Ghost Stories of Old New Orleans

The Ghosts of Carrollton Jail

(1898-99} The Ghosts of Carrollton Jail Perhaps the most startling of all the inexplicable tales told about the ghosts of this old city is that series of recitals by members of the police force concerning the manifestations which occurred in 1898 or so in the Ninth Precinct Jail. This old structure was built about 1850 and was, when Carrollton belonged in Jefferson parish, the old Jefferson Parish Prison. It stood at the corner of Hampson and Short streets, fronting on Hampson. It was used continuously until the summer of 1937, when, along with three other precinct jails, it was condemned and demolished. It was a brick building of two stories, with great doorways and heavily barred windows. Despite the flowers and shrubbery which flanked its approach and strove to lend it a semblanceof grace and beauty, it was a bleak and hideous place. No blaze of light ever could have made it cheerful or acceptable to those unfortunate ones whose fate it was to be detained there. In a square central courtyard was reared a gibbet. Many there were who shudderingly climbed those pitiless steps. Many there were who swung there at a rope's end until oblivion swallowed them up for all eternity. The thieves, the felons, the murderers, and those who had plotted and carried out crimes still more horrible and vile—all had languished in the narrow, airless cells of the old prison. A most unlovely and unhallowed spot, which for a season housed two men who had raped and murdered a small girl, and afterwards butchered her poor little body. These monsters were lynched in the yard of the jail itself by enraged citizens. 179 180 Ghost Stones of Old New Orleans That was a long time ago. And it required the driving rains of many a year to tone down the hues of fresher masonry which replaced that chiseled away by a party of escaping prisoners . Not a cell but had its ugly history. Every inch of wall space was covered with penciled inscriptions which only so tainted an aggregation of humanity could have fathered. There were ribald rhymes, obscene outpourings of filth and degeneracy, a line to a ladylove from one too gross to realize the insult of its very location, threats and coarse jokes and base riddles and nasty drawings, with here and there a roaring paraphrase of Holy Writ. They came and they went, these poor damned human creatures whose feet never could walk the straight way, whose itching fingers must forever clutch at the forbidden. They huddled in the noisome cells while their skins bleached a sickly gray and the vermin ate them and the noose waited. They cursed and rotted and went forth with hopeless feet. They flew into mighty rages, and bit themselves, and hung themselves, each in his own fetid corner. Then there were those who hugged the slender string of days they had left on earth, dreaming dreams and seeing visions, and promising over and over again to come back when the spirit should be freed. To come back. . . . How? Why? That they did come back is a matter of record. They came peering in, pausing here and there, causing strange things to happen, peopling the somber old prison anew, startling and perplexing those astute and hardened arms of the law who doggedly refused to believe in apparitions but who could find no other answer to the astounding riddle which unwound itself in their midst, day after day and week after week. As long as the old walls stood, it seemed that every ancient brick had its ghostly tenant. Even as the wreckers tore at it, there were those who declared they saw human shapes writhing in the clouds of dust when the bricks came hurtling down. The shapes hovered and grinned and grimaced, some of them with wry necks and bulging eyeballs, others with twisted backs and knotted legs and bloody holes gaping where the worms The Ghosts of Carrollton Jail 181 had fed, their hideous mouths leering and drooling, and their matted hair falling in foul handfuls among the rubbish. The rafters had their ghosts, and the brown old sleepers had their ghosts, and every board in the cypress flooring had its ghost. But the bricks that came from the terrible cells were fairly feathered with them, as the workmen tell it. It seemed that every prisoner who ever had suffered incarceration...