In Brief
At the Old Sheriff's House and Jail in Crown Point, Indiana, volunteers restoring the cellblock say the doors began opening and closing on their own. Women report being grabbed in the cells. John Dillinger broke out of here in 1934 with a gun nobody can agree was real.
The Full Story
The Old Sheriff's House and Jail in Crown Point, Indiana is a red-brick Victorian fused to a concrete cellblock, residence and prison in one building. When the volunteers who run it began restoring the place in the 1990s, they say the cell doors started opening and closing on their own.
It got stranger from there. People working the building reported bars rattling in empty cells, disembodied voices, footsteps, lights switching on and off, shadow figures moving down the rows. The activity centers on the old cellblocks, where visitors describe shapes sliding in and out of the cells. Women have it worst. Up in the women's cells especially, some say they've been grabbed, or pushed.
In 2016, Syfy's Ghost Hunters spent a night here for an episode called "Public Poltergeist Number One." When an investigator was commenting on how small the cells were, their recorder caught a voice answering back: "tell me about it." Their thermal camera picked up a floating orb the same night.
No source names a particular ghost. For all the building's fame, the apparitions are generic inmates and guards, never one documented spirit. There's no record anyone ever died inside these cells, either. The fame belongs to a man who only stayed a few weeks.
The first sheriff's house and jail went up here in 1882 for $24,000, a Second Empire pile with a three-story tower, a mansard roof, and a porch on Tuscan columns. The sheriff and his family lived in the ornate front rooms; behind them sat the cellblock. The original held just ten cells. By the late 1920s the complex had swelled across the block to roughly 150 cells, with a kitchen, a barber shop, and a garage. Sheriffs lived on-site until 1958, and the jail held prisoners until 1974.
Its most famous prisoner came through in between. On January 28, 1934, John Dillinger was extradited here and locked in what Lake County called an escape-proof jail. On March 3, he walked out using a pistol nobody can agree was real. Dillinger said he whittled it from a piece of shelving with a razor and darkened it with shoe polish; the Mob Museum's account says his attorney's investigator got it from a woodworker. Real or carved, it lasted long enough. He grabbed two Thompson submachine guns off the wall, locked the jailers in cells, took a deputy and a mechanic as hostages, and drove off in Sheriff Lillian Holley's own Ford V-8, found abandoned later in Chicago.
He was dead by July, shot by federal agents outside a Chicago theater. The jail outlived him by ninety years and counting. The doors open by themselves now.
