The Old Jail

Seven executions since 1818. A 2022 spirit box said 'Elizabeth' and 'Eugene.' The Franklin County Historical Society now runs ghost hunts here.

William Reed was hanged in the courtyard of the Old Jail in Chambersburg in April 1912 for killing Sarah C. Mathna, the woman he had wanted to marry. He was the last man executed on the grounds, and he brought the total to seven over the jail's 152-year run. The gallows are gone. The courtyard isn't. Investigators on overnight hunts have reported standing in it and feeling the hairs on their arms lift for no reason they can explain, and on one July 2022 session the women's block on the third floor started talking back through a spirit box.

Her name, the spirit box said, was Elizabeth. She had two friends. "Don't leave." "Talk with me." Religious phrases came through in the same session, church bells and prayer fragments that nobody on the live side had said out loud.

The Old Jail was built in 1818 and is one of the handful of Chambersburg buildings that survived the Confederate burning of the town in 1864. The sheriff and his family lived in one half of the building. Prisoners occupied cells across three levels. Meals for everyone, staff and inmates, came up from the basement kitchen. The jail ran until 1970, got placed on the National Register of Historic Places the same year, and now houses the Franklin County Historical Society.

The inmate roster runs a long way toward explaining why the building has a reputation. Captain John Cook, one of John Brown's raiders at Harper's Ferry, was held here before he was moved for trial and eventually hanged in Virginia. "Lewis the Robber," a highwayman romanticized as the Robin Hood of Pennsylvania, spent time in these cells before his own execution elsewhere. Seven men were executed in the jail's courtyard. Others died in the basement from the conditions. A number of inmates killed themselves.

The basement is where the ghost hunts usually run longest. The root cellar has a legend about an unmarked grave, and a spirit box session produced the single-word answers "grave," "back," and "chased" in quick sequence. Other names came through the device in the same area: Gary, Sara, Jacob, Deborah. None of them match the known execution list, which the historical society will happily show you.

The third-floor men's section produced a male voice that identified itself as Eugene and said he felt "remorse." Asked where he was, he said "I'm close." EMF meters lit up every time somebody on the live side asked a direct question.

Visitors who don't bring equipment report the usual things. A black figure the shape of a man walking past a second-floor window with no sound. Moans from cells that don't currently have living people in them. The feeling of being touched, usually on the arm or shoulder, in the basement. Cells on the first-floor museum level still have the scratch marks where inmates counted their days.

The Franklin County Historical Society runs the investigations through Ghost Hunts USA and takes the entries seriously enough that the society's own paranormal page lists phenomena by floor. Most operating museums prefer the ghost talk stays off their official site. The Franklin County historical folks made a different call. The Old Jail is comfortable letting visitors draw their own conclusions about what happens in a 207-year-old building where at least seven people were legally killed and more died by their own hand in the basement.