Museum of Colorado Prisons

Visitors keep hearing a dry rattling cough from Cell 18 at the Museum of Colorado Prisons, where a tubercular inmate named Edna died.

Cell 18 coughs. The tiny cell, which sits in a row of otherwise silent cells in what was Colorado's women's prison from 1935 to 1968, is supposedly haunted by a woman known to staff and regulars as Edna. Visitors walking past hear her cough clearly enough that people stop and check. Nobody is inside. Photographs taken near the cell come back with orbs and odd lighting artifacts often enough that paranormal groups request the spot by name.

The Museum of Colorado Prisons, in Canon City, opened in 1988 in Cell House 4 of the Colorado State Penitentiary. The building is a direct, almost brutal piece of Depression-era prison architecture, put up in 1935. It held women exclusively for 33 years. The state closed it as a functioning prison in the late 1960s and mothballed the cells for two decades before the museum got the building. Most of the cell hardware is original. You walk the same narrow corridors, under the same bare bulbs, past the same locked doors the inmates walked past, and then you stop at Cell 18.

On the downstairs floor there's a dark stain on the concrete that visitors call the phantom blood stain. Staff say an inmate was murdered by another inmate in that spot, and the mark has never come clean, despite repeated attempts to scrub it out. A former employee who worked at the museum between 2006 and 2008 said someone whispered his name clearly in his ear while he was alone in the building. He was alone in the building. Museum staff mention it the way you'd mention a leaky roof.

Next to the cells is the gas chamber. It sits in its own small outbuilding as an exhibit. The Colorado State Penitentiary carried out 78 executions over its history: 45 by hanging, 32 by gas, and one by lethal injection. The last hanging was Walter "Shorty" Jones in 1933. The last gas chamber execution in Colorado was Luis José Monge in 1967. The chair is still there. So is the metal tray where the cyanide pellets dropped. Tours walk through it. Some people don't want to.

The museum has become a regular destination for paranormal investigation groups, who rate it as one of the most haunted sites in Colorado. The old laundry is flagged repeatedly in reports as a cold spot, and it carries a persistent phantom smell of tobacco even though no one working in the building smokes. A museum employee told a Colorado Springs news crew, on tape, "I often hear noises, footsteps, and sometimes whistling when I'm here alone." She did not sound dramatic about it. She sounded resigned.

Colorado's prison history is not gentle, and the museum does not hide any of it. It puts contraband weapons, escape-attempt artifacts, and a jumpsuit from a 2018 Labor Day escape that happened during visiting hours on direct display. The Woodpecker Hill cemetery records, which account for prisoners who died inside and were buried without names, are available to look at. Whoever Edna is, whoever left the stain on the downstairs floor, they might be on one of those pages.

The museum runs a Gold Rush Ghost Encounters Tour every Halloween and sells private overnight investigations through Ghost Hunts USA the rest of the year. Come for the history first, because the history makes the hauntings feel inevitable. Leave through the gas chamber. Notice how quiet it is in there, and then notice how quiet it isn't in Cell 18.