No Peace for the Dead

On October 19, 1882, on Gay Street in downtown Knoxville, the banker Thomas O'Conner killed Joseph Mabry with a shotgun. Mabry's son Joseph shot O'Conner, and O'Conner, dying, fired once more and killed him. Seven bystanders were wounded. The quarrel behind it had been building for years, over land and over the death of Mabry's other son, Will, in a barroom fight the previous December, which Mabry blamed on O'Conner. Three men died on the street that day, and none of them lived to settle it.

No Peace for the Dead is built around stories like that one. It follows people whose lives in Knoxville ended violently or unjustly, or with something left unfinished, and the hauntings said to have followed them. It's Ghost City Tours' adults-only ghost tour of Knoxville, for guests 16 and older, and the darker of our two tours here.

Knoxville gave its residents plenty to fight over. The city voted to secede in 1861 while most of East Tennessee stayed loyal to the Union, and neighbors spent the war on opposite sides. In June 1863, Union raiders shot Dr. James Harvey Baker through the door he had barricaded at his house on Kingston Pike. Two years later his son Abner, home from the Confederate army, shot William Hall, a Union veteran, downtown. Newspapers at the time disagreed about why. That night a Unionist mob took Abner from the jail and hanged him. Visit Knoxville passes along a story that Dr. Baker's spirit has never left the house.

Some of these lives came apart without a shot fired. Evelyn Hazen, Joseph Mabry's granddaughter, sued her former fiancé for breach of promise in 1932 and won. The details aired in the case cost her socially, she resigned from teaching, and she spent the rest of a long life in the family house on the hill, largely alone. In one telling of her story, she saw the apparition of an old friend in her bedroom for weeks, until she moved to another room.

Knoxville's oldest ghost story starts with a shooting, too. On August 25, 1879, Annie Lowe shot the builder Martin Woody, who died within the hour, and then shot herself. Within a few years boys were telling each other about a silent woman in white near Old Gray Cemetery, and the figure has since been identified both with Annie and with Martin's wife, Mary. Which woman people mean says a lot about who they think had reason to stay.

Adults only means your Ambassador can discuss these things directly: murder, a lynching, scandal, and the cruelty people inflicted on one another. Some of the men in these stories held other people in slavery, and we don't leave that out. It doesn't mean gore for its own sake or profanity as a selling point, and it isn't a drinking tour. The weight of the evening comes from the people involved and what happened to them.

The name is a theme. It isn't a claim that every spirit in Knoxville is angry or looking for revenge. Some of the people in these stories are said to be restless; others are only said to remain, and many reported hauntings come with no explanation at all. We won't invent one, and we won't invent motives, final words, or witnesses. Your Ambassador will tell you where the record ends and the lore begins.

If you're choosing between our Knoxville tours, The Ghosts of Knoxville Tour is the all-ages introduction to the city's people and legends. No Peace for the Dead is for couples, friends, ghost-story regulars, and travelers who want the harder stories, told frankly and in more depth. Guests must be 16 or older. Book below, and we'll send meeting point details with your confirmation.