“Don’t you know that anywhere a white mule dies is forever cursed?”

Spoken by an unknown Knoxville citizen at the turn of the 20th century, these words rang chillingly true.

It has long been believed by some locals that the mysterious string of fires that claimed five lives and destroyed the 400 block of Gay Street twice between 1897-1904 is attributed to an ancient gypsy curse.

“The Curse of the White Mule,” is a Knoxville legend claiming that the death of a rare white mule on the land where the W.W. Woodruff Building stood—now the location of Downtown Grill and Brewery—left a wicked spell in its wake.

In a 1904 issue of the Knoxville News-Sentinel, even they asked “Did White Mule’s death bring the ‘hoodoo’?”

In 1867, a traveling Gypsy Circus set up camp on a baseball field located on what is now the commercial district of Gay Street, just south of Summit Hill. With it, the troupe brought all sorts of exotic animals, such as lions, bears and elephants.

The crown jewel of the collection, however, was a white albino mule, an extremely rare and considered by some to be a sacred animal.

As fate would have it, the mule died of unknown causes before the caravan quit its Knoxville camp. According to the legend, the circus owners were so incensed by their loss that they placed a curse on the land where the animal took its last breath.

Fast forward 30 years, and hotels, restaurants and businesses stand where the baseball field once did. With Knoxville’s commercial district prospering, the White Mule Curse seemed to have been forgotten.

But on a quiet night in April 1897, a small fire broke out in the back of a Gay Street hotel. Unchecked, the flames spread quickly, soon engulfing the entire block.

Killing five people and causing over $1 million in damages, the disaster became known as “The Million Dollar Fire,” and was the worst Knoxville had seen up to that point.

Although whispers of a curse lingered, citizens cleaned up and rebuilt the block and soon moved on from the disaster.

Just seven short years later, however, bad luck struck again. At 2 a.m. on Nov. 12, 1904, another fire erupted in the bowels of W.W. Woodruff & Co., which was by then a large general store.

Once firemen arrived, the building was consumed, with flames licking a stock hold of gunpowder in the store’s front window. When the magazine exploded, it knocked everyone standing in front of the business to the ground, obliterating the remainder of the building along with the surrounding structures.

“All those nearby felt as though they had been kicked by a mule,” Christopher Coleman wrote in his book, “Ghosts and Haunts of Tennessee.”

In the aftermath, rumors of the White Mule Curse spread faster than the fire itself.

But Captain Woodruff, proprietor of W.W. Woodruff & Co. general store, refused to be daunted by the claims, instead stubbornly rebuilding his business for a third time.

“Curse be damned!” Woodruff was quoted saying.

And his persistence paid off. Although plagued by a handful of small, inconsequential fires since 1897’s “Million Dollar Fire,” the Woodruff building will turn 110-years-old this fall.

So has the curse been broken? Downtown Grill and Brewery General Manager, Mark Harrison, said he hopes so.

“We’ve been here for over 12 years now,” Harrison said. “I figure we are safe.”

To pay homage to the mule in hopes of assuaging the curse, the brewery created their signature White Mule Ale, a brew that quickly became one of their most popular.

“The White Mule may be gone,” Coleman wrote, “but it is not forgotten.”