Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary

Brushy Mountain grew out of one of the ugliest chapters in Tennessee history. After the Civil War, the state leased its prisoners – most of them Black men, many serving long sentences for minor offences – to coal companies, undercutting free miners. In 1891 miners in the Coal Creek area rose against the system, burning stockades and freeing convicts in what became known as the Coal Creek War. When the leases expired, the legislature ended the practice and instead built a state-run prison and coal mine in a remote valley at Petros, on the edge of today’s Frozen Head State Park.

The first prisoners arrived in 1896 and were set to work building a rail spur, wooden barracks and the mines themselves. Conditions were brutal: tuberculosis, typhoid and pneumonia were rife, men were whipped for failing to meet coal quotas, and many died in the mines or of disease. By 1931 the prison held nearly a thousand men, some 300 over capacity, and inmates quarried the sandstone for a new four-storey cross-shaped cellhouse, completed with an 18-foot wall by 1934. Mining continued for decades before reform-minded warden Lake Russell ended it.

Reclassified as maximum security in 1969, Brushy became known as “the end of the line” for men considered too dangerous elsewhere. Its most famous inmate, James Earl Ray, the assassin of Martin Luther King Jr., escaped over the wall with six others on June 10, 1977 and was recaptured in the surrounding mountains about two and a half days later. In 1982 two inmates were killed in a racially motivated attack inside the prison. Brushy never had a death row, but violence, accidents and illness took many lives, and some inmates were buried in a pauper’s cemetery on the hill.

The prison closed on June 11, 2009. Morgan County bought it from the state for $10, and in 2018 it reopened as a tourist site with a restaurant, distillery and museum tours narrated by former inmates and guards. Its after-dark trade is ghost hunting: a local investigator who began exploring the site after its closure leads overnight investigations, and the operators advertise footsteps, apparitions and disembodied voices – with visitors claiming to have been touched, shoved and scratched.

Guides and paying investigators report footsteps on empty tiers, apparitions, disembodied voices and growls, readings on EMF meters and “spirit boxes,” and physical sensations of being touched, pushed or scratched. Temperatures inside the stone cellhouse are often noticeably colder than outside.

The prison hospital, the back of the kitchen, the upper (third and fourth) floors of the cellhouse and D-Block, which the operators say was built in 1957 on the site of the old “death house” where bodies were kept. Investigations run from about 9 or 10 pm until the early hours.

Brushy’s reputation, and James Earl Ray’s escape, have made it a favourite of true-crime and paranormal TV and YouTube producers. The site hosts concerts, car shows and races – including events tied to the Barkley Marathons in neighbouring Frozen Head State Park – and its distillery’s End of the Line moonshine plays on the prison’s nickname.