Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility

Cell 19 at the Museum of Colorado Prisons echoes with a tubercular cough. The women's block has a long record of visitors getting their hair pulled.

Stand outside Cell 19 at the Museum of Colorado Prisons and wait. Within a minute or two, if the building is quiet, you'll hear a woman cough. Dry, short, coming from an empty cell with a sandstone floor and an iron bunk nobody has slept on since 1968. Staff think she's a tubercular inmate from the women's prison years. Nobody knows her name.

The museum sits wall-to-wall with the Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility, the oldest operating prison in the state, opened on January 13, 1871, when Colorado was still a territory. The museum's own building ran as the Territorial Women's Correctional Facility from 1935 to 1968, then sat empty for twenty years before opening as a museum in 1988. The cells you walk into are the actual cells. No replicas. The bars and the sandstone floors have been there longer than Colorado has been a state.

What happens here is more physical than most haunted-prison stories. Visitors on the after-hours Gold Rush Ghost Encounters Tour routinely describe getting their hair pulled in the upper-tier women's block, a hand on the shoulder in a corridor where they were standing alone, the feel of somebody grabbing their forearm hard enough to leave a faint mark. It isn't ambiguous cold-spot talk. People are saying they got touched.

The other recurring detail is tobacco smoke. Pipe or cigarette, no source, in rooms with the windows closed and no smokers present. The building has been smoke-free since it opened to the public in 1988. EVP sessions in the women's block regularly come back with coughing and with a woman's whispered voice too quiet to make out. Maureen Sheridan, who has led tours through the building, told KOAA that the spirits are "mostly playful, but can also be a little mischievous." That's the register most of the reports land in: not malevolent, not subtle, just present.

The daytime tour is cheap and straightforward. You walk the corridor, you read the placards, you look into the cells. The after-hours tours are the ones that do the rest. Ghost Hunts USA and a couple of local outfits run private investigations through most of the year, and the Halloween week program keeps ticket holders inside the cell block overnight with the lights off. No actors. No jump scares. A flashlight, a locked door, and whatever Cell 19 is willing to give you.

Canon City has Royal Gorge and dinosaur tracks and a dozen other reasons to stop. The prison museum is the one to spend an hour in. Downstairs, there's a phantom blood stain at the site of an old inmate-on-inmate murder that reappears on the floor no matter how many times the staff scrub it clean.