Burlington County Prison Museum

Joel Clough was hanged in 1833 for murder at Burlington County Prison and buried in the yard. Cigarette smoke still drifts from his empty cell.

Joel Clough was hanged in the yard of the Burlington County Prison in 1833 for stabbing his girlfriend to death after she broke off their engagement. He was twenty-nine. Guards buried him in a corner of the same yard, where a tree now stands above the grave. Within days of his execution, people working the night shift started reporting cigarette smoke drifting out of his empty cell.

His cell is on the top floor. That placement was deliberate. When Robert Mills designed this Mount Holly prison in 1810, he put the maximum-security cell, the dungeon, as high up as he could get it. Three stories of stone underneath would defeat any prisoner who tried to tunnel out, and isolate him from the men in the cell blocks below. Mills was a serious architect. He had studied under Benjamin Latrobe and would go on to design the Washington Monument, the U.S. Treasury, and the U.S. Patent Office. The Burlington County Prison, completed in 1811, was one of his early commissions and one of the earliest progressive prisons in America, with individual cells, cross-ventilation, fireproof construction, and a Bible or prayer book issued to every inmate.

It ran continuously until 1965. When it closed, it held the title of the oldest operating prison in the country. It reopened as a museum the next year.

Joel Clough is the prison's headline ghost. Paranormal teams who've worked the building pick up EMF spikes in and around his former cell on nearly every visit. A stretcher parked next to the dungeon shifted on its own during one investigation. Motion sensors trip inside the cell when no one is in there. Staff describe dark outlines crossing a doorway and sliding down the cellblock hall, gone before anyone can get a flashlight on them. More than one investigator has reported smelling cigarette smoke near the dungeon, the same detail the nineteenth-century guards reported.

He is not alone. A child's spirit hides in an old iron safe on the lower floor, and small footsteps and giggles get reported in corridors where no kids are visiting. The Paranormal Consultants and Investigators of New Jersey have logged banging sounds that answer spoken questions on cue, light anomalies in the dungeon cells, and dark movement synchronized with motion sensor trips. One of their investigators had her hair physically tugged, and her REM pod, EMF detector, and motion sensor all alarmed at the same moment.

Syfy's Ghost Hunters filmed an episode here on March 12, 2008. TAPS captured voice EVPs in the cellblocks and logged orb anomalies on their cameras. They recorded activity in the third-floor dungeon strong enough that the investigators flagged it on air as the space they'd want to come back to.

The dungeon is where visitors talk about the air itself. Prisoners awaiting execution were chained to the floor up there in the dark. People walking through it now describe the room as physically heavier, like the atmosphere has added a few pounds per square inch, and leave feeling short of breath. The tree in the yard where Joel Clough is buried is still there, grown large. Staff recommend looking at it before you go inside, so you know where to picture him when the cigarette smoke starts.