In Brief
At the Thomas Wolfe Memorial in Asheville, North Carolina, there's one hallway the staff rarely walk. It's where a boarder named Theodore Salmer collapsed and bled to death one Sunday in 1933 — and the site's own manager is the one who told the story.
The Full Story
At the Thomas Wolfe Memorial in Asheville, North Carolina, there's one hallway the staff rarely walk. The site's own manager, Tom Muir, is the one who'll tell you why.
The yellow house at 52 North Market Street started as a seven-room home in 1883 and grew to twenty-nine rooms as a boardinghouse called the Old Kentucky Home, run by Julia Wolfe. She was the mother of the novelist Thomas Wolfe, who grew up here — never sure which room he'd sleep in, since Julia rented out every bed she could — and turned the place into "Dixieland" in *Look Homeward, Angel*. One Sunday morning in November 1933, a longtime lodger named Theodore Salmer collapsed in the hallway from a pulmonary hemorrhage, blood spilling from his mouth, while Julia made tea in the kitchen.
She ran to the porch and called across the street to her neighbor. The neighbor happened to be Ed Dunn, an undertaker — exactly the man Salmer now needed. By the time Dunn came through the door, Salmer was dead. "To this day there is one place in the historic house where staff rarely goes," Muir wrote, "the tragic hallway where Salmer met his demise."
Wolfe had already put Salmer in a book, as a character named Gilmer. He had a habit of doing that to the dead in this house.
Two of them were family. His brother Ben died upstairs in October 1918, a week shy of twenty-six, of the influenza that was killing people everywhere that year; Thomas, then a student at the University of North Carolina, was summoned home by a telegram that read, "Come home at once. Ben has Pneumonia. Mother." He made it to the deathbed. Ben became Ben Gant, in a passage people still call one of the most powerful death scenes in American fiction. Their father, William, died in a back room in June 1922 and became Oliver Gant. That room is a regular stop on the tour now. The whole family lies together a few miles away, at Riverside Cemetery.
Visitors report the usual things — a woman seen in the dining room, typewriter sounds from rooms that are closed, a face in an upstairs window some take for Wolfe himself. The house is a state historic site, kept at the pitch of a working 1918 boardinghouse, the furniture mostly original.
"I sense the house is now at peace," Muir said. "Though it hasn't always been."
