Ep. 50 - Death Row Ghosts

Prisons are notorious for being haunted. They are places of such strong emotion, that isn't surprising. There are a couple of areas of jails that lend themselves more to haunting activity: solitary confinement and Death Row. Whether one supports the death penalty or not, there is no question that some people commit such heinous crimes that it is hard to imagine, that anything else could be justice other than the death penalty. There are several murderers who have met their final demise at the end of a rope, an electric chair or a needle. Is it possible that their spirits have remained on this side of the veil? Perhaps they are not welcome anywhere else.

The concept of an area in a jail specifically set aside for those doomed to face execution is actually a fairly new one. People have awaited death in prison-like setting for centuries, but there wasn't always a "Death Row." The term "death row" didn't become official until the 20th century. However, codified death penalty laws go back to the Babylonian kingdom of the 18th Century BC. Hammaurabi was the king of Babylon at that time and he issued the laws that required the death penalty for 25 different crimes, none of which was actually murder. But even before that, the Ancient Laws of China called for death as a punishment for crimes. The Old Testament directed that death was the punishment for murder. These provisions supporting a death penalty traveled through the centuries and crossed countries and oceans. Europeans immigrating to America, brought their system of justice and the thirteen colonies had their first recorded execution in 1608. Original council member in Jamestown, Captain George Kendall, was hanged for treason. 

The death penalty came under federal authority officially in 1790 with the Judiciary Act of 1789. Eventually, the states received autonomy in regards to to death sentences. Executions officially moved to correctional facilities in 1834 with Pennsylvania being the first state to do that. Before this, as many of you know, executions were public and well attended by all ages. The term "death row" wasn't used yet, nor were prisoners awaiting execution segregated from the rest of the prison population. Death Row became official in 1933 in the state of Florida. Giuseppe Zangara was an Italian immigrant who attempted to assassinate President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The President had been giving a speech in Miami, Florida when five shots rang out, all of them missing him, but the Mayor of Chicago was hit and killed. Zangara pled guilty and was sentenced to death. Florida law stated that a doomed criminal couldn't share cell space with other criminals. Raiford Prison was where he was sent and they only had one death cell, which was already occupied, so prison officials had to expand this death waiting area and once one cell became two, they needed a new name and "Death Row" was born. 

Zangara was executed in Old Sparky a little over a month later. As the years progressed, the amount of time a criminal spent on Death Row after being sentenced to death grew as the appeals process became longer and longer. And thus Death Rows grew. But there were also states that started abolishing the death penalty. Michigan outlawed it in 1846, except for in cases of treason. By 1917, six states had outlawed it completely, at least until the first World War when paranoia over socialism had all but one of those states re-instate the death penalty. Mandatory death sentences soon fell by the wayside in many states and were completely gone by 1963. Hanging and firing squads were the preferred means of execution until the first electric chair was introduced in New York in 1888. Cyanide gas in a gas chamber would be introduced in Nevada in 1924. Oklahoma was the first state to adopt the use of lethal injection in 1977, but Texas would be first to use it in 1982. Into our modern era, the death penalty has fallen out of favor with some seeing it as cruel and unusual punishment. It's hard to believe that America has gone from a country that used to have thousands flock with their picnic baskets to public executions to a country where executions have become a rarity. There were only 25 in America in 2024.

Ghost stories connected to Death Row started nearly from the moment it was established. And ghosts of the executed pre-date Death Row as was shared in Ep. 41 of Phantasmal Crime. On this episode, we will discuss more of these condemned criminals who have returned in the afterlife. 

Herman Lindsey had been a former Death Row inmate at Florida State Prison. He had been tried, convicted and sentenced in the robbery and death of pawnshop owner Joanne Mazzola. That conviction was overturned three years later, but in that short time that Lindsey spent on Death Row, he experienced the most terrifying moments of his life. Lindsey told the Daily Mail, "On the night of someone being executed, you will see a spirit walk down the hallway. That is something that's not a tale. The majority of people on Death Row will tell you they have seen it themselves." The spirit that walked the hallways was believed to belong to a man who had been executed a few years prior. This spirit would also appear to an inmate a day or two before he was to be executed. Lindsey was convinced of what he saw because 12 other inmates all saw the same thing. 

Frederick Hollman was hanged on May 14, 1897. Before the trap door was dropped, he yelled out, "Just wait until I am dead and I will come back every night and visit those men who put me here, those witnesses and jurors. I will haunt them to their graves. I will rap on their windows at night, and they will see my face at their windows." Hollman had immigrated to America from Germany in 1883 and soon after became a prolific serial killer. He was definitely thought to have murdered six people, but he was suspected in the deaths of seventeen and attempted murders of eight. He was captured and convicted in Illinois of the murder of Wiebke Geddes and was imprisoned at Ford County Jail. It is here that his spirit seems to have returned. Rappings on heard on windows and the face of Hollman has been seen glaring through a window into his former jail cell. An unpleasant and angry ghostly voice has been captured in EVPs and people have claimed to be pushed or poked by something they can't see. Hollman's face has even been captured on film, peering from the window of his jail cell.

Idaho's Jack the Ripper was a man named Raymond Snowden. He claimed to have killed three women, but he was only convicted of the brutal stabbing of Cora Dean in 1956. Snowden stabbed her dozens of times. He was hanged at the Old Idaho Penitentiary in October 1957 and there had been some kind of miscalculation and his neck didn't snap when the trap door opened and it took 20 minutes for him to hang to death. The former site of the gallows has had lots of paranormal activity. People claim to hear the sounds of choking and screaming. Snowden's full-bodied apparition has been seen in the shadows. But Snowden isn't the only Death Row criminal still at the Idaho jail. Douglas Van Vlack committed suicide by jumping from the rafters before he was executed. His ghost has been seen and he likes to show up as an orb or a mist. Electronics malfunction in the area where he died. 

The Old Allegheny Jail was said to be haunted by a man named William Culp. There were claims of disembodied voices and murmurs are heard. The former Death Row area is haunted by Culp who was executed in 1907. He actually took his own life. The crime he was on Death Row for was the murder of his own brother. His spirit was reported by fellow inmates and they claimed he was repeating the gruesome scene of his crime night after night. The Monongahela Valley Republican wrote in Oct. 24, 1907, "Culp or Culp’s ghost had come into his [former] cell and...began to rehearse the scene of murdering his brother. At least, three condemned criminals confined in cells along murderer’s row declared that they saw ‘it’ distinctly. When examined by the warden, they all gave the same description of the ghost, the direction from which it came, and its antics in front of cells on murderer’s row. They were so terrified that they had to be moved to other cells. 

Back in 1995, it was reported that Willie Lloyd Turner had been on death row in Virginia longer than any other person. That was 15 years. He was scheduled six times for execution in that time. Turner had been a lifelong criminal. He murdered jewelry store owner Jack Smith during a robbery in 1978. While on death row, he helped plot an escape by six other inmates from death row in 1984. Turner was executed by lethal injection on May 25, 1995. Stories claimed that Turner had somehow smuggled a loaded .32-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver into his death row cell and that it was hidden in the case of the typewriter on which Turner had written his autobiography, but the New York Times reported that the story was a hoax by Turner's lawyer and that the gun had been planted. Turner claimed that he would figure out how to come back from death. He believed in ghosts and wrote in his autobiography about ghost sightings he had been told about by prison guards. Turner showed up on death row a little over a month after his execution. Guards described him as being an opaque full-body apparition. Many of them thought it was really Turner because he looked solid. Then he would disappear. If inmates were claiming this, then it likely happened because they wouldn't want to leave themselves open to ridicule for no reason. 

A former executioner at Strangeways Jail, also known as HM Prison Manchester, named John Ellis is thought to haunt the execution chamber. The chamber was built after World War I and 100 criminals were executed there before Great Britain abolished capital punishment. John Ellis worked at the prison for 23 years before he committed suicide in 1932. His ghost is seen wearing a dark suit and carrying a briefcase. He walks the entire length of the death wing before disappearing. The Death Row is also haunted by the infamous Blackpool Poison Killer, Louisa May Merrifield. She used rat poison to kill an elderly woman for the inheritance she expected to receive. Merrifield was executed for that crime and now her full body apparition is seen walking about before disappearing.

Susan Newell was the last woman executed in Scotland. She served her time at Duke Street Prison until her execution by hanging in 1923. She had been convicted and sentenced for the strangling death of a young paperboy. On her way to the gallows she said to the hangman when he tried to put a white hood over her head, "Don't put that thing over my head!" She was hanged without it. Only a single wall from the prison still exists, but the area around it is haunted by the spirit of Newell. Her spirit was seen shortly after her execution. The ghost was described as being a small woman and Newell was just that. Her spirit would disappear after being seen.

Ted Bundy is one of the most famous serial killers in history. Bundy was attractive and smart and incredibly warped. He could be the nice next-door neighbor and a charming boyfriend and he could also be a murderer who relished in torturing women and returning to their dead bodies for necrophilia. His ruse to entice young women into his snare was to pretend he needed assistance because he had an injury like a broken arm. He was born in Vermont in 1946 and he never knew who his biological father was. At that time in America, having a child out-of-wedlock was scandalous, so Bundy's maternal grandparents started raising him as their own, telling him that his mother was his sister. The circumstances under which Bundy figured out that his sister was actually his mother are murky. Some accounts have a cousin showing him his birth certificate, others claim that Bundy stumbled across his birth certificate. Ann Rule wrote in her book about Bundy that he didn't find out about his paternity until 1969. He always resented his mother about this. His grandfather Samuel, who was his father figure, was described as a tyrant who beat his wife and dog, threw Bundy's mother down the stairs and swung neighborhood cats around by their tails. His grandmother had mental illness and occassionally needed electroconvulsive therapy. 

Bundy's mother eventually married a man named Johnny Bundy and he adopted Ted, which is how he got his surname. Ted didn't care much for Johnny even though the man tried to include him in activities. Bundy seemed broken from a very early age. Was it nurture or nature or both? We'll never know, but he exhibited disturbing behavior starting at 3-years-old. And when I say disturbing, I'm talking about lining up a bunch of knives around your aunt while she is sleeping and then standing by the bed and smiling about it. There was also the animal cruelty that so many serial killers exhibit as children. Ted also started seeking out pictures of scantily clad women and gravitated to images that featured women in violent situations. He loved stories of sexual violence. And when that wasn't enough, he started peeping in windows, hoping to see women in various states of undress. He terrorized neighbor children by enticing them out into the woods and forcing them to take their clothes off. 

He didn't have many friends and claimed that he wasn't sure how to be in relationships, but he did get a girlfriend in his second year in college and he would claim that she was the only woman he ever really loved. Her name was Diane Edwards - great, her name was Diane. Bundy dropped out of college in 1968 and got involved in politics. Shortly after that, Edwards broke up with Bundy because he seemed to have no ambition and this devastated Ted. In 1969, he started dating a single mother and her daughter would claim that Bundy was inappropriate with her on several occasions. The relationship would be tumultuous but last from 1969 to 1976. In the mid 1970s, Bundy returned to college to study psychology of all things and he did really well, graduating with honors. He took a job at a suicide prevention hotline and this is when he and Ann Rule got to know each other. Rule would later talk about how chilling it was to think of the times that she allowed him to walk her to her car for safety. She wrote The Stranger Beside Me about that time in her life. She found Ted to be kind and empathetic. 

Even though Ted was with the single mom, he rekindled his relationship with Edwards in 1973. He also started law school. In 1974, Ted abruptly broke up with Edwards even though he had talked to her about getting married and when she demanded to know why, he blew her off with a simple, "Diane, I have no idea what you mean." Ted had made a ruse of the whole thing. His purpose was to get her to fall in love with him now that he was marriage worthy and then break her heart to get back at her. And then there were the murders. No one knows the truth about any of this because Bundy changed stories, made up stuff and told a little bit of truth. He had 20 confirmed murders and he confessed to as many as 30. Authorities believe that he killed at least 36 people. The documented murders started in 1974, but Ann Rule believes he started as a teenager. The murders were committed in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Colorado and Florida. Bundy was arrested in Utah and released, but eventually went on trial and got prison time for kidnapping and assault. He was later extradited to Colorado and jailed in Aspen. He escaped from the courthouse in Aspen by jumping out a window in June on 1977. He was captured after six days. Bundy would escape again and make his way to Denver, then Chicago and onto Michigan and then Georgia and finally Florida. 

It would be in Florida where Ted would completely lose control of himself after breaking into a sorority house on the Florida State University campus. He attacked four women, killing two of them and severely injuring the other two. Bundy was spooked by headlights and fled the house, breaking into a basement apartment at another house and attacking another woman. Bundy then headed to Jacksonville where he killed a 14-year-old girl. On February 12, 1978, Bundy was arrested and he was indicted by a grand jury. A bite to the buttock of one of his sorority victims was a key piece of evidence. He was convicted of two murders, three counts of attempted murder and two counts of burglary. The judge imposed the death sentence. Bundy had another trial for the murder of the 14-year-old and he was convicted and sentenced to death for that. Bundy spent the rest of his years fighting appeals and confessing to some of his crimes. He would overpower his victims, take them to a secluded place, rape them, kill them and decapitate them. he would also commit necrophilia then and at later times, coming back to where he had left or buried his victims.

Bundy said he would commit suicide before he would let the state kill him, but he never did. He rejected his last meal and was executed in the electric chair on January 24, 1989. But that wasn't the end of Bundy. His spirit seems to be too arrogant to move on. Prison guards at the jail where Bundy was executed, started talking about seeing his ghost "sitting casually on the electric chair." And they described him as smiling. These stories started shortly after he was executed. Bundy's ghost seemed to be attached to his Death Row cell too. Guards at the Florida State Prison said they saw the full-bodied apparition of Bundy in his former holding cell on death row. Some even heard him audibly say, "Well, I beat all of you, didn't I?" Eventually, no guard would go into the execution chamber alone because they were afraid of being confronted by Bundy. 

Death Row is meant to be a scary place. If one is there, they know that there time is limited and that they have a scheduled date with death. Perhaps that is the energy that has caused these spirits to remain. Or are they afraid to move on? Maybe they don't want to accept that they are gone and want to pretend they are still awaiting their execution on Death Row. Are these hallways that housed dead men walking housing their spirits. Are they haunted? That is for you to decide!