Old Whitley Jail

At the Old Whitley Jail in Columbia City, Indiana, the figure investigators keep reporting is Charles Butler, a man who was hanged on the property in 1884 and never quite left it. They describe him as electrically charged: cameras malfunction near him, batteries drain in minutes, and the costumes and curtains hung through the building move on their own. Footsteps, voices, and laughter come from empty corners.

The hanging was real, and it was the only public execution in Whitley County history. The building went up in 1875, a three-story French Second Empire brick block at 116 East Market Street, with a mansard roof and carved stone trim. The front half was the sheriff's residence, where his family kept their kitchen and bedrooms; the back half was the fortified stone cellblock. Butler had shot his wife in 1883 near Pierceton after she refused to let him see their sleeping son. He was held here, escaped with four other inmates, and was found drunk and recaptured by Sheriff Frank Allwein, who returned him for trial.

About 200 people held tickets the day he died. Allwein sprang the trap at 12:08 p.m. on October 15, 1884. The drop was botched. Butler didn't fall hard enough to break his neck, and he strangled in front of the crowd for somewhere between eight and ten minutes before he was cut down, dying a few minutes later inside the jail. The hood and part of the noose used that day sit a few blocks away in the Whitley County Historical Museum.

Springing that trap weighed on Allwein for the rest of his life. He died in 1919, at 75, and the story goes that it never left him. His figure is reported, too, moving along the corridor between the sheriff's residence at the front of the building and the fortified cellblock at the back, the same path he walked every day he ran the place.

The building is a haunted house now, the Columbia City Haunted Jail, run since 1991 by an owner named Paul Harrington who redesigns most of it every year. USA Today ranked it the fifth-best haunted attraction in the country in 2019. "It was the biggest honor we've had," Harrington said. "We absolutely try to live up to it, every minute." But he keeps the real story in the same breath. "We have our local legend, which is Charles Butler getting hung," he said. "He shot his wife, killed her. They put him in the jail, he escaped, they caught him, and then there was a state sanctioned hanging."

There is a third one. People report an unidentified woman in the same brick walls, and no source can say who she is. No grave, no name, no event ties her to the jail. The men here have records behind them, down to the minute the trap fell. She has nothing, and she is reported just the same.