Single Brothers House

Shoemaker Andreas Kremser was buried alive digging the cellar in 1786. His ghost, the Little Red Man, tapped in these walls for 160 years.

Little Betsy was deaf. She'd been deaf since a childhood illness, and she'd never heard the story of Andreas Kremser, the shoemaker who died in the cellar of the Single Brothers House in 1786. So when she came in from the garden one afternoon and told her grandmother about a small man in a red cap who had beckoned her to come play, nobody could explain how she knew what he looked like. The red cap was Kremser's. Everyone in Salem had known that. Betsy had not.

The Single Brothers House went up in 1769 as a dormitory for the unmarried men of the Moravian settlement. Shoemakers, tanners, tailors, potters, all of them living and working under one roof until they married out. Kremser showed up in 1772, a small man from up north with a distinctive red cap and a reputation for being useful. When the house needed a deeper cellar, he volunteered to help dig.

On the night of March 25, 1786, a bank of earth collapsed on him in the sub-basement. They pulled him out by lantern light. He was alive, but not for long. He died around midnight, and because the Moravians recorded everything, we know the exact hour. The community archive in Winston-Salem still has the entry.

What happened next is also in the records. Almost immediately, residents started hearing the tap, tap, tap of a shoemaker's hammer coming up from the cellar. Then came the glimpses: a small man in a red cap scurrying down a hallway, visible for half a second, gone when anyone turned to look. They called him the Little Red Man. For nearly two hundred years, he was a fixture of the house.

Then Betsy saw him. Her story is what separates this haunting from a hundred others like it. She was a child who couldn't have heard the gossip and couldn't have been told the story. She described a man she had no way to describe. Skeptics can do what they want with that, but it's a detail that keeps the Little Red Man in the Moravian record rather than the folklore bin.

The sightings tapered off around 1950, after a prominent community member saw the ghost while giving a tour of the cellar and a minister performed a ritual to lay him to rest. Whether the ceremony worked or Kremser just decided he'd tapped his last sole, the regular sightings stopped.

The Single Brothers House now serves as offices for Old Salem Museums and Gardens. It's open to the public, and it's one of the most visited buildings in the district. Staff will mention, if you ask, that doors down there don't always stay shut, and that cold drafts sometimes move through rooms with no windows. Once in a while, when the building is quiet, someone claims to hear a hammer tapping in the cellar where Andreas Kremser died almost 240 years ago.