Tennessee State Prison

Tennessee’s first state penitentiary opened on Church Street in Nashville in 1831 and was demolished in 1898. Its replacement, on Centennial Boulevard about six miles west of downtown, was built with 800 single-occupancy cells, and a cell block design modelled on the Auburn prison in New York. It received 1,403 prisoners on its first day and was overcrowded for the rest of its life, at times holding up to three times its design capacity. Convict labor, solitary confinement, disease and harsh discipline marked its early history.

The record is full of unrest. In 1902 sixteen prisoners blew a hole in a wall and escaped, and two were never recaptured. Prisoners staged a fire protest in 1938 against abuse and poor food. Riots broke out in 1975 and 1985. A federal court found conditions unfit in the 1980s, and the prison closed in June 1992; the new Riverbend Maximum Security Institution had opened in 1989. A 1993 injunction barred the Department of Correction from housing prisoners there again. The prison also carried out executions in the electric chair, which inmates and guards nicknamed “Old Sparky”; sources give differing totals, from over a hundred to 125. The men and women who lived and died there were real people, among them some convicted of terrible crimes and others held in appalling conditions.

After the closure the buildings became a favorite film location. The Green Mile (1999), Walk the Line (2005), The Last Castle and Ernest Goes to Jail all shot scenes there, and music videos followed. Johnny Cash recorded a live album at the prison in 1974. In 2011 the interior was declared off-limits because of asbestos, and a tornado struck the complex on 3 March 2020 and damaged it badly.

Ghost stories come largely from the years after the closure. Tour companies and local writers say the sounds of screams from the old execution area, clanging cell bars with nobody near, doors that swing and slam, footsteps in empty halls and shadowy figures are reported by people who have been in the buildings. They are unverifiable: the site is closed to the public, and the only descriptions come from people who trespassed or from film crews and promoters. Some listings still call it a ghost-tour destination, but its interior is not open for visits, and it is not safe to go inside.

Reports include screams attributed to the execution area, cell bars clanging, doors opening and slamming, footsteps in halls, shadowy figures and sudden drops in temperature.

The cell blocks, long corridors and the execution chamber of the main building – reports that come from trespassers and film workers rather than from visits open to the public.

The prison appears in The Green Mile and Walk the Line, in Johnny Cash’s live prison recording from 1974 and in music videos by Eric Church and others. It features on Tennessee’s lists of haunted places and in local news after the 2020 tornado.