Haunted Prisons

Council Bluffs, Iowa is one of the more unsuspecting locations for paranormal activity. The rather small and simple city is situated on the Missouri River directly across from the Nebraskan city of Omaha. Home of Pottawattamie County, the area was named after the heavy presence of a contingent of Native Americans in the area. However, another heavy ghostly presence still remains in Council Bluffs at the old Pottawattamie County Jail, within an area of cells known as, “the squirrel’s cage”. Read more…

Prison escapes are one of the rarest events to occur inside correctional institutions across the world. But what if there was a way to ultimately prevent escapes? It should come as no surprise that in 1934, a maximum-security federal prison called Alcatraz was opened on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. To authorities then, if inmates escaped, the raging waters would drown them. If the thrashing waves didn’t kill them, then the sharks surely would. Decades after closing, Alcatraz remains one of the top haunted prisons in all of North America. Read more…

Missouri was made an official state in 1821, and by 1836 a fully functioning and surprisingly large stone penitentiary dubbed the Missouri State Penitentiary was dolefully open for business. 183 years later, the remains of the prison are more haunted than ever before. In fact, Time Magazine once referred to the prison as, “the bloodiest 47 acres in America.” Is the Missouri State Penitentiary Haunted? Governor John Miller was the fourth governor in Missouri’s new state history, and he was responsible for helping establish Jefferson City as the state’s capitol. Read more…

Gold was first discovered in the Wyoming Territory in 1842 right near the Sweetwater River. Legend has it that the man who first discovered it was so envied for his find that he was murdered before he could even make it home with his new treasure. For the next three decades, the area boomed with ruthless and violent prospectors who would stop at nothing to strike it rich. With so much crime in the High Plains, it was only a matter of time before justice would have to step in and be meted out. Read more…

Castellated with turrets and battlements, the imposing Gothic-styled West Virginia Penitentiary looked every bit as intimidating on the outside as it was violent on the inside. Prison breaks, riots, and scores of executions on inmates for a prison constructed to hold 480 people before swelling to over 2,000 in the decades to follow. Even the object of a Supreme Court case in 1986, the prison was eventually decommissioned and inmates transferred elsewhere. Read more…

Prisons are notorious for being very haunted places. Built to last decades and decades, they are enormous structures housing some of the most brutal killers that society has ever seen. The people who spend their lives in them are confined to tight living quarters and subject to incredibly high amounts of violence, brutality, and many times, death. There is no joy to be found in them except among those who serve smaller prison sentences or are unexpectedly reprieved. Read more…