By Tim Binnall
The historic Carbon County Jail in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania purportedly boasts a number of spirits left behind from its time as a correctional institution and, for a mere $749,000 dollars, the site and its resident ghosts could be yours. The current owners of the location have reportedly decided to put the jail up for sale after spending the last two decades maintaining it as a museum and haunted attraction. Said by one owner to be home of "tons of ghosts," the jail is specifically associated with a number of coal miner hangings.
Their executions were the end result of a violent series of skirmishes between coal miners and owners in the region in the late 1870's that became so infamous that the incidents actually inspired a 1970's film starring Sean Connery. Over a century later, some historians now suspect that the men sentenced to die may have received unfair treatment at trial. And it is the spirits of those wrongly-convicted prisoners who are said to still linger in the jail.
The centerpiece of the site is a particularly eerie cell where there is a handprint allegedly left behind by one such doomed man who insisted he was innocent. It is claimed that the stain cannot be removed nor covered and that prisoners who subsequently stayed in the cell were terrified by a ghost. Beyond that spot, visitors to the jail have also reported feeling a hand on their shoulder or being brushed up against by an unseen force.
Perhaps because of the macabre history of the location and tales of paranormal activity at the site, the jail has become a popular destination for students and ghost hunters alike. As such, it is the hope of the owners that whoever buys the property will keep the museum alive. "It's a good business," one of the owners mused, "It's not brain surgery." Indeed, with what sounds like almost a guarantee for ghostly activity, the haunted jail could be a proverbial license to print money. Then again, we'd have also said the same thing about a haunted asylum until we found out what happened to a Canadian couple who bought one.