators for the TV show Ghost Hunters were standing inside the old powerhouse at Hales Bar Dam, on the Tennessee River below Chattanooga, when something they couldn't see touched each of them on the face. That was 2012, on an episode they called "Flooded Souls." Steve Gonsalves and Dave Tango both felt it, in the same room, from a force nobody could locate.
The powerhouse is all that's left of a dam that never worked. Construction started in 1905, the dam opened in 1913, and it was dropped across the river onto soft Bangor limestone riddled with hollow channels. It leaked the day it opened and never stopped. Engineers pumped hot asphalt into the foundation and sank concrete caissons, among the first American dams to try it, and nothing held. Over eight years of construction, 109 men died. When the Tennessee Valley Authority finally gave up in the 1960s, it built a new dam downstream and let a rising lake do what the old one never could: hold water. The reservoir swallowed the little town of Long, and its cemetery went under with it.
Almost everything people report here is about drowning. A tunnel ran beneath the structure, and local children used it as a shortcut to school; at least two are said to have died when it leaked and filled, and their small apparitions are the most-reported figures in the passages. The tours name others: a girl called Linda who keeps to the upper floors, and a man the staff call Chris. Nothing in any record dates them or gives them last names.
The ground was supposed to be bad long before the first stone went down. In 1775, at the Treaty of Sycamore Shoals, the Cherokee war chief Dragging Canoe refused to sign this stretch of river away and warned the settlers taking it that they would find the land "dark and bloody." Some 130 years later, engineers picked that exact bend to build the largest thing anyone had ever put across the Tennessee.
What stands there now is stranger. The powerhouse shell holds Dam Whiskey Co., a distillery that walks visitors through its barrel room and the old tunnels, and every October the building is dressed up as a haunted house, paying customers filing past the floors where the children are said to have drowned.
Two national ghost crews filmed there years apart. Both came away with the same thing buried in their tape: not a voice, not a scream, but something that sounded like a Native American flute, playing faintly on the exact land a Cherokee chief once said would be dark and bloody.
