1859 Jail and Marshal's Home

Jailer Henry Bugler was shot dead at the front door of Independence's 1859 Jail on June 13, 1866, by horsemen trying to free a prisoner connected to Jesse James' gang. Visitors see him in a blue suit in the center south cell, while Civil War-era women and children who were detained here without charges under Order No. 11 are heard and seen throughout the building.

Henry Bugler's four-year-old son John was sleeping upstairs at the 1859 Jail in Independence when a stray bullet hit him in the wrist. The shot came from the men who had just killed his father at the front door.

On the evening of June 13, 1866, between five and six armed horsemen rode up to the Jackson County Jail at roughly 10 p.m. and demanded the keys. They wanted a prisoner named Joab Perry, a former Confederate bushwhacker who had ridden with Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson. Bugler, the county jailer, indicated he would not hand over the keys. The Chicago Tribune reported that he was shot as he started to close the door and fell dead. The gunmen were never identified, though newspapers named Frank Gregg, the Wilkerson brothers, Archie Clement, Jim Anderson, Frank James, and possibly Cole Younger and Jesse James as suspects. The theory was that Perry knew too much about the Clay County Savings Association bank heist and needed to be silenced.

Bugler had been the first jailer to live in the 1859 Jail with his family. His wife Mary was pregnant at the time of the murder. She stayed. She finished his term, cooking meals for prisoners, raising their children (Bridget, Mary Celia, Julia, Sarah, Henry Jr., John, and Thomas), and caring for up to ten Jackson County orphans. Thomas, their last child, was born in the jail residence in December 1866, six months after his father's murder.

The jail itself was built from two-foot-thick limestone with twelve cells, each designed for three men. During the Civil War, those cells sometimes held twenty. Union Provost Marshals, nicknamed "Little Gods" for their unchecked authority, used the building as a hospital, a military office, and a detention center. Under Order No. 11, women, children, and the elderly from the Missouri-Kansas border counties were arrested and held here without charges. When the jail overflowed, overflow prisoners were moved to other buildings. One of those buildings collapsed. Several young girls died.

Frank James spent roughly six months in the 1859 Jail during the 1880s. His accommodations were nothing like the wartime cells. He had a Brussels carpet, fine furniture, paintings on the walls, and hosted card games. The jailer didn't seem to mind. James was a celebrity by then, and Independence treated him like one.

The building was saved from demolition in 1958 and converted into a museum by the Jackson County Historical Society. Harry Truman helped with the effort. It opened to the public in 1959, on the jail's centennial.

The ghost most people talk about is Henry Bugler. Visitors have seen a man in a blue suit in the center south cell, the cell closest to where he was shot. He shows up there, and then he does not. Staff have heard male voices in empty rooms, heavy footsteps, and what one witness described as a man gasping for air. The women and children from the Civil War era are present too. Female figures and small shapes have been seen moving through the jail. The sounds of children come from parts of the building where no children are.

Some visitors report sudden waves of nausea in the cells. Others feel sharp drops in temperature. Radios in the building turn on and off by themselves. Objects are found moved from where staff left them.

His headstone reads: "assassinated while in discharge of his duty as Jailor of Jackson County, Mo." Mary Bugler raised seven children and ten orphans in a building where her husband was murdered at the front door.