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Hello, I am Joshua P. Warren and this is Joshua P. Warren Daily. Here is the press release that I am sending out right now all over the place headline Asheville Murder Spree Anniversary New Psychic Impressions Tuesday, november thirteenth, twenty eighteen will be the one hundred and twelve year anniversary of Asheville's largest murder spree, the Will Harris Rampage. That night, for the first time ever, haunted Asheville Ghost Tours is producing a special APM walking tour, tracing the killer's path and featuring a psychic medium who will reveal her impressions of what happened every grim step of the way. Joshua P. Warren, tour owner, says quote, three people died at the infamous OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. But that terrible night in Asheville, nineteen oh six, produced six deaths, including two police officers, three civilians, and the killer himself, whose bullet riddled corpse was put on display. This incident haunts downtown to this day, and many have seen the ghosts. This special tour will be led by Christian McLeod, president of the Asheville Cryptid Society, and it will feature psychic Reverend Pamela Mortimer, who grew up in a haunted house, honed her skills in the famous Lilydell, New York spiritualism community, and has investigated haunted sites in Asheville, like Helen's Bridge and the Grove Park Inn. Quote Christian is a certified paranormal investigator, and Pamela has an extensive background in visualizing dramatic events from the past, says Warren. We're producing this tour as a kind of mental time travel. Allowing the guests to stand exactly where these moments transpired and experience it through Christian's vivid storytelling and Pamela's gifts of perception. It will be an unforgettable night. Tickets cost twenty two ninety five per adult. Yes, that's twenty two dollars ninety five cents and fifteen dollars for children. The tour will run regardless of weather, and tickets can only be purchased online through hauntedashville.com. That's hauntedashville.com. So this is the press release that I'm spreading around right now, and therefore I want to tell you a little bit more about the Will Harris incident. I told you I would in yesterday's podcast. You see, Will Harris had a rap sheet like you wouldn't believe. I mean, you imagine bad things that people could do. Yeah, he pretty much had it on his rap sheet, and he'd bounced in and out of jails and prisons. And it uh it's my understanding he escaped from uh Raleigh Central. He tried a number of times, but he finally succeeded by hiding in a wagon that had a load of bricks, and uh and once he got out, the first place he went to was Asheville because he was looking for his girlfriend named Molly. And when he got there he could not find Molly and he got very agitated, and he went into a nearby cafe where it just so happens her sister named Pearl was. And Pearl said that Molly had always said, If this crazy guy named Will Harris ever comes here looking for me, don't tell him where I am. So Will Harris, he saw Pearl, he went straight for her, says, Where's your sister? And you you can imagine how nervous the Pearl was, and she was like, Oh, I have no idea. Well, Will Will Harris was a uh he was an evil man, but he was not a stupid man, and he could tell that she was lying to him, and so he said, Okay, all right, yeah, fine, fine. So he left and he went to a local pawn shop, Finkelstein's, which is still in business to this day, and he bought a new suit and a Savage 202 rifle. Who knows where he got the money from? And then he went and purchased a bottle of whiskey. So as the day grew long and the sun began to set he realized one way or another that Pearl lived on Eagle Street, which was a crime ridden area of Asheville in nineteen oh six. Some called it uh Hell's Half Acre. So he found where her house was, her apartment pretty much, on the street level, and he barged in there. And Pearl was obviously horrified to see this guy, especially when he sat down with this rifle and he started downning this bottle of whiskey straight. She knew it was an extremely sensitive and tense situation. Well, finally Pearl's boyfriend came home from work, and when he walked in, he saw what was happening, and he goes, Uh I'll be right back. And he left and he went to the police station, which was just right nearby, and and told them what was going on, and a policeman came over and knocked on the door and said, Open up, police, and immediately Will Harris fired his gun through the door, hit the policeman in the abdomen, and he the policeman died. So Will Harris kicked open the door, came out in a damn drunken rampage, and started screaming I'm Will Harris and I'm from hell. And at that point he began making his way up Eagle Street and onto the street we now call Biltmore Avenue. So he'd already killed one person, right? Well there was a shop owner right next door, and the shop owner heard some kind of noise and stepped outside, and Will Harris shot him. I think the bullet went through that fella's eye and blew the back of his head out, uh so that's victim number two. Then there was another guy who was walking across the street, just coming home from work also, and uh Will Harris shot him, killed him, and uh then there was another fella who was standing there on the corner between Eagle Street and Biltmore Avenue with uh some of his friends and his uh the guy's friends scattered. But the one guy who stayed thought this was some some kind of a prank or something like that, and uh Will Harris shot him and killed him. So uh, you know, now we're up to what victim number uh four, I guess. And so at at that point, Will Harris he turns the corner heading down the hill on Biltmore Avenue, and this is where it takes on a really weird spin. So uh this is in the evening, maybe uh close to nine p.m. A lot of people realize that there's something out of place happening. And across the street from that corner where Will Hell uh where Will Harris turned to the left, uh there was this club called the British American Club. And one of the guys who was there drinking late at night was a prominent judge in Asheville. His name was Judge Spears Reynolds, and Spears Reynolds always carried a thirty-eight in his vest pocket. And so he realized something bad was happening, so Spears Reynolds, the judge, comes out and he starts firing across the street at Will Harris. And Will Harris is shooting back at him, and people are scattering like you wouldn't believe, and so there's bullets flying, and all of a sudden uh Will Harris shoots so close so close to uh uh Judge Spears that these like chips of brick come flying down onto Judge Spears Reynolds, and at that point Reynolds says, Okay, I I I think I've had enough, and he goes back into the building where the British American Club was. Now, I want to pause here for just a second to tell you. I told you yesterday the story gets really weird. A lot of people after that considered Judge Spears Reynolds to be one of the luckiest men in Asheville because of having that exchange with Will Harris. Well, it turns out that his brother, named Robert Reynolds, later became a U.S. senator. I'm talking a not just a state senator, like a real U.S. senator. They called him Bunkham Bob. And so Robert Reynolds, Bob, he lived in the nearby Reynolds Mansion, a very haunted house, by the way, out toward uh the area of Woodfin. And when Robert Reynolds was fifty nine years old, he married the nineteen year old daughter of a woman named Evelyn McLean. Now Evelyn McLean was the last private owner of the Hope Diamond. And Evelyn McLean was one of these ladies who liked to take the Hope Diamond and and wear it at uh big parties and whatnot. And her son died in a car accident. Uh shortly after she visited Asheville with this jewel, her daughter died of a drug overdose. Her husband died in a sanitarium. The family newspaper, the Washington Post, went bankrupt. And just one year after her daughter's death, Evelyn expired from pneumonia at age sixty. Okay, so there is a weird peripheral connection between the Hope Diamond and all this because here you have the judge who everybody says is lucky, and then his brother ends up connected with the curse of the Hope Diamond, right? And the bad luck surrounding Evelyn McLean helped prompt the uh the last owner uh uh of the Hope Diamond there, uh New York jeweler Harry Winston to donate it to the Smithsonian. And uh and you may have heard that the the mailman who took that jewel to the Smithsonian had terrible tragedy. He was in a car accident, and many of his family members died, and he was maimed and all that. So that's kind of a weird side note about the curse of the Hope Diamond and how it connects to to Asheville. I could go on into greater detail, but anyway. So that exchange occurred between Will Harris and Judge Spears, and then uh Will Harris, he's he's he's heading down Biltmore Avenue, he's going down the hill, and there's this other police officer who comes out and fires down the hill. Now this other police officer is up there toward the top of the hill, and he's firing down the hill toward Will Harris. Now, here it is nine o'clock or you know close to nine, it's dark. Will Harris has drank let's just say hell, a bottle of straight whiskey, and yet for some bizarre reason he has such control and accuracy that he turns and he lifts his rifle and he points it to toward the top of the hill, and the officer at the top of the hill, he uh he he moves, you know, he dodges behind a a wooden post, and Harris fires uh once and just and that bullet glances off the edge of that wooden post, and then Harris got down on one knee and he really steadied himself, and I I don't even know he how he could have seen what he was doing, and he fired again, and that bullet went into the officer's mouth, exploded out the back of his head, can continue going up the hill, ricocheted off the Vance Monument, which is the primary monument in the midst of downtown Asheville, uh, broke through the window, that bullet broke through the window of a shop across the street, passed through a box of cigars and lodged itself. I mean, what a powerful rifle, and and how incredible, how incredible the luck or unluck, you know, that he could do that. And at that point, Will Harris realized, uh, you know, I gotta I gotta flee. And so he he ran further down the hill, and he made it quite a ways as a posse was forming in downtown Asheville, including the owner of Finkelstein's pawn shop, who and that guy was just handing out rifles and guns to everybody saying, Go get that son of a bitch. So it was the next day when they they cornered him near Asheville in a thicket and asked him to give himself up and he wouldn't do it, and so they all opened fire and they just blew him to bits. And then they dragged his body and put it onto a wagon and they rolled it up there to downtown Asheville and they uh propped it up on display, and there were people who were so damned angry as they should have been, who were coming up and shooting the corpse of Will Harris. And like I said in yesterday's podcast, I mean uh I have a picture, a big blow up of a picture in the Asheville Mystery Museum that shows this guy's bullet riddled corpse. And there were police officers who were coming out saying, Well, we don't need the where were you when we needed you yesterday, okay? You don't have to do this anymore. He's dead, forget about it. You know, and so the police officers were having to like hold back the the people. Well, what's really weird is that his body was shipped to Raleigh for autopsy and processing, and to this day uh we don't know what happened to it. It kind of just sort of disappeared in the records. So that's weird. But then after that, guess what? People all over downtown Asheville began seeing these grisly apparitions of the murder victims and perhaps even Will Harris himself, and they were all in states of uh just gruesome and shocking display. Uh I won't get into those details because those are details that you'll get if you take the haunted Asheville Ghost Tour, but that is the gist of the strange and bizarre and disturbing story of Asheville's largest murder killing spree, the Will Harris incident, 1906. This November 13th will be uh the 11th year anniversary. So you can see why that we're doing this special tour where you get to come on the tour that night, one time only, 8 p.m. And uh we're gonna take you. You know, Christian McLeod is gonna take you right there, step by step, point by point, block by block, where all this happened, and we're going to have a psychic there for you, Pamela Mortimer, and she is going to give you her insight on what happened along the way. So it's a somber event, but it's also a fascinating opportunity to be there and uh see what you sense, what you can photograph. I'd love to have paranormal investigators there, bring your equipment. If you're psychic, you know, come on there. As a matter of fact, if you're a psychic, email me. Maybe I can hook you up with a ticket or two. I mean, just to be there because we want to gather as much info as we can about this amazing incident. So anyway, look, if you go to hauntedashville.com, click the big uh the big red button there that says book online, and uh that's how you get your ticket for this special night. It's a Tuesday, it's gonna be cold. I don't know, it might be rainy and miserable, but that doesn't matter. Weather will not stop us, it never does. Even if it's rainy and miserable, it we will we're going to do this regardless of weather. This is when it happened, and you are going to be there in the creepy footsteps of this incident. So go there to hauntedashville.com. I'm sure it will sell out, but go ahead and get your ticket, and I would love to hear from you about your experiences. So yeah, press release is going out uh right now about this, and I cannot wait to see the pictures that come from this, to hear what was discovered, to get the feedback from investigators. It's going to be uh really a fascinating experience, but only uh you know for a limited amount of folks because it is a walking tour, and you know, you understand. So again, that's hauntedashville.com. So that's it for this particular podcast. I am Joshua P. Warren. My website is joshuapwarren.com. This podcast is called Joshua P. Warren Daily. It's always short, it's always free. You can sign up and uh subscribe through various means when you click that link or just follow me on Twitter at Joshua P. Warren at Joshua P. Warren, and I will tweet when a new one is available. So thank you for listening, thank you for your interest and support, thank you for staying curious, and I will talk to you again soon.