In Brief
At the Jailer's Inn in Bardstown, Kentucky, you can pay to lock yourself in the one room that's still an actual jail cell. This is the jail where Martin Hill, awaiting the gallows in 1889, died crying out in his fever. Guests still hear a cell door clank shut.
The Full Story
The Jailer's Inn in Bardstown, Kentucky is a bed and breakfast where one of the guest rooms is still an actual jail cell, the only one in the building that never stopped being one. The original prisoner bunks are bolted in place, fitted now with modern bedding, and you close the door and stay the night behind it by choice. Guests have reported lying in the dark and hearing what one of them called "the clinking of a cell door closing," with no living person anywhere near it.
The building locked people up for a long time before anyone slept there for fun. It opened as the Nelson County jail, ran as a lockup for nearly two centuries, and was Kentucky's oldest operating jail by the time it finally closed in 1987. The walls are laurel dolomite stone, about 30 inches thick. The McCoy family bought the place at public auction and turned it into an inn in 1989.
The most documented ghost here is a man who died in his cell waiting to be hanged. Martin Hill, a Nelson County man, was convicted of murdering his wife Esther in 1885 and sentenced to the gallows. Before the state could carry the sentence out, he fell severely ill and died in his cell in 1889, at 34. He went out the hard way. By one account, "in his pain and fever delirium, it is said he cried out in agonizing pain." He cheated the hangman by a few weeks. The story goes that a 1909 article described later prisoners hearing the same thing from his old cell, pacing and cries with no one in it.
Two figures get reported more than the rest. Bardstown ghost-tour operator Patti Starr names Esther, Hill's murdered wife, as the most active spirit, saying she followed her husband into the jail and never left. The other is Mrs. McKay, one of the original jailers, and a separate woman entirely. Guests describe her as a friendly presence. Then they wake in the dark to find her standing at the foot of the bed. So many people reported her over the years that the Travel Channel named the inn one of the ten most haunted places in the country.
It's a working inn now, taking reservations, running daily tours of its own grounds. And one of the rooms is still the cell, where a man died crying out in his fever, behind a door people pay to lock that keeps closing on its own.
