Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary

Tennessee's first maximum-security prison, opened in 1896. Inmates called it "End of the Line." James Earl Ray, who assassinated Martin Luther King Jr., served time here. It closed in 2009 and now offers ghost tours.

Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary, known as 'the end of the line,' was Tennessee's first and oldest maximum-security prison, and its origin story is as violent as its reputation. Before the penitentiary existed, Petros was a coal mining town that used convict labor from the 1860s through the early 1890s. Local coal miners, fed up with losing work to prison laborers, ignited the Coal Creek War in 1891, burning the old state prison to the ground along with its stockades and mines. Brushy Mountain was then built by the very prisoners it would house, opening in 1896 on the site of the destroyed facility.

For over a century, Brushy Mountain confined Tennessee's most dangerous criminals within its granite walls, nestled in a remote mountain valley where escape was nearly impossible -- though many tried. The prison's most infamous inmate was James Earl Ray, the assassin of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who briefly escaped in 1977 before being recaptured after three days in the surrounding wilderness. An estimated 10,000 men died while the prison was in operation, and at least 100 executions were carried out. At its worst, the prison averaged one murder per week, and guards rarely maintained full control of the population.

When Brushy Mountain finally closed on June 11, 2009, the violence that had saturated its walls for over a century didn't leave with the inmates. The most terrifying entity reported is 'The Creeper,' a spirit connected to the death of a prisoner who was stabbed in the throat in the auditorium and then placed in a padded cell, where he slowly bled to death. Since then, a figure has been seen crawling across the auditorium floor, believed to be the murdered inmate reenacting his final moments as he desperately tried to reach help.

Cell 28 -- James Earl Ray's former cell -- generates its own activity. Visitors to the cell report feeling an oppressive, suffocating presence and sudden drops in temperature. The Hole, the prison's solitary confinement area, is another hotspot where visitors feel someone touching them or pushing them from behind. The temperature drops sharply in the chapel for no obvious reason. Dark shapes and figures are seen in peripheral vision throughout the facility, particularly in the cell blocks and the mess hall. Growling and voices with no source echo through corridors, and banging sounds reverberate through the building's stone walls.

EVP recordings captured during investigations have produced voices and sounds with no living source. Footsteps follow visitors through empty cell blocks. The hospital wing, where untold numbers of inmates died from violence, disease, and neglect, is reported to be among the most active areas.

Brushy Mountain now operates as a historic tourism destination offering regular tours, overnight investigations, and a distillery. The granite walls still stand, and according to those who've walked them after dark, so do many of the men who died within them.