Staycation Directory

Moundsville, West Virginia

The West Virginia State Penitentiary sprawls across 11 acres. The prisoners built it, heavy rock by heavy rock, beginning in 1866. When you watch someone sentenced to “hard labor” in a movie, this place is what the judge had in mind.

That approach to justice lasted until the mid-1980s, when the West Virginia Supreme Court ruled that the prison’s 5×7 foot cells were cruel and unusual punishment — particularly because two or more convicts were often crammed into them. It was the beginning of the end for the prison as a prison. The WV State Pen closed in 1995.

Now the penitentiary is open again — as a tourist and local attraction. It also occasionally stages mock prison riots (for guard training), and hosts a surprisingly popular sleepover “ghost hunt” once a month, where people spend the night in the empty, unlit buildings.

Our guide, Tom, loves his job. He can easily stretch the standard 45-minute tour into one twice that length, peppered with stories of prison riots and revenge murders and of how the inmates in North Hall — known as “The Alamo” — would hurl urine and vomit onto the guards.

For such a vast, empty place, the prison is loud — concrete and steel don’t muffle sound. It’s clean but ugly, even if some prisoners did try to spruce the place up a bit. We notice a framed painting on the wall depicting the world’s longest single arch steel span bridge (which is downstate in Fayetteville). “Danny Lehman painted that,” Tom tells us. “He got stabbed through the eye in North Hall. Punctured his brain.”

If this is your kinda thing you will have tons of fun!

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