Haunted Yuma Territorial Prison: 3,069 Inmates, 104 Graves

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated November 13, 2026 · How we verify

Few places in the American West carry a reputation as fixed as the haunted Yuma Territorial Prison, a stone and adobe complex above the Colorado River in Yuma, Arizona, that took in its first inmate on July 1, 1876, and locked its gates for good on September 15, 1909. In between it held more than three thousand people, and it has spent the century since being filmed, toured, investigated, and mythologized. Sorting what the record actually says from what the cameras came looking for is worth doing before you go.

Quick orientation: the site is now run as a historical museum by the Arizona State Parks system under the name Yuma Territorial Prison State Historic Park. It is counted among the Yuma Crossing and Associated Sites on the National Register of Historic Places, within the Yuma Crossing National Heritage Area, and it was the third historic park established in Arizona.

Thirty-Three Years Under Constant Construction

The prison opened under the authority of the recently organized Arizona Territory. Over the next 33 years, 3,069 prisoners passed through it, including 29 women, serving sentences for crimes that ranged from murder to polygamy. The place was never really finished. It was under continuous construction and repair throughout its working life, and the labor for that work came from the prisoners themselves, who effectively built the walls that held them.

The end came in 1909, when the last prisoner was moved out to the newly constructed Arizona State Prison Complex at Florence, three years before Arizona became a state in 1912. A graveyard on the grounds holds 104 of the prisoners who did not leave.

The Names on the Register at Yuma

The inmate roll is part of why the prison looms so large in Western memory. Burt Alvord was a Cochise County lawman turned train robber. Pete Spence was an outlaw tied up in the Earp-Clanton feud. “Buckskin Frank” Leslie, the gunfighter who killed Billy Claiborne, did time here, as did the stagecoach robber Pearl Hart and the train robber Bill Downing. William J. Flake, a Mormon pioneer, was imprisoned for violating the Edmunds Act. Ricardo Flores Magon, the Mexican revolutionary who founded the Partido Liberal Mexicano, was also held at Yuma. Thomas H. Rynning served as warden.

When High School Students Took Over the Cellblocks

The oddest chapter in the building’s history is also the best documented. After its own building burned in 1909, Yuma Union High School moved into the empty prison a year after the inmates had gone. Classrooms were set up temporarily in the old cellblocks and the prison hospital became the assembly hall. The school stayed four years, from 1910 to 1914, before moving to a replacement campus. After 1915 the city of Yuma took over the stone complex for use as a city jail.

What the Ghost Claims Actually Rest On

The haunting reputation here is widely repeated but thinly documented. The clearest anchor in the record is television: “Hell Hole Prison,” the eighth episode of season 12 of the Travel Channel series Ghost Adventures, was shot at the prison and focused on its allegedly haunted history. The prison was also one of two stories covered on the 71st episode of the podcast And That’s Why We Drink.

That is the honest extent of it. No verified incident, no named witness, and no catalogued phenomenon appears in the historical record of the site. What visitors describe tends to attach itself to the obvious places: the dark cell, the cellblocks, the iron cages, the burial ground where those 104 graves sit. Treat those accounts as stories told about a building rather than as evidence of anything occurring in it. The documented facts, 3,069 inmates, a desert cellblock built by the men confined in it, and a cemetery on site, are grim enough without embellishment.

Yuma, Hollywood, and the Prison’s Second Life

The prison’s fame owes a great deal to fiction. Elmore Leonard set his 1972 novel “Forty Lashes Less One” around a planned prison break in 1909, the year the place closed, and wrote the 1953 short story “Three-Ten to Yuma,” filmed in 1957 by Delmer Daves with Glenn Ford and Van Heflin and again in 2007 by James Mangold with Russell Crowe and Christian Bale. Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West” names Yuma as the prison awaiting the character Cheyenne. A 1957 episode of the syndicated Western series 26 Men, “Incident at Yuma,” dramatized a break and the trouble of raising a posse, with Tristram Coffin playing Captain Thomas H. Rynning.

Visiting Yuma Territorial Prison State Historic Park

The site is open to the public as a museum operated by Arizona State Parks. Expect stone walls, the original cellblocks, the guard tower, and the prison cemetery, all of it in full desert sun. Yuma summers are severe, so time a visit for the cooler months or the early part of the day, and bring water. Check the Arizona State Parks site for current hours and admission before you drive out.

Address: Yuma, Arizona

See Yuma Territorial Prison for Yourself

Sources

• Yuma Territorial Prison State Historic Park in Arizona
• Yuma Territorial Prison State Historic Park, AZ A
• Wildernet.com
• Yuma Territorial Prison, Arizona Ghost Town
• Arizona Department of Corrections
• Wikipedia: Yuma Territorial Prison