The history of Moundsville

A castle-walled prison opened after a decade of building

The West Virginia Penitentiary is a decommissioned state prison, now run as a museum and tour attraction. Its walls run along Jefferson Avenue, built of hand-cut stone, 24 feet high and topped with battlements like a castle. The design copied a prison in Joliet, Illinois, but built at half the size.

West Virginia had only just become a state when it ran out of room to hold its prisoners. From 1864, the legislature crammed convicted men into a county jail in Wheeling. In 1866, lawmakers bought ten acres near Moundsville and put up a wooden prison while they worked out a permanent design. Construction dragged on for a decade, using convict labor, and the stone penitentiary finally opened in 1876.

Early reports described decent conditions. A warden wrote that food, clothing, and discipline had all steadily improved. The prison ran its own bakery, brickyard, and blacksmith shop, and later a coal mine a mile away that saved the state thousands of dollars a year. A school and library, finished in 1900, gave inmates a chance to learn to read.

The prison's early order did not last. By the 1920s, more than 2,000 men were packed into a building meant for far fewer. A new wing, called the New Wall, broke ground in 1929 and took thirty years to finish. The prison would later land on the U.S. Department of Justice's list of the ten most violent correctional facilities in the country.

Ninety-four men were executed within these walls

Public hangings began drawing crowds to the yard. Between 1899 and 1959, the state executed 94 men here, 85 by hanging and nine later by electric chair. Executions stayed open to the public until June 19, 1931, when the rope decapitated Frank Hyer during his hanging. After that, the state closed the executions to outside witnesses. The prison switched to the electric chair in 1951. An inmate named Paul Glenn built the chair himself. Guards nicknamed it Old Sparky. The last man executed in it was Elmer Bruner, on April 3, 1959. West Virginia abolished the death penalty six years later. The chair still sits inside the prison today, part of the tour.

A labor leader and a serial killer both served time here

Labor leader Eugene V. Debs spent two months locked up here in 1919, convicted under the Espionage Act for speaking against the draft. Thirteen years later, serial killer Harry Powers died inside these walls. Powers had lured women through lonely-hearts ads to his home in Quiet Dell and murdered at least five of them. Powers was hanged at the penitentiary on March 19, 1932.

Fourteen men broke out the front gate in 1979

On November 7, 1979, fourteen men escaped through the front gate, helped by broken locks and thin staffing. One of them, Ronald Turney Williams, was already serving time for killing a police officer in Beckley. During the breakout, he shot and killed an off-duty state trooper who tried to stop him. Williams stayed free for two years before federal agents caught him in a shootout in New York City.

A closed prison became a film set and ghost tour

Overcrowding and outdated conditions finally closed the prison in 1995, after 129 years in use. Inmates transferred out, and the state opened a new facility elsewhere. Roughly a thousand men are believed to have died here across those years, 36 of them by violence at other inmates' hands.

The empty cellblocks found new life as a filming location. In 2017, the TV series Castle Rock shot scenes here, using the prison as the fictional Shawshank. A television crew once investigated the building for a show called Proof Positive, hunting for the ghosts that tour guides still talk about. Visitors and staff describe a tall, dark figure some call the Shadow Man, said to be the spirit of an inmate who died in his cell.

A few hundred feet from the walls stands 600 feet, a 2,000-year-old earthen burial mound built by the Adena people long before any prison stood here.