#165 – JAIL GHOST ROUND TABLE

🎙️ Blake Smith and Karen Stollznow welcome back skeptical paranormal researcher Hayley Stevens for a roundtable discussion on haunted jails and prisons. Hayley, who hosts the The Spooktator Podcast alongside co-hosts Paul Gannon and Charlie Revel Smith, previously appeared on MonsterTalk to discuss ghost folklore and the allegedly haunted village of Pluckley. This time, she and Karen each bring their own firsthand prison investigation experiences to the table — one from a 17th-century British institution, the other from a 1950s American county jail about to meet the wrecking ball.

The episode ranges from the folklore mechanics of why prisons attract ghost stories, to the ghost-hunting tourism industry, to the psychological underpinnings of things that go bump in the dark of a cell block — all filtered through a lightly skeptical but genuinely curious lens.


⛓️ Why Prisons Get Haunted

The group explores the cultural logic behind prison hauntings. Hayley notes two recurring narrative archetypes she’s observed across paranormal TV shows and ghost-hunting tours alike: the big bad ghost (the gangster, the murderer, the condemned man) and the sympathetic victim (the wrongly executed, the unjustly incarcerated). Ghost hunters on television either challenge the former or try to compassionately “move on” the latter.

Blake points out that the desire for post-mortem justice likely fuels a lot of the lore — the notion that Al Capone, for instance, might still be doing time across several of the prisons he inhabited in life. Karen draws a parallel to the heightened superstitions found among people in other high-stress professions — ER nurses, paramedics — where occupational vigilance and pattern-seeking cognition seem to lower the threshold for anomalous interpretation.

Owen Davies’s book 📚 The Haunted 💵 gets a nod: Hayley recalls a passage in which prisoners hearing dripping water convinced themselves a murder victim’s ghost was coming for them — until someone identified a leaky pipe.


🏛️ Shepton Mallet Prison: Hayley’s Investigation

Hayley’s most recent prison investigation took her to Shepton Mallet Prison, one of the oldest functioning prisons in England, originally established as a house of correction in the 1600s and decommissioned only recently (it is now being redeveloped). The prison held, among others, the Kray twins and American servicemen executed there during World War II — including several hanged on its gallows, reportedly for much longer durations than British prisoners subjected to the quick-drop method associated with hangman Albert Pierrepoint.

The proximate media hook was a tour guide named Paul Tall, who claimed a ghost — the spirit of one of those executed American servicemen — had burned him with a cigarette during a public tour. He had a visible wound. Hayley’s assessment: almost certainly a cigarette burn of more mundane origin. She gained access to the prison through UK podcaster Danny Robins and his Haunted podcast, having previously been turned away when she offered to investigate independently (the prison operators were running paid ghost-hunting nights at £65 per person and weren’t keen on scrutiny).

The alleged phenomena at Shepton Mallet ran mostly to atmospherics — a “sinister presence” in a particular wing haunted by a woman in white said to have been hanged in her wedding dress, cold spots (attributed by Hayley to a leaky roof during a rainstorm), and oppressive architecture. A grotesque mannequin installed in the room beneath the gallows, complete with a noose and fake blood, rather undercut the solemnity of the place’s real history.


🔦 Denver County Jail: Karen’s Investigation

Karen’s experience dates to her time visiting Denver, where her now-husband Matt Baxter’s skeptical paranormal investigation group was invited by the Denver County Sheriff’s Department to spend two Saturday nights in a 1950s-era cell block slated for demolition. The facility had accumulated genuine tragedies over the decades: a guard murdered in 1974 when his throat was slashed during an escape attempt, multiple inmate suicides (including one who hanged himself with bedsheets from a top bunk and went undiscovered for six hours), and a female inmate who died after a hidden bag of cocaine ruptured internally.

The reported phenomena the group investigated included:
– A ghostly guard heard jingling keys and tugging cell doors at night — traced, at least in part, to a photograph of the murdered 1974 guard hanging in one of the hallways. Inmates who reported seeing the apparition described him in detail consistent with the photo: old-fashioned uniform, 1950s haircut, black-rimmed glasses. “He looked like Buddy Holly,” Karen notes.
– Shadow people reported by both staff and inmates — seen peripherally, vanishing into walls, in a facility already saturated with ambient noise and movement from still-active wings.
– A phantom inmate story, circulating in slightly different versions each time it was told: a man in an isolated cell woke to find a stranger in his top bunk who said “Go back to sleep — I’m not here,” and was gone by morning. Karen flags it as plausibly a sleep paralysis-adjacent experience, though the story had acquired enough variant retellings to qualify as full-blown jail folklore.
– A haunted communal shower, disembodied voices from empty concrete rooms, mysterious activity in the law library, and — the group’s favorite — a disconnected rotary telephone that allegedly rang before riots, serving as a supernatural early-warning system.

The team attributed most phenomena to the building’s acoustics (echoing concrete and steel), the hypervigilance of staff in a facility known for riots, and the folklore-amplifying effect of a transient inmate population constantly refreshing and elaborating the stories.


🕯️ The Ghost-Hunting Tourism Industry

Both investigators reflect on the gap between the real, often tragic histories of these places and the way those histories get packaged for ghost-hunting tourism. The Shepton Mallet events charge £65 per person for six-hour overnight sessions conducted in the dark — a darkness the operators described as helping participants “tap into their other senses,” which Hayley translates more accurately as simply removing the ability to see what’s going on. Ouija boards, table-tipping, glass divination, and the gadgetry popularized by shows like Ghost Hunters fill the program.

Hayley’s Spooktator co-host Paul, who has attended many such events, has noted that some participants aren’t there for the celebrity ghost at all — they’re hoping to make contact with a deceased spouse or sibling. That shift, from entertainment to something more like a secular séance for the grieving, is where the group’s concern about the industry sharpens.


🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 The Mackenzie Poltergeist Connection

Blake draws a thread to MonsterTalk’s recent episode on the Mackenzie Poltergeist of Greyfriars Kirkyard in Edinburgh — a haunting that is itself prison-adjacent, since the kirkyard served as an open-air prison for Covenanter prisoners in the 17th century. MonsterTalk has listeners doing on-the-ground archival research into several open questions from that episode, including whether the origin story of the poltergeist (a homeless person breaking into the mausoleum) holds up to documentary scrutiny, and what explains the reported physical injuries that tour visitors claim to sustain. Hayley, visiting Edinburgh for the Fringe in August, volunteers to conduct a Facebook Live from the Kirkyard — in the name of science.

Karen also flags her interest in visiting Savannah, Georgia and the Chatham County Jail, a location with its own substantial haunting tradition and a city Karen describes as almost overwhelmingly rich in ghost lore and historic cemeteries.


📚 Further Reading

– 📚 The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts 💵 by Owen Davies
– 📚 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology 💵 by Scott O. Lilienfeld et al.

🔗 Related Links

– Shepton Mallet Prison — Wikipedia
– Albert Pierrepoint — Britain’s most prolific 20th-century executioner
– Kray Twins — Wikipedia
– Mackenzie Poltergeist — Wikipedia
– Greyfriars Kirkyard — Wikipedia
– Sleep Paralysis — Wikipedia
– Taphonomy — relevant to understanding apparent post-mortem “signs of life” in folklore
– Pluckley, England’s “most haunted village” — the subject of Hayley’s previous MonsterTalk appearance

Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.

Blake and Karen are joined again by Hayley Stevens (The Spooktator Podcast) to talk about haunted jails and prisons. Hayley previously appeared on MonsterTalk in episode # 37 to discuss lake monster mysteries.

Referenced in this episode

• The Haunted by Owen Davies
• Haunted episode featuring Hayley Stevens (original link unavailable)

Music

• Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys