Old York Gaol

The Old York Gaol in York, Maine, is among the oldest surviving prison buildings in the United States. York was the shire town of York County, then part of Massachusetts, and the courts that met there needed a secure place for prisoners to wait for trial. The stone cell block is dated to 1719 or 1720 and incorporates timbers from an earlier jail built in 1656, as a plank dated to that year shows. The complex grew over the following century: rooms for the gaoler’s family were added in the 1730s, a second storey with three more cells around 1763, and a gambrel roof tied the parts together by 1806. It held felons awaiting the circuit judges, debtors and people sent to the adjoining House of Correction.

Conditions were harsh. Prisoners were separated by the seriousness of their alleged crimes, those accused of the worst offences held upstairs and minor offenders below, and a single underground dungeon had no toilet. Because judges rode a circuit, accused people could wait up to a year for trial. The jail stopped holding prisoners in the nineteenth century (sources give 1860 and 1879), and afterwards served as a school, a warehouse and a boarding house. The novelist William Dean Howells suggested restoring it in 1898, and it opened as a museum on 4 July 1900. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1968 and is now run by the Museums of Old York.

The ghost story most often told concerns Patience Boston, a young woman of Native American descent, described in different sources as an indentured servant or enslaved, who was held at York after the death of a child in a well. According to the Vermont writer Joe Citro, who visited in 2002, she was pregnant when jailed, stayed almost two years and was hanged after her son was born. The executions chronicle gives the date as 24 July 1735, when she was 23, and notes that ministers Samuel and Joseph Moody published her “confession” in 1738, with the admission that they could not reproduce her words exactly as she spoke them. When Citro visited, the museum offered an audio recreation of that confession that visitors could hear from outside the window where the minister was said to have heard it.

Citro reports that Patience is considered the prime suspect for the unidentified presence said to haunt the upper floor, and that some museum workers have refused to stay alone in the building as dark falls. Other ghost writers describe an oppressive sense of dread, touches from unseen hands and faint cries from the dungeon, while a “white witch” legend has also been attached to the grounds, though no record of such an execution was found in the sources. The jail’s own history, with its rotating accused and the woman whose last words were mediated by ministers, may be more disturbing than the legends; the stories are a way of remembering the people who were held here.

Reports include a presence on the upper floor, a sense of dread, touches from unseen hands, faint cries from the dungeon cells and workers unwilling to be alone as night falls.

The upper-floor cells and the dungeon on the ground level; reports cluster around dusk and with staff alone in the building.

Roxie Zwicker’s book Haunted York County treats the gaol among the area’s ghost stories, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tale “The Minister’s Black Veil” drew on the legend of Joseph Moody, one of the ministers who attended Patience Boston, according to the executions chronicle.