West Virginia State Prison Experience

To start, I have NEVER believed in ghosts and still do not, but this story is still today, unexplainable to me. In July of 1992 I became a Deputy Sheriff in central West Virginia and from 1992 until 1995, (when the State Prison in Moundsville closed), I had made a few prisoner transports to and from the prison. I always thought it was a creepy place, but aren’t prisons suppose to be?

In spring of 2000 I was scheduled to have a training class at the Moundsville Prison. Today many law enforcement agencies use the Prison for training but this was to be the first training class there. I was a Prevention Resource Officer in a local Junior High School and the training dealt with School Violence.

I live a few hours away so I allowed myself plenty of time to get to the training class. I pulled up to the prison and the front door was open. I had been there before and figured I would go on in. I stepped inside the front entrance and yelled out but no one answered. I knew someone was there somewhere because the doors were all open, although there were no other cars parked in front. Not finding anyone I proceeded to try to find where the class was going to be held. I looked around for several minutes but I didn’t find anyone nor did I find a “classroom”. I was at one end of a hallway and saw a man dressed in a blue shirt and pants at the other end of the hallway go into an adjoining hallway. I yelled out to him but he never acknowledged my presence. Figuring this was probably an employee or perhaps the instructor of the class I followed in the direction he went. When I made my way to the other hallway in which he “ducked” into, I found that it led to an office, but nowhere else. There were no other doors in which the man could have gone.

At this time I heard voices from where I had just came from and turned and went back. I met up with two other guys who were taking the class and thought nothing else of the man who “disappeared” except that I never saw anyone all day long dressed in blue. I left that evening after the class without really wondering or thinking about it.

Later that same year the television show “Fear” taped an episode at the prison and that intrigued the students at the school in which I was assigned. I taught a Criminal Justice class and the students wanted to take a trip to Wheeling and tour the prison while there. I arranged the trip and in January of 2001 we went to tour the prison. Before “Fear” I had never heard of the prison being “haunted”. While on the tour the students were full of questions for the guide, mostly on the subject of “haunting”.

I was very surprised when the guide told the story of a “prisoner” being sited by the tower guards going into the prison on the north side, but after investigated the “prisoner” was never found. The guide explained that this occurred often. Supposedly this “prisoner” was one of the “ghosts” at the prison. The guide then showed us where this “sighting” always occurred, unbelievably at the same door and hallway where I saw the “man in blue” nearly a year earlier. I had to ask “what was he wearing?”…the guide said that if the “prisoner” was in fact the “ghost” of the inmate they suspected it was, then they wore blue uniforms at the time.

Still not convinced this was actually a “ghost”, it still puzzles me today and I thought I’d share this experience.