Old Whitley Jail

Whitley County's only public execution took eight minutes to finish in 1884. The sheriff never got past it. Visitors meet both men.

It took Charles Butler eight minutes to die. The trap sprung at 12:08 in the afternoon on October 15, 1884, in front of about two hundred spectators on the lawn of the Whitley County Jail in Columbia City. The drop was botched. His neck didn't break. Coroner Dr. C.S. Williams pronounced him dead eight minutes later, though some accounts put the strangulation closer to ten. It was the only public execution in Whitley County history, and Indiana changed its law afterward to restrict all future executions to state prisons. What happened at Columbia City that afternoon was the end of public hangings in the state.

Sheriff Frank Allwein carried it out. He had been sheriff since 1880. The execution weighed on him, according to family accounts, until his own death in 1919, at seventy-five.

The murder that led to it happened in 1883 in nearby Pierceton. Butler had been arrested many times for violent behavior between 1877 and 1883, mostly directed at his wife Abbigail. She finally left, taking their four-year-old son Henry with her to Butler's own relatives in Pierceton, hoping distance from him would mean safety. He tracked her there. She refused to let him see the sleeping child. He shot her twice, once in the spine and once in the brain. The jury took seven hours at Butler's May-June 1884 trial. They returned the guilty verdict at four in the morning on June 12.

Butler escaped the jail at some point before his execution. Allwein and his men caught him again. Then the hanging. Then the eight minutes.

The Old Whitley Jail, built in 1875, is a three-story French Second Empire brick building at 116 East Market Street. The front was the sheriff's residence (kitchen, dining room, bedrooms for his family) and the rear was a fortified stone cellblock. The current owner Paul Harrington runs it as a seasonal haunted attraction he calls Columbia City Haunted Jail, a no-touch haunt with sets and scares. USA Today ranked it the fifth-best haunted attraction in the nation in 2019.

Harrington's haunt is staged. The stories his staff and investigators pass around aren't.

Four things come up in almost every investigator report. Cameras fail in the building. Fully charged batteries drain rapidly, sometimes with the building's power cut entirely. Display costumes have moved on their own between visits. People hear footsteps and voices and laughter coming from the corner of a room nobody's in. The activity is attributed both to Butler and to an unknown female entity whose story nobody has cleanly tied down.

Investigators also write up what they describe as Sheriff Allwein, pacing the corridor between the residence and the cellblock. The building's layout means anything moving between the two sections is walking the same path Allwein walked every day for four years.

The ghost story isn't invented. Eight minutes of documented death, two hundred real witnesses, a sheriff who carried it for thirty-five more years before he died. Allwein was seventy-five when he went. Butler had been waiting in the walls the whole time.