Squirrel Cage Jail

The Pottawattamie County Jail on Pearl Street is one of the strangest buildings in American penal history. Inside its brick shell sits a three-storey cylinder of pie-shaped cells – about 90,000 pounds of iron – that a single jailer could rotate with a hand crank, so that only one cell at a time lined up with the door. The design was patented in 1881 by William H. Brown and Benjamin F. Haugh of Indianapolis, who promised “maximum security with minimum jailer attention.” Eighteen such rotary jails were built in the United States; Council Bluffs’ is the only three-storey example and one of just three that survive.

The jail opened on 11 September 1885 – critics of the sheriff mocked it as too comfortable, calling it “Hotel Guittar” – and stayed in use until 1969. In practice the idea worked badly. The mechanism jammed, the cage was hard to balance, and prisoners risked serious injury from cells moving past fixed bars; in 1904 a prisoner’s head was crushed as the cage turned. The building was condemned around 22 times during its working life. In 1960, when a prisoner died of natural causes, a malfunction kept his body from being removed for two days, and the rotating mechanism was finally disabled. Prisoners’ names and dates are still scratched into the cell walls.

After the county closed it, the city’s Park Board acquired the building in 1971, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1972, and the Historical Society of Pottawattamie County led a campaign in 1977 to save it. The society owns and runs it as a museum today. Its records show at least five deaths in the jail; former museum director Kat Slaughter has said she suspects the true number is higher.

The ghost stories come mainly from staff and from paranormal teams who have spent nights in the cells. Slaughter told Omaha’s KMTV that she had experienced most of the reported activity herself, and investigators from the group Paranormania describe returning many times. The museum now runs after-hours October tours that tell the stories of prisoners who died there and of the jail’s many failures to hold its inmates.

Staff and investigators report footsteps on empty floors, dark shadow figures, doors slamming or opening, objects being moved, whistling and voices heard by people alone in the building. One team described the sound of booted footsteps approaching their cell during an overnight stay, and a visitor reported having her hair pulled. Electronic equipment is said to fail repeatedly on the top floor.

Reports centre on the rotating cell block, especially its third tier, and the walkways around it. Most accounts come from after-hours visits and overnight investigations.

The Squirrel Cage Jail is a well-known stop on Iowa ghost-tour lists and is covered by Omaha and Council Bluffs media most Octobers. The historical society’s podcast has episodes on the jail’s history and its ghosts, and its October after-hours tours sell out regularly.