MARK WASHBURN, The Charlotte Observer

http://www.newsobserver.com/105/story/544546.html

Ghosts haunt cells of West Virginia Penitentiary
MOUNDSVILLE, W.VA. - Convicts serving afterlife sentences keep things
lively in West Virginia's creaky, creepy old penitentiary.A forlorn
monolith of stone near the Ohio River, the West Virginia Penitentiary
was closed in 1995, a decade after courts ruled that doing time in its
cramped steel cages, where sewage dripped from pipes and bugs wriggled
in food, constituted "cruel and unusual" punishment.But some rogues
still prowl the gothic fortress in spirit form, say visitors and former
administrators.

Paranormal investigators and amateur ghost-hunters are frequent visitors
to the 19th-century big house, which allows tours by day and
night.Whether tricks of shadow and gloom or something supernatural,
visitors have felt, seen and photographed strange things in the steel
labyrinth embraced by sandstone ramparts and gothic turrets.From a
window in the abandoned confines of the third-floor administration
building where female prisoners once worked, a woman's face has been
repeatedly sighted, peering into the silent prison yard.A blurry,
furtive apparition called "Shadow Man" has been glimpsed in the
psychiatric ward, the cafeteria and the catacombs.

But the granddaddy of them all seems to be inmate No. 44670, known in
life as R.D. Wall. He's been attracting attention for 76 years, long
before the tourists came.Grisly historyAnnually, about 20,000 people are
drawn to the old pen and get a history lesson on its macabre executions
and grisly violence, some of it imparted while visitors -- who dare --
stand locked in maximum security cells. (They qualify for "I Did Time"
T-shirts on sale in the gift shop.)West Virginia, which split with
Virginia in 1863 in the tumult of the Civil War, began work on the
prison in 1866.Movie buffs may recognize the unusual gateway inside the
entrance -- a round, rotating cage with one open side, installed in
1894. A guard in a booth controlled movements of "the wheel," spinning
it with an old trolley motor to provide access to side passageways or
the main prison area.It was featured in an opening scene of the 1971
Jimmy Stewart movie "Fool's Parade," about three discharged convicts who
try to open a general store.Visitors are led through the old dining
hall, where inmates segregated themselves by gang and race, the vast
recreation yards ringed by 24-foot-tall walls and the wagon gate, a
sally port for supplies that still has a 7-ton door at one end.There's
the site of the "Old Men's Colony," where inmates too feeble to protect
themselves -- or their dinner plates -- were housed.

When the prison closed, the youngest in that unit was 75; the oldest
91.And visitors see the old prison industries building, where road signs
and "Wild, Wonderful West Virginia" license plates were once fashioned.
It has been converted into the National Corrections and Law Enforcement
Training and Technology Center, a federal institute for prison workers
that holds mock riots for training in the old cellblocks.Those ancient
cell houses are the stars of the tour. Stark and cavernous, prisoners
were housed in steel boxes stacked four tiers high."It was eerie in
there," recalls Paul Kirby, who was health care administrator and later
deputy warden of the prison."Steam coming up out of the ground and
constant noise, doors slamming and clanging. At night it had an eerie
quiet. Occasionally you'd see a rat run across the floor.

Savage vengeance
Inmates settled vendettas with savage vengeance."They wouldn't just stab
you once, they'd stab you over and over and over, just stab them until
they couldn't stab them any more," says Kirby, now manager of the
Moundsville Economic Development Council, which operates the prison
tours.Exemplary prisoners got to live in the honors hall, a cellblock
with liberal privileges.Squealers and convicted police officers were
relegated to "Rat Row," a block for protective custody, and didn't mix
with the general population. Others lived in the New Wall tiers,
completed in the 1950s.'The Alamo'For incorrigibles, there was North
Hall, dubbed "The Alamo." It was a prison within a prison, 160 steel
cells measuring 5 by 7 feet, the size of a walk-in closet.Inmates sent
here for violations of the rules, ranging from drug use to murder, spent
23 hours a day in dingy, metal-screened cells, sometimes sharing their
space with a roommate not of their choosing because of crowding. Their
art, slogans and graffiti are still vivid on the rusting walls.

Entering North Hall, Tom Stiles stops the tour to show the four cells
fenced off from the rest where the worst inmates were kept."Rusty
Lassiter stabbed Red Snyder 37 times right here," Stiles says casually,
as though you should know them.Inmates certainly did. Both were
notorious troublemakers. They had shared the prison yard the day before
for exercise and seemed cordial enough. Next day, with two guards
looking on, bam."You never know what happens to a guy's head locked in a
little box 23 hours a day," says Stiles. He has coordinated tour
operations for four years.In 1899, the state took over executions from
West Virginia's sheriffs, and over the next six decades, 86 hangings
were conducted at the prison, some involving celebrated scoundrels.Like
Harry Powers -- pudgy, bespectacled and unassuming. He selected women
from personal ads in magazines catering to the lovelorn. He romanced
them boldly by mail. Then he killed them and buried them on his farm in
the Quiet Dell settlement, near Clarksburg."Bluebeard of Quiet Dell,"
newspapers called him.In 1932, he went to the gallows.
Whimpering.Hangings were open to the public until the ghastly execution
of Frank Hyer on June 19, 1931."I was drunk when I did it," the
restaurateur from rural Durbin proclaimed by way of explanation before
climbing the 13 steps to the gallows for beating his wife to death. "But
I will make the sacrifice and shed my blood for the crime."It wouldn't
be so noble. When the trap was sprung, Hyer was instantly
decapitated.Flummoxed prison officials insisted there was no problem
with the rigging of the noose. They surmised Hyer's substantial heft and
soft neck were at fault.Whatever the cause, after that, executions were
invitation-only affairs.

'Old Sparky'
In 1959, West Virginia abandoned the gallows and switched to
electrocution. Inmate Paul Glenn, a skilled carpenter, built the
electric chair dubbed "Old Sparky."Though hailed as a humane improvement
in the mechanics of executions, his handiwork made him decidedly
unpopular among his colleagues. He was moved to protective custody, then
transferred to another prison.Nine men died in Glenn's creation before
West Virginia outlawed capital punishment in 1965."Old Sparky" is
displayed in a museum room at the end of the tour, with newspaper
clippings describing notable executions.Guides demonstrate a homemade
electrical board used to test the electric chair.

They explain how three guards, picked by lottery, would throw a switch
-- none of them knowing which of the three circuits was hooked up to the
chair.Any officer who refused to take a turn in the deadly tableau was
out of a job.Though riots and escapes plagued the old penitentiary in
its later years, one notorious convict tried -- and failed -- to get
in.Charles Manson wrote to the warden in 1983, asking to transfer to
Moundsville from California, where he was serving a life sentence in the
Tate-LaBianca murders. Manson was raised in nearby McMechen and wanted
to be closer to his kinfolk."Would you accept me at your place," he asks
in his scrawled letter on display. "I got 9 lifes & don't want out no
more. I'm a good worker & I give you my word I'll start no trouble."When
hell freezes over, said Warden Donald Bordenkircher.

Night tours
Night tours of the spooky old pen are Michael Parnicza's domain. He
served in the prison's medical unit for 13 years and now leads visitors
on flashlight tours.When he brings them into the catacombs beneath the
administration building, he tells the tale of R.D. Wall, whose
first-degree murder sentence seems to last an eternity. R.D., as he's
affectionately known, was observed one day talking quietly to the
warden. Word circulated he was a snitch.R.D. worked in an old dungeon
that had been converted to a tool room. Three inmates butchered him
there Oct. 8, 1929."Sightings started occurring in 1930," recalls
Parnicza.At night, tower guards would see a man at the back of the
administration building, above the spot where R.D. met his end."When
they went to look, they'd never find anything," Parnicza says.In that
basement, it can get very cold very fast.

Men sometimes emerge with inexplicable scratches on their arms.Women
report feeling an unseen hand touching their hair.Says Parnicza, who has
never seen anything ghostly, but admits being spooked now and then by
strange noises in the pen: "Happens quite often."Among the other
mysterious quirks of the old pen is its neighbor across the street, a
prehistoric burial mound built about 2,000 years ago by a lost tribe
called the Adena people. For $3, visitors can tour the museum there and
climb the 70-foot mound.No one is quite sure how the primitive society
moved the 60,000 tons of earth required to build it.Four stories above
the door of the administration building -- the entrance incoming
prisoners used -- can be seen a large replica of the West Virginia state
seal, the pen's ultimate irony.It contains the date of the state's
founding, drawings of a farmer and a coal miner and the state motto:
"Montani Semper Liberi."It's Latin.

Translated:"Mountaineers are always free."