Museum of Colorado Prisons

The Museum of Colorado Prisons in Canon City lives inside a real prison, a 1935 women's cell house with about 30 original cells over two floors. The one people stop at is cell 19, on the upper row. A female prisoner is said to have died inside it. Now the cell is locked and empty, and the story goes that visitors walking past hear coughing come from behind the bars, then go home and find their photos full of orbs.

A few cells down is number 18, and its story is older and comes from a stranger source. The prison's own warden, Wayne Patterson, wrote in his memoir that back when the women's prison was still running, he had to calm inmates who kept complaining about a woman crying all night in cell 18. Cell 18 was empty. The book is real; the anecdote reaches us through the paranormal writers who retell it. Don't confuse the two women. Cell 19 coughs. Cell 18 cries.

Cell 7 gets named too, as the block's hot spot. It's said to have held inmates who died by suicide or were killed by other prisoners, and people report a flat wall of panic the moment they step inside it.

The exhibits do the rest of the work. The collection includes a toothbrush filed into a shank, an execution table, and the noose from Walter "Shorty" Jones, hanged December 1, 1933 in Colorado's last legal hanging. And a few rooms from the cells sits a single-seater gas chamber, the last one the state ever used. Colorado executed more than a hundred people over its history, 32 of them by gas, the final one in 1967.

Staff don't dress it up. One museum employee put it plainly: "I often hear noises, footsteps and sometimes whistling when I'm here alone." She wasn't describing cell 19. She was describing the whole building, the one that used to hold women, the one she locks up by herself at night.