The West Virginia Penitentiary in Moundsville held men three to a 5-by-7 cell for 129 years, and roughly 995 of them died inside. Investigators now line up for one cell in particular, at the far end of the block the inmates called the Alamo.
The most-visited cell at the West Virginia Penitentiary in Moundsville measures 5 feet by 7, at the far end of North Hall, and it is the one investigators line up for, recorders in hand. Tom Moore, a founding member of the Mid-Ohio Valley Ghost Hunters, sat in it alone on purpose, so nothing on the tape could be blamed on the person beside him. When he played it back, a man's voice said one word: "weapon."
"I can not say it is," Moore wrote, "but I do have a hard time believing that this recording is anyone else other than William 'Red' Snyder."
Snyder had that cell. He was doing life for killing his father and one other man, and the Ghost Walks account of his death has him running the Aryan Brotherhood inside. Maggie Grey, who guarded him, remembered a man who talked to her about "Days of Our Lives" as if those people lived just next door, and then added the rest of it: "if he told you he was going to kill you, that's exactly what he meant."
In 1992 an inmate named Russell "Rusty" Lassiter came at him with a shank and stabbed him 37 times, close enough that a guard drew his gun to break it up. Grey's summary of the scene: "That was a nasty stabbing. But that was nothing."
She had the arithmetic to say so. At least 36 men were murdered inside these walls, and roughly 995 died here in all before the prison closed in 1995. The state itself killed 94 of them, 85 on the gallows and 9 in an electric chair the prison's Wikipedia entry credits to an inmate named Paul Glenn. The hangings were public until June 19, 1931, when the drop took Frank Hyer's head off.
The other regular is a man in khaki. R.D. Wall was walking to the boiler room when inmates cut him down with dull shivs for informing on them; most accounts date it to October 8, 1929, though Ghost Walks, citing a Mineral Daily News Tribune story dated October 10, 1979, puts the killing 50 years later. Either way, the same Ghost Walks piece collects reports of a figure in prison khaki heading for the boiler room and vanishing, some describing the hallway figure without its head. Legends of America keeps a separate presence on its list, a featureless dark shape it calls the Shadow Man, and gives it no address at all; the one account that pins him anywhere, MidAtlantic Daytrips, says he lives in the kitchen.
The walls holding all of it were cut by the men they were built to hold. From 1866, roughly 150 prisoners worked the quarries, hand-shaping the sandstone of a fortress that took 10 years to finish, its foundation sunk 6 feet down so nobody could tunnel under it. As one tour guide, Donna Richards, puts it: "They built their own prison."
