Cell 19: Ghost Stories at the Museum of Colorado Prisons

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated September 3, 2026 · How we verify

The Museum of Colorado Prisons occupies a building that was never designed for visitors. It stands in Cau00f1on City, Colorado, in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains, and until 1935 gave way to its long service as a women’s prison, its cells held people who could not leave. Today those same cells hold exhibits, and the museum’s reputation as one of the most ghost-storied buildings in the state rests largely on what people say they hear in one of them.

Quick Orientation for the Old Women’s Prison

• Located at 201 N 1st St, Cau00f1on City, Colorado.
• The building housed women prisoners from 1935.
• Converted to a museum in 1988 through community effort.
• Open to the public as a working museum, with exhibits installed in the original cells.
• Official site: prisonmuseum.org.

From Cell Block to Exhibit Hall

The museum’s subject is Colorado’s penal history, and its greatest asset is that it does not have to reconstruct anything. The corridors, the barred doors and the cramped cells are the originals. The building’s institutional life ended and its museum life began in 1988, when a community push turned the former women’s prison into a public collection rather than letting it be cleared or repurposed.

What fills those cells now ranges from ordinary objects of daily confinement to the harder artifacts of punishment and execution. The effect on visitors is often less about the displays than about the architecture around them: the scale of the rooms, the sound of a heavy door, the sense of how little space a person was given. That is worth saying plainly before any discussion of ghosts, because a building that unsettles people for entirely physical reasons will generate stories whether or not anything else is present.

Cell 19 and the Story of Joe

The museum’s best-known ghost story attaches to a single cell. According to the legend told here, Cell 19 belonged to a prisoner called Joe, said to have been wrongfully convicted and, in the more lurid version of the tale, walled up alive. His spirit is described as making noises from inside the cell.

This should be read as folklore rather than documented history. The account of a man being sealed into a wall is the kind of detail that circulates around old prisons everywhere, and no verified record is offered to support it. What is real is that visitors consistently single out Cell 19 as the place where they hear something. Whether the story grew from the noises or the noises are now heard because of the story is the question no ghost tour can answer.

What Visitors Report in the Corridors

Beyond Cell 19, the reported phenomena fall into a few recurring categories. All of it is reported experience, not established fact.

• Unexplained smells. Visitors describe corridors filling with the odor of old tobacco or of an old-fashioned perfume, with no obvious source. Scent is one of the more commonly reported effects in the building, which is unusual: most haunted sites trade in sound and sight.
• Apparitions. Figures have been reported in the halls and cell areas, generally seen briefly and at a distance.
• Recorded voices. Ghost hunters working in the building have claimed to capture EVPs, or electronic voice phenomena, on audio recordings. As always with EVP, the recordings are open to interpretation and depend entirely on who is listening and what they expect to hear.

Old masonry, iron fittings and a hillside site in a dry mountain climate account for a great deal of noise on their own, and a museum’s own visitors, ventilation and neighboring buildings account for a fair amount of the rest. None of that disproves what people report. It does mean the museum’s reputation is built on accumulated testimony rather than on evidence.

Visiting the Prison Museum in Cau00f1on City

This is one of the more straightforward haunted locations in Colorado to see honestly, because it is a genuine museum with regular public admission rather than a private site or a seasonal attraction. The exhibits stand on their own for anyone interested in criminal justice, state history or nineteenth and twentieth century institutional life, and the ghost stories are a layer on top rather than the whole show. Check the museum’s website for current hours and for any after-hours or paranormal-focused events, which are not always on the standard schedule.

Go for the history first. If you want to test Cell 19, do it knowing exactly which parts of the story are on the record and which are not.

Sources

• Eaton House Museum
• Breckenridge Welcome Center
• Delta County Museum
• Official site
• Birth of the Sedalia Museum
• Wikipedia: List of museums in Colorado

Ghost Tours Nearby

Aspen's DarkSide Ghost Tour★ 4.9 (83)from $48Private Aspen Ghosts and Haunted History Walking Tourfrom $492

Affiliate links: BeyondHaunted may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you.

More Haunted Museums

Molly Brown HouseVigo County Historical MuseumCleveland Grays ArmoryOld Rectory Epworth LincolnshireArkansas State CapitolGilcrease Museum