Outlaws and Lawmen Jail Museum

A bloodstain on the floor of Cripple Creek's old Teller County Jail won't come out after decades of scrubbing. It's the museum's most durable exhibit.

There's a bloodstain on the floor of the old Teller County Jail that doesn't come out. Volunteers have scrubbed it. Owners have tried stronger solvents. The mark is still there, in the same spot on the same concrete, decades after the last inmate walked out in 1991. It's the first thing guides point at on the tour.

The jail went up in 1901 on West Bennett Avenue, two blocks from where Cripple Creek's red-light district ran at the peak of the gold boom. It replaced an earlier wooden lockup that kept burning down during riots. The new one was steel and stone, two stories, with women's cells on the main floor, men's cells upstairs, and a solitary block in back that staff still refer to by its original name: the hole.

Ninety years of use left a record. Drunks, prostitutes, claim jumpers, two men who hanged themselves in their cells, a deputy sheriff beaten to death during a 1906 escape attempt, and a woman named Leah. The common version of Leah's story: her husband beat her, brought her to the jail to hold for trial, and she died in custody. Sources disagree on whether the death was from the original beating or from something that happened inside. Staff hedge when asked. Her name shows up in the guestbook more than any other.

The museum opened in the same building in 1991, the year the jail closed, and the owners didn't change much. The cells still have their original bunks. The kitchen still has the pots. The booking desk up front is the booking desk the deputies used. There's no reconstructed set, only the actual rooms where things happened.

Guests on the self-guided tour report the same cluster of things. Footsteps crossing the upstairs cellblock when no one is up there. Cell doors that were closed at opening time found open by mid-afternoon. A woman sobbing in the women's block, usually from the third cell on the left. One tour guide, Tammy, has said in multiple interviews that she sometimes feels a hand pressed against the small of her back when she's alone in the building; she doesn't turn around anymore.

Ghost Adventures filmed at the jail in 2014. The crew described catching a dark figure moving through the solitary block on camera and recorded cell doors opening without contact. You can take their footage seriously or not; the locals' accounts predate the show by decades and haven't changed since, which is a better signal than a single TV episode.

The bloodstain has its own lore. The attributed incident is usually given as an 1896 fight between two inmates that ended with a broken bottle to the neck, but that date predates the current building by five years. The stain is probably from something later, a fight, a suicide, a death in custody that wasn't written up. Nobody's been able to pin a specific incident to it through digitized records. Volunteers stopped trying to scrub it sometime in the early 2000s.

The jail charges a modest admission and the whole tour takes under an hour. You leave through the same door the deputies used. On the way out, most visitors check the concrete one more time.