The Old Licking Jail: Newark’s Sheriff-House Lockup

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated August 27, 2026 · How we verify

Stone walls, iron-bound gates, and a front door that once opened onto a sheriff’s parlor: the Old Licking Jail in Newark, Ohio, was built to do two jobs at once, and it looks the part. It housed the county’s lawman and his family on one side and, on the other, the people he locked up. That arrangement lasted the better part of a century. The building’s documented history is a matter of county record. The ghost stories attached to it are something else entirely: reported experiences, repeated by visitors and paranormal groups, with nothing in the archive behind them.

The Old Licking Jail at a Glance

• Built: between 1888 and 1889, in Newark, Ohio
• Architect: J.W. Yost
• Purpose: a residence for the sheriff and a detention facility for up to 68 inmates
• Notable incident: the so-called Rebellion of 1894, in which Sheriff William E. Jones lost his life
• Decommissioned: 1987
• Now owned by: the Licking County Governmental Preservation Society, which purchased it in 2014
• Status: a historical site offering tours
• Reported phenomena: whispers, apparitions, unexplained cold drafts, sounds carrying at night

J.W. Yost’s Two Buildings in One

Architect J.W. Yost drew up the Old Licking Jail in the late 1880s, and construction ran across 1888 and 1889. What went up was not simply a lockup. It was a hybrid: a home for the sheriff of Licking County joined to a detention block with capacity for as many as 68 inmates.

That was standard practice for county jails of the era, and it explains much of the building’s atmosphere. A sheriff’s wife often cooked for the prisoners. Children grew up a wall away from men awaiting trial. The domestic side of the building and the punitive side shared plumbing, a roof, and, on bad nights, sound. Visitors who find the place unsettling frequently point at that fact rather than at anything supernatural: the design put ordinary family life directly against confinement.

The stonework and the ironwork are the reason the building still draws people who have no interest in ghosts at all. Heavy masonry, barred openings, and a hard institutional geometry make it one of the more legible surviving examples of nineteenth-century county corrections architecture in the region.

The Rebellion of 1894 and Sheriff William E. Jones

The single darkest episode in the building’s recorded history is the event remembered locally as the Rebellion of 1894. It cost Sheriff William E. Jones his life. A sheriff dying inside the jail he ran, in a building that was also his house, is the kind of fact that fixes itself in a town’s memory, and it sits at the root of most of the jail’s later reputation.

It is worth being precise about what that reputation rests on. The death of Sheriff Jones is history. The idea that his death, or anyone else’s, left something behind in the corridors is folklore that grew up afterward. The two are told together so often that they can be hard to separate, but they are not the same category of claim.

Twenty-Seven Empty Years, Then a Rescue in 2014

The jail was decommissioned in 1987, when it stopped holding prisoners and stopped being anyone’s home. What followed was the standard fate of a large obsolete public building: it sat. Years of vacancy do a specific kind of damage to a structure, and they also do a specific kind of work on its reputation. Empty buildings collect stories the way they collect dust.

In 2014 the Licking County Governmental Preservation Society purchased the property. The jail now functions as a historical site, with tours that cover both the architecture and the haunted lore. The preservation angle matters here: the reason anyone can walk these corridors today is that a group decided the building was worth saving rather than clearing.

Whispers, Cold Drafts, and the Name Carl Etherington

Reports from the Old Licking Jail follow a familiar pattern for a decommissioned lockup, and they come from both paranormal enthusiasts and people who arrived skeptical. What gets described, consistently enough to be worth listing:

• Whispering with no identifiable source
• Apparitions, described by some witnesses as full figures
• Sudden cold drafts moving through the corridors
• Screams and other sounds reported at night

The name that recurs most often in these accounts is Carl Etherington, a detective whose life ended inside the building. As with the identification of any apparition, that attachment is an interpretation laid over an experience rather than evidence of who, if anyone, is present. Nothing reported at the jail has been verified, and none of it should be read as more than what people say they encountered. The building’s genuine history contains enough violence that a visitor’s imagination has plenty to work with before any ghost is required.

Touring the Old Licking Jail in Newark

The jail is open as a historical site under the Licking County Governmental Preservation Society, and tours cover the architecture as well as the paranormal claims. It has become a reliable draw for visitors interested in either, and it contributes to both local tourism and local history education, which is a large part of what keeps the doors open.

Confirm tour dates and hours before traveling. Availability at volunteer-run historic sites shifts with the season, and paranormal programming in particular tends to cluster around the fall. Whichever version of the visit you book, treat it as an old building first: follow whatever the guides tell you about where you may and may not go.

Sources

• Local Sites to Celebrate State's History
• Ohio Historic Inventory: Pataskala Jail (Archives (official))
• Ohio Girl's Fatal Ride
• NPGallery NRHP Archive Search (National Park Service)
• Wikipedia: Pataskala Jail

Address: 46 S 3rd St