In Brief
Minneapolis City Hall hosted exactly one execution: the 1898 hanging of John Moshik, which went so wrong it became the last in Hennepin County. Staff and inmates on the upper floors still report a shadow they say is him.
The Full Story
Minneapolis City Hall holds the seat of both the city and Hennepin County government, and it has hosted exactly one execution. On March 19, 1898, John Moshik was hanged inside the building. Staff and inmates on the upper floors have reported him ever since — a shadowy figure, footsteps, and cold drafts they tie back to the man who died there.
The hanging went wrong. The drop was supposed to break Moshik's neck and it didn't, so he strangled instead, slowly, for roughly three minutes. It was brutal enough that it became the last execution ever held in Hennepin County, and the only one ever held in this building. Accounts of his crime vary, and no court record turned up to settle them; the story usually told is that he killed a man over a small sum of money, but that part lives in retellings rather than in any document.
What didn't fade was the ghost. The story of him is not a recent invention. A Minneapolis newspaper carried it in 1934, when prisoners said they heard the ghost of the man hanged in 1898 — which means the legend is now nearly a century old, told by people who were locked up here long before anyone alive today.
And there are still people locked up here. The detention center on the upper floors holds inmates now, which is exactly where the reports come from. The haunting plays out where people are actually held, not in some sealed-off wing — a shadow seen on the upper floors, footsteps, cold drafts, odd movements. It's described by staff, deputies, and inmates, never anyone named, and nothing has ever turned up on the cameras to back any of it.
The building around all this is enormous. It fills a full city block in roughly cut pink Ortonville granite, designed by the firm Long and Kees and built across the turn of the century, one of the largest 19th-century municipal buildings in the country. Down in the rotunda sits a marble figure of the Mississippi River called the Father of Waters, and there's a tradition of rubbing its big toe for luck.
So the same building runs both ways. Downstairs, people line up to rub a statue's toe for good fortune. Upstairs, the thing they report is a man who took three minutes to die, and who, as one local magazine put it, "many think still hangs around milking that fact to this day."
