Burlington County Prison

In 1806 the freeholders of Burlington County resolved to build a new jail in Mount Holly, and they chose a young architect named Robert Mills – later the designer of the Washington Monument – to draw it. Mills was a reformer: his plans gave prisoners individual cells, ventilation and fireproof vaulted ceilings, and over the door he placed a motto promising justice that “while it punishes, would endeavor to reform the offender.” The stone-and-brick jail received its first inmates in 1811.

It stayed in use for more than 150 years. When it closed on November 23, 1965, it was described as the oldest operating prison in the United States, and the inmates were marched to a converted armory nearby. Local people had already fought off a 1950s plan to demolish it, and it reopened as a museum in 1966. Of the 45 executions recorded in Burlington County, 13 took place after the jail opened, and its top-floor cell for the most dangerous prisoners still has shackles fixed to the wall. It became a National Historic Landmark in 1986.

The museum’s own account traces the ghost stories to 1833, when Joel Clough was hanged at Mount Holly on July 26 for the murder of Mary Hamilton in Bordentown, and buried on the grounds. Soon afterwards, guards and prisoners reportedly complained of moaning and rattling chains, and of cigarette smoke coming from the cell known as “the dungeon.” Later ghost-lore places Clough’s ghost in the top-floor cell for condemned and dangerous prisoners, though the museum itself does not say which cell he occupied. The stories revived in the 1990s, when the county closed the museum for repairs: workers described voices and figures and said their tools vanished and turned up inside locked cells.

The county then invited paranormal investigators in, and the old jail has since become one of New Jersey’s best-known haunted buildings. Groups record voices and electromagnetic readings in the evening, Ghost Hunters filmed there in 2008, and the museum runs October “A Haunting on High Street” events. The county also rents the building to private paranormal teams.

Moaning, rattling chains, cigarette or pipe smoke, voices, footsteps and apparitions – including a tall man in uniform in the basement – plus tools moved into locked cells, reported by 19th-century guards and prisoners (according to museum tradition), 1990s renovation workers and modern ghost-hunting groups.

The cell called “the dungeon,” the top-floor high-security cell with its surviving wall shackles that ghost-lore links to Joel Clough, the third floor generally, and the basement; investigations usually run from 8 p.m. to midnight.

The prison appears on Ghost Hunters and in most lists of haunted New Jersey sites, hosts October “A Haunting on High Street” evenings, and is rented to paranormal groups through the county parks department. Its architect, Robert Mills, and Mount Holly detective Ellis Parker are featured in the museum’s exhibits.