Old Joliet Prison

Illinois built its new state penitentiary at Joliet in 1858 with leased convict labour, using limestone quarried on the site; the first thirty-three prisoners arrived from the old prison at Alton that May to begin construction. The result was a fortress of turreted walls around sixteen acres. It held Civil War prisoners as well as convicts, and by 1872 its population of more than 1,200 was a record for a single prison. Conditions were primitive: as late as 1910 the cells had no running water or toilets. A separate women’s prison opened across the road in 1896.

Joliet’s inmates included Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, sent there for life in 1924 for the murder of fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks. Violence was part of its history – the first officer was killed there in 1864, and in 1975 gang members seized a cellhouse and took officers hostage; a reformed former gang member, Herbert Catlett, was killed trying to talk them down. In 1915 Odette Allen, the wife of reforming warden Edmund Allen, was found dead after a fire in the warden’s quarters; an inmate, Joseph Campbell, was convicted of her murder and sentenced to hang. The Illinois Supreme Court upheld the verdict in 1918, but his sentence was later commuted to life after a campaign by Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Ferdinand Barnett, and he died in the prison in 1950. Doubts about his guilt have lingered for a century.

The newer Stateville prison opened nearby in 1925, but Joliet stayed in use until 2002, latterly as a reception centre. Abandoned, vandalised and damaged by an arson fire in 2017, it was opened for tours in 2018 by the Joliet Area Historical Museum and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2023. Its looming walls are familiar from film and television: Jake Blues walks out of its gates at the start of The Blues Brothers (1980), and it was the prison of the first seasons of Prison Break.

The ghost tours began almost as soon as the gates reopened. In 2018 the museum partnered with Chicago Hauntings for paranormal tours and late-night ghost hunts, and it now runs its own haunted-history tours each autumn. Guides and participants report voices on spirit boxes, sounds of rioting in the old hospital and hostile presences in the segregation unit. In 2019 the prison featured in a Ghost Adventures special, “Serial Killer Spirits: John Gacy Prison”.

Tour guides and visitors describe voices and swearing captured on spirit boxes in the segregation building, recorded sounds like a riot in the old prison hospital, footsteps and figures in creaky stairwells, dowsing-rod responses, and a lingering smell of blood in the old shower stalls.

The segregation (solitary) building, the prison hospital, the gymnasium and shower block, the east and west cellhouses and the stairwells; activity is reported mainly on evening and late-night tours.

The prison is famous from The Blues Brothers, White Heat and Prison Break, and has become a Route 66 attraction. Its October haunted tours and the separate Old Joliet Haunted Prison attraction are among the Chicago area’s most popular Halloween events.