Tennessee State Prison

Old Sparky killed 125 men at Tennessee State Prison between 1916 and 1960. People still hear cell doors slamming that haven't moved in 30 years.

The electric chair at the Tennessee State Prison killed 125 men between 1916 and 1960. Inmates called it Old Sparky. The prison itself sat on the west side of Nashville from 1898 until it closed in 1992, and it never had a quiet reputation, in part because of the chair and in part because of the conditions everywhere else inside the walls. A 1985 inmate riot, conditions lawsuits going back decades, and the routine brutality of the labor system gave the building roughly a century of accumulated misery. When the state closed it in 1992 and moved everyone to Riverbend, the buildings were locked and left. They've stayed mostly locked ever since. A 2020 tornado tore the roof off one of the cellblocks. Nobody fixed it.

The ghost story trespassers tell most often is the warden. Visitors and trespassers, including the few film crews allowed in for permitted shoots, have described a uniformed figure walking the rooflines and the upper walkways of the cellblocks. He doesn't acknowledge anyone. He patrols. The identification with a specific past warden has shifted over the years, and no single name has stuck, which is unusual for a building this well-documented. The behavior is what carries the story.

Cell doors that haven't moved in 30 years have been heard slamming. The metallic clang of doors and gates is one of the most repeated phenomena in trespasser accounts. So is the sound of boots on the catwalks. Several reports describe screams from inside the cellblocks, attributed by witnesses to the men who died in Old Sparky. The chair was kept on the lower level near the main administration building. The 125 executions ran from Julius Morgan in 1916 to William Tines in 1960. The federal courts effectively suspended capital punishment for years after, and Tennessee never used the chair at the state prison again.

The building is one of the most filmed prisons in American movies. The Green Mile shot here. Ernest Goes to Jail shot here. Last Castle shot here. Crews and security guards on those productions have a long list of stories: tools moving, temperature drops in the death row corridor, voices on audio tracks that nobody can account for. One sound engineer reported a recording of what sounded like a man saying his own execution date.

James Earl Ray, who pleaded guilty to assassinating Martin Luther King Jr., did time here in the early 1970s before his transfer to Brushy Mountain. He escaped from Brushy in 1977 and was caught three days later. His brief presence at the State Prison gets cited in nearly every haunting account, even though he didn't die here. The reason is partly tourism and partly the fact that the building's most famous inmate is a useful name to attach to it.

Trespassing has been illegal at the prison since closure, and the state has prosecuted YouTubers and ghost hunters who have gotten in. The buildings are structurally compromised. The tornado damage is real. None of that has stopped the urban explorers, and the ones who have made it inside have produced footage of doors moving, lights cycling in cells with no electricity, and what sound like cell extractions happening in empty corridors. The sounds are clear enough that a few channels have stopped uploading their Tennessee State Prison footage entirely.

The prison was built to hold the worst of Tennessee. For 94 years it did. The argument from people who have spent time inside the empty buildings is that 94 years of misery don't just go away when the lights come off. The last inmate walked out of here in 1992. Cell doors have been slamming on an empty hallway ever since.