Old Idaho Penitentiary

The Old Idaho Penitentiary sits at the foot of the hills on the eastern edge of Boise, behind high sandstone walls the color of dry bones.

The stone came from a quarry on the ridge just above it. The men who cut it, hauled it and set it in place were the prisoners themselves. Over a hundred years, they built most of the prison that held them: the cell houses, the walls, the guard towers, the workshops, even the gallows.

For 101 years, more than 13,000 people passed through those gates. Some served a few months. Some served for life. Ten of them were hanged.

Territorial Prison

The penitentiary opened in 1872, when Idaho was still a territory — a rough frontier of mining camps, cattle ranches and stagecoach roads, eighteen years before it became a state. At first, it was a single stone cell house, holding a handful of convicts: horse thieves, robbers, murderers, and men who had committed crimes in the gold and silver camps of the mountains.

Over the following decades, as Idaho grew, so did the prison. New cell houses went up. A high wall was built around the grounds in the 1890s. A women’s ward was added in 1906. Prisoners worked in the quarry, the shops, the farms and the laundry.

Conditions were harsh. The cells were small, crowded and cold in winter, sweltering in summer. For much of the prison’s history, there was no indoor plumbing in the cells; prisoners used buckets. Discipline was strict. Those who broke the rules could be sent to a solitary confinement block known as “Siberia” — dark, tiny cells where prisoners were held in near-total isolation.

The Prisoners

Some of the prisoners at the Old Idaho Penitentiary became famous.

Harry Orchard was a miner and labor activist who, in 1905, assassinated Frank Steunenberg, a former governor of Idaho, by planting a bomb at the gate of his home in Caldwell. Steunenberg was killed when he opened the gate. Orchard’s confession led to one of the most famous trials in American history, in which he accused leaders of the Western Federation of Miners — including the radical labor leader William “Big Bill” Haywood — of ordering the killing. Haywood was defended by Clarence Darrow and acquitted. Orchard was sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted to life in prison. He lived at the penitentiary for nearly fifty years, became deeply religious, raised chickens and made shoes, and died there in 1954.

Lyda Southard was one of the most notorious women in Idaho history. Newspapers called her “Lady Bluebeard.” Over several years in the 1910s, four of her husbands died suddenly, along with her brother-in-law and her daughter. Investigators came to believe she had poisoned at least some of them with arsenic boiled from flypaper to collect on their life insurance. She was convicted of murdering her fourth husband in 1921 and sent to the women’s ward of the penitentiary. In 1931, she escaped, using a rope she made from a garden trellis. She was recaptured more than a year later in Colorado, and returned to the prison. She was eventually paroled.

And Raymond Allen Snowden, who brutally murdered a woman in Boise in 1956 and was dubbed “Idaho’s Jack the Ripper,” was the last person executed at the penitentiary. He was hanged in 1957. According to accounts of the execution, the drop failed to kill him instantly, and he struggled for several minutes before he died.

The Riots

By the 1960s and 1970s, the penitentiary was old, overcrowded and crumbling. Tensions among inmates and between inmates and guards boiled over.

In 1971 and again in 1973, inmates rioted, protesting the conditions. During the 1973 riot, they set fire to several buildings, including the dining hall and chapel. The damage was severe. Later that year, the remaining prisoners were moved to a new, modern prison south of Boise. The Old Idaho Penitentiary closed in December 1973.

The Museum and Its Ghosts

The prison was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1974 and opened as a museum, operated by the Idaho State Historical Society. Visitors can walk through the cell houses, the women’s ward, the solitary confinement cells, and the rose garden where inmates once worked. And they can see the gallows.

Visitors, staff and paranormal investigators report many strange experiences there.

In the cell houses, people describe hearing voices and footsteps, and the clanging of metal doors. In Siberia, the solitary block, visitors say they feel an intense, oppressive presence, and some report the feeling of being watched or touched. In the old women’s ward, people report the scent of perfume, and the sound of women’s voices and laughter. Some believe Lyda Southard still lingers there.

The most frequently reported experiences, though, come from the area around the gallows, in the building known as Cell House 5. Visitors have described a heavy, suffocating feeling, cold spots, and an overwhelming urge to leave. Some say they’ve heard the creak of a rope, or the thud of a trapdoor.

The penitentiary has been featured on paranormal television programs and offers special evening tours and events around Halloween.

The Walls They Built

What strikes me most about the Old Idaho Penitentiary is that its prisoners built it.

Every block of sandstone in those walls was cut by a man serving time, carried down from the quarry on the hill, and set in place by men who knew they’d be spending years behind it. They built the gallows they’d watch other men die on. They built the solitary cells they’d be sent to if they broke the rules.

There’s a kind of terrible irony in that. And maybe it explains why so many people say the old prison doesn’t feel empty. These men didn’t just live there. They made it, with their own hands.