In Brief
At the Burlington County Prison in Mount Holly, New Jersey, a top-floor cell held the man condemned to die. Days after they hanged him in 1833, guards started smelling cigarette smoke drifting out of it. Nearly two centuries later, that's still the detail people report.
The Full Story
At the Burlington County Prison in Mount Holly, New Jersey, the worst cell sat at the top of the building. Architect Robert Mills, who would later design the Washington Monument, built the maximum-security "dungeon" on the third floor, not in a basement, with a permanent iron ring set in the stone floor to chain the prisoner and one high, thin window. The idea was that no one up there could dig out or whisper to the cell blocks below. The motto carved over the entrance read, "Justice Which, While it Punishes, Would Endeavor to Reform the Offender." The man who made the place famous was chained in that top-floor room in 1833, and the smell of his cigarettes is the thing people keep reporting.
His name was Joel Clough. He had stabbed a young Bordentown widow named Mary Hamilton eleven times in the chest at her boarding house, on April 6, 1833, after she rejected him. Days before he was to hang, he slipped his ankle chain, tore a blanket into a rope, and forced himself out a window. They caught him that night near the Delaware River and brought him back. He was hanged on July 26, 1833, and buried in a corner of the prison yard, where a large tree grows over the grave today.
Within days, the guards working the building started smelling cigarette smoke near the dungeon, coming from a cell that was now empty. The first reports of moaning and rattling chains date to that same year. Clough was one of seven men hanged at the prison over the next century; the last execution came in 1906, before such things moved to Trenton. The prison itself kept running until 1965, when it closed as the oldest operating prison in the country, and reopened as a museum the next year. The heavy oak front door still carries its original iron hardware, stamped with the year 1810.
The smoke never stopped. During 1990s renovations, workers said they heard sounds and saw figures throughout the building, and that tools went missing and turned up later inside locked cells they had no key to. Visiting paranormal groups report recorded voices and EMF spikes, and in the Death Cell the meters routinely register a hit. Syfy's Ghost Hunters filmed an episode here in 2008. They all keep returning to the same top-floor room, where the EMF meter answers and the air still smells faintly of a cigarette no one is smoking.
