Home › United States › West Virginia › Moundsville, Wv
Historic haunted places in Moundsville, WV. Each page gives the ghost story, whether visitors can go, and a link to the site the story came from. The stories are folklore, not documented fact.
3 listings shown.
WEST VIRGINIA / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
The projection booth is the hot spot at this restored 1920 theater. In the best-known story, a disconnected phone on the booth desk rang while a preservation architect and his daug…
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
WEST VIRGINIA / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
The solitary confinement block inmates called the Sugar Shack was the most feared part of this Gothic prison. Ghost-hunting groups say it is still the most active, describing being…
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
WEST VIRGINIA / HAUNTED PLACE
Haunted place
This potter's field holds unclaimed men from the nearby state penitentiary, including some who were executed. Visitors and Appalachian haunt writers describe a heavy silence and th…
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
Explore verified haunted attractions and ghost tours in nearby cities.
Moundsville is a city of the Ohio River: the county seat of Marshall County, West Virginia, in the Wheeling metropolitan area, and a town named for a grave. The Grave Creek Mound, built by Indigenous people of the Adena culture between about 250 and 100 BC, stands in the middle of the modern city, and the two institutions that define Moundsville's story sit within blocks of each other on the same street — that ancient mound at 801 Jefferson Avenue, and the retired West Virginia Penitentiary at 818 Jefferson Avenue.
The town's documented history, from its Wikipedia article, runs from the frontier to industry. English colonists Samuel and James Tomlinson built a cabin at the future site in 1771; their community, Elizabethtown, was incorporated in 1830, the neighbouring town of Mound City in 1832, and the two combined in 1865. A Baltimore and Ohio Railroad line opened in 1852, making Moundsville an important Ohio River port until the Civil War. The Fostoria Glass Company was headquartered here from 1891 to 1986. And in 1866 the new state's legislature — West Virginia had become a state in 1863, during the Civil War, and had been confining people convicted of felonies in the county jail at Wheeling — directed its Board of Public Works to select at least ten acres in or near Moundsville for a state penitentiary, appropriating $50,000 to buy land and begin construction.
The penitentiary that resulted operated from 1866 to 1995 and was completed in 1876. Its record, documented in its Wikipedia article, is the darkest institutional history in this program. From 1899 to 1959, ninety-four men were executed there — 85 by hanging and nine by electrocution in an electric chair, nicknamed "Old Sparky," that was originally built by an inmate, Paul Glenn; the last execution was Elmer Bruner's, on April 3, 1959, and the original chair is still displayed on the official tour. The prison held more than 2,000 inmates at its most crowded, was ranked on the United States Department of Justice's Top Ten Most Violent Correctional Facilities list, and its recreation room, the "Sugar Shack," became notorious for gambling, fighting and sexual assaults. Fifteen prisoners escaped on November 7, 1979, and escapee Ronald Turney Williams shot and killed an off-duty state trooper, Philip S. Kesner, who tried to intervene. On January 1, 1986, twenty inmates calling themselves the Avengers began the New Year's Day Riot, taking hostages in the mess hall; no hostage was seriously injured, and three inmates were killed over the two days. That same year, the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia ruled that confinement in the prison's 35-square-foot cells constituted cruel and unusual punishment, and the penitentiary closed on March 27, 1995.
The mound across the street is older than all of it by two thousand years. Built in successive stages between about 250 and 150 BC, it stands 62 feet high and 240 feet in diameter, required moving more than 60,000 tons of earth, and is one of the largest conical burial mounds in the United States and the largest surviving mound built by the Adena. Its first recorded excavation was in 1838, and the state opened the Delf Norona Museum beside it in 1978.
This section is folklore — reported by the penitentiary's own operator, and never asserted as fact here. Moundsville's legend is unusual in this program for how little of it there is in print from the people who run the place.
The penitentiary's own homepage makes the whole of its paranormal pitch in a few plain lines: the site offers "paranormal investigations" among its tours, and its featured seasonal flashlight tour, the North Walk, walks the oldest, northernmost section of the prison, which it describes as the section "most known to have paranormal activity." Its public ghost hunt page invites guests, in its own dare, to see who they can find "living" in the Sugar Shack or North Hall, to look for patients in the psych ward, or to sit in a cell. Those are invitations and billing, attributed here in full — the operator's collected pages publish no named ghost, no roster of spirits, and no specific sighting presented as an event, and this page invents none.
What gives the billing its weight is not a ghost story but the documented record in the section above, and it is worth being exact about the line. The Sugar Shack's notoriety is documented — as a place of gambling, fighting and assaults among living inmates. The executions, the riot deaths, and the killing of Trooper Kesner are documented deaths, with names and dates, in the prison's Wikipedia article. Whether anything of that history lingers in the cellblocks after dark is the claim the ghost hunts sell tickets to test, for six hours at a time, with the visitors' own equipment. Reported activity is reported; the history underneath it is real, and the two are kept separate here.
Across Jefferson Avenue, the contrast completes the city's story. The Grave Creek Mound's official pages publish no ghost lore at all — none — and a two-thousand-year-old burial mound in a city named for burial mounds is, in the official record, a museum and an archaeological collection, full stop. Moundsville's haunting, such as its operators claim it, lives entirely inside the prison walls.
Hountix lists 3 places in Moundsville, WV. Seasonal attractions keep their own open dates, so check each business's own site before you go.
The West Virginia Penitentiary's own homepage introduces the site in one sentence: built in 1866 and decommissioned in 1995, the former state penitentiary now offers day tours, paranormal investigations, escape rooms, a haunted house in October, and large events in its event centre. Its contact address is 818 Jefferson Avenue, Moundsville, and its tours menu lists the range with prices when collected: guided day tours from $15 for a 90-minute walk through the Gothic structure, a Twilight Tour from $40 for three evening hours, and private paranormal investigations from $1,099. Its public ghost hunt page sets out the paranormal product in full. A public ghost hunt — from $75 per its tours list, and billed there as its most popular tour — is a six-hour overnight event for ages 18 and over, with photo identification required and a signed paranormal waiver: it begins with a 90-minute guided tour, after which guests investigate the halls on their own, with their own flashlights, cameras and equipment, snacks and coolers allowed and alcohol strictly prohibited. The page names the ground it dares guests to try — the Sugar Shack, North Hall, the psych ward, and a cell of their choosing — and notes, plainly and usefully, that no paranormal events are held from mid-September through October, when the haunted house and Halloween events take over the building. Private paranormal investigations follow the same shape, a guided tour followed by hours of self-directed investigation.
The building those hunts walk is documented in its Wikipedia article, summarised in the city story above: a castellated Gothic stone prison modelled at half scale on the 1858 Joliet prison, its Jefferson Avenue wall about 826 feet long and 24 feet high, completed in 1876, self-sufficient in its early decades with its own shops, farm and, from 1921, its own coal mine, and by its later decades overcrowded past 2,000 inmates and ranked among the Justice Department's most violent facilities. The executions — 94 men between 1899 and 1959, the inmate-built electric chair still on display — the 1979 escape, and the 1986 riot are all in that record, with names and dates.
The haunting claim is the operator's, and it is a general one: its homepage calls the prison's northern section the part "most known to have paranormal activity," and its ghost hunt page frames the night as a dare to find who is still "living" in its named rooms. No named spirit and no specific sighting appears in the operator material collected for this page, and none is supplied here. What is documented needs no addition: this is a real prison where real people were executed, rioted and died, kept standing as a museum — and, after dark, opened to anyone who wants to walk it with a flashlight and decide the rest for themselves.
*Website: http://www.wvpentours.com/*