Old Idaho Penitentiary

Idaho was a seven-year-old territory when it began building a prison in the foothills east of Boise in 1870. The Territorial Prison received its first eleven inmates from the Boise County jail in 1872, and over the next century convicts quarried sandstone from the nearby ridges to build the cell houses, dining hall, women’s ward and the seventeen-foot wall that encloses them. In 101 years the penitentiary held more than 13,000 people, among them 216 women.

Its inmates included Harry Orchard, who assassinated former governor Frank Steunenberg in 1905, and Lyda Southard, “Idaho’s Lady Bluebeard”, who killed several of her husbands to collect on their life insurance. Ten people were executed at the prison, six of them by hanging in the yard now planted as a rose garden; the last was Raymond Snowden in 1957. Solitary confinement in the cells known as the Cooler and Siberia was notoriously harsh.

Conditions led to riots in 1952, 1971 and 1973, the last of which burned several buildings. In December 1973 the 416 remaining inmates were moved to a new prison south of Boise and the Old Pen closed. It is now a state historic site run by the Idaho State Historical Society, which also recorded oral histories with former guards in 1992. Within its walls lies one unexpected grave: that of Dennis, a cat adopted by inmates in 1952, whom they buried with a headstone when he died in 1968.

Ghost stories began to gather once the prison stood empty. Staff and visitors speak of footsteps and voices in the cell houses, slamming doors and an unsettling atmosphere, especially around death row and the solitary cells; the site’s historian has described the “creepy feeling” of working inside the walls alone. Ghost Adventures filmed one of its first-season episodes there in 2008, and the historical society now hosts popular Halloween events – once called Frightened Felons, more recently Locktober – that mix haunted-house scares with history performances and cemetery tours.

Visitors and staff report footsteps on empty tiers, voices and whispers, cell doors that seem to bang shut, cold spots, and a sense of being watched in the solitary cells and on death row. Paranormal investigators have claimed EVP recordings during overnight sessions.

The 1890 New Cell House and its third-tier death row, the solitary cells of the Cooler and Siberia, Cell House 4, the former infirmary and the rose garden where the gallows once stood.

The Old Pen appears on Ghost Adventures and in Idaho ghost-story collections, and its October events are among the Treasure Valley’s most popular Halloween outings. The site also hosts exhibits on its inmates, including the stories of Harry Orchard and Lyda Southard.