Oregon State Penitentiary

Oregon's only maximum-security prison, in operation since 1866. The oldest prison west of the Mississippi River still in use. Located near the former Mill Creek Correctional Facility, now a haunted house attraction.

The Oregon State Penitentiary has occupied its site in Salem since 1866, making it the oldest of the fourteen state prisons currently operating in Oregon. Its history stretches back even further: the Oregon Territory Jail, the first prison in the Pacific Northwest, was built in Oregon City in 1842. When the state capital moved to Salem, inmates were transferred to temporary wooden housing at the new site in 1866 and pressed into service constructing their own permanent prison. The facility has been in continuous operation ever since, accumulating over 160 years of incarceration, punishment, violence, and death within its walls.

Executions in Oregon were conducted publicly by individual counties until 1902, when they were centralized at the State Penitentiary and made less public. Sixty men have been executed inside the facility's walls. The prison's most notorious escape occurred in 1902, when inmates Harry Tracy and David Merrill acquired a gun, killed three guards, and broke free from the penitentiary grounds in a violent episode that made national headlines. In December 2022, Governor Kate Brown commuted the death sentences of everyone remaining on Oregon's death row to life without parole and instructed the Department of Corrections to dismantle the state's death chamber.

The paranormal activity at the Oregon State Penitentiary is concentrated around Tower 4, one of the facility's guard towers, and the area immediately surrounding it. The tower was built directly on top of the former prison graveyard, where inmates who died in custody and were not claimed by family were buried. The graveyard was officially abandoned in 1917, and in 1923 the grounds were paved over to create a recreation yard for inmates. The dead were not exhumed. They remain beneath the concrete, their graves unmarked and in some cases unrecorded, covered by the daily activities of the living prisoners above them.

A former prison guard who began working at the facility in 1956 reported persistent paranormal experiences during his graveyard shifts in Tower 4. He stated that whenever he was on the overnight shift, he did not feel as though he was alone in the tower. The sense of an unseen presence was constant and unshakeable, a feeling shared by other guards who served in the same post over the years. The irony of experiencing ghostly activity during the graveyard shift in a tower built on an actual graveyard was not lost on the staff.

Beyond Tower 4, the penitentiary's long history of violence, execution, and death has generated a broader reputation for unexplained phenomena. The facility has housed Oregon's most dangerous criminals for over a century and a half, and the suffering concentrated within its walls, from the sixty men who were executed to the unknown number who died of illness, violence, or despair during their sentences, has left an atmosphere that guards and staff describe as heavy with presence. The Oregon State Penitentiary remains an active maximum-security prison, which means the paranormal reports come not from ghost tour participants or weekend investigators but from the correctional officers who spend their working lives inside the facility and have no particular interest in promoting supernatural stories about their workplace.