West Virginia Penitentiary

Across the street from the West Virginia Penitentiary, there is a hill that isn’t a hill.

It rises about sixty-two feet out of the flat land of the Ohio River valley: a perfectly rounded cone of earth, covered in grass. It is the Grave Creek Mound, one of the largest prehistoric burial mounds in North America, built by people of the Adena culture more than two thousand years ago. When it was excavated in the nineteenth century, diggers found human remains deep inside.

The town that grew up around it was named Moundsville. And in 1866, right beside this ancient tomb, the new state of West Virginia began building a prison.

A Fortress

West Virginia had only become a state three years earlier, carved out of Virginia during the Civil War. It had no prison of its own. Its convicts were being held in county jails or shipped out of state. So the legislature chose a site in Moundsville and began construction, using prison labor — inmates quarrying and cutting stone to build the walls that would confine them and the men who came after.

The result, finished in 1876, was a forbidding Gothic fortress of gray sandstone: turrets, battlements, a castle-like central tower and walls two feet thick and twenty-four feet high. It looked like something from a nightmare about the Middle Ages. Its cells measured about five by seven feet.

For nearly 120 years, it was where West Virginia sent its most violent offenders. It was also, from 1899 to 1959, where the state put people to death.

The Gallows

Ninety-four men were executed at the West Virginia Penitentiary. Eighty-five of them were hanged.

At first, the hangings were public. Crowds gathered in the prison yard to watch. That ended in 1931 after a hanging went horribly wrong: a man named Frank Hyer was dropped through the trapdoor, and the force of the fall decapitated him in front of the spectators. After that, the gallows were moved indoors, and the executions were witnessed only by officials.

In 1949, West Virginia replaced the gallows with the electric chair. The chair at Moundsville was built, according to the prison’s history, by an inmate. The inmates called it Old Sparky. Nine men died in it between 1951 and 1959. Then West Virginia abolished the death penalty in 1965. It has not executed anyone since.

Old Sparky is still at the penitentiary. It’s on the tour.

The Sugar Shack

The violence at Moundsville wasn’t only official.

By the second half of the twentieth century, the penitentiary was one of the most dangerous prisons in the country. It was hopelessly overcrowded, with three men sometimes crammed into a single tiny cell. Stabbings, beatings and murders were common. Inmates made weapons from anything they could find.

In the basement, there was a recreation room that inmates called the Sugar Shack. Guards rarely went in. Inmates gambled there, fought there, and, according to the stories, settled scores there. Tour guides say it was the scene of assaults and killings that never made it into the official record.

And in 1929, according to prison history, an inmate named R.D. Wall — believed by other inmates to be an informer — was attacked by a group of prisoners in the boiler room and killed. It’s one of the most retold stories at Moundsville, and the boiler room is one of the places visitors most fear.

The Riot

On New Year’s Day 1986, a group of inmates overpowered guards and seized control of part of the penitentiary.

They took more than a dozen hostages, including guards and a food service worker. Over the following days, as the governor negotiated with the rioters, inmates hunted down three fellow prisoners they believed were informants or sex offenders and killed them. One of the murdered men was dragged through the cell block in front of other inmates.

The riot ended after two days, when the governor agreed to meet with the inmates and hear their complaints about the conditions at the prison. But the killings shocked the state.

That same year, the West Virginia Supreme Court ruled that the tiny cells at Moundsville constituted cruel and unusual punishment. It took nearly a decade for the state to build a new facility. The penitentiary finally closed in 1995.

The Shadow Man

The old prison has been a tourist attraction ever since, and one of the most active haunted locations in the country, according to those who give its tours.

The most famous presence is called the Shadow Man: a dark, featureless figure, usually seen in the corridors or near the old cell blocks, sometimes standing still and watching, sometimes moving away. Visitors and guides say they’ve photographed it.

In the boiler room, visitors say they feel a sudden chill, or the presence of someone standing behind them. Some believe it is R.D. Wall. In the North Hall, where the most dangerous inmates were held, people hear voices and the clanging of cell doors. In the old death row, visitors describe overwhelming sadness.

Former guards and inmates who return to tour the prison sometimes say they feel uneasy. A few have refused to go into certain areas at all.

The Mound

I keep coming back to the mound.

The prison sits across the street from a tomb built more than two thousand years ago by people we know almost nothing about. They raised that great hill of earth by hand, basket by basket, to honor their dead. And then, two millennia later, a new people came and built a fortress beside it — a place to hold their own condemned, and eventually to kill them.

Some visitors say the land itself is haunted, and that the prison was simply built in a place that was already full of ghosts. I don’t know about that. But I do know that if you stand in the prison yard at Moundsville at dusk, with the walls on one side and the dark shape of the mound beyond them, you feel very clearly that you are standing in a place where death has been dealt with, in one way or another, for a very long time.