Cell Block 4 and the Haunted Penitentiary of New Mexico

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated September 5, 2026 · How we verify

Fifteen miles of high desert separate central Santa Fe from the reason people call this the haunted Penitentiary of New Mexico. The prison sits in unincorporated Santa Fe County along New Mexico State Road 14, a men’s maximum-security facility run by the New Mexico Corrections Department, and the part of it that draws the stories has not held a prisoner since 1998. That is Cell Block 4, at the far northern end of the complex from the Control Center, where over two days in 1980 thirty-three inmates were killed in what the record describes as the most violent prison riot in American correctional history.

Quick orientation: the complex today consists of three separate facilities, Level V and Level VI, both opened in 1985, and a Level II minimum restrict facility opened in 1990. The regular daily population runs at about 790 inmates, whose average age is 32. The Level VI supermax site held New Mexico’s death row. Terry Clark, a convicted murderer, was executed there in 2001, the only execution carried out in the state between the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976 and its repeal in 2009.

Sing Sing’s Blueprint on Cerrillos Road

Congress had authorized a penitentiary for the territory since 1853, but nothing was built until much later. The territorial legislature authorized the prison in 1884, and it opened in 1885 on Cerrillos Road, its design lifted from the same plans used for Sing Sing and Joliet. There is a well worn Santa Fe story that the town was offered a choice between the penitentiary and the region’s first university and picked the prison. It is untrue. The University of New Mexico was not authorized until 1889, five years after the legislature had already approved the prison.

The first prison industry here produced bricks. From 1903 onward, New Mexico became the first western state to put prisoners to work building highways, a practice that would spread across the region.

1922 and 1953: The Riots Before the Riot

On July 19, 1922, prisoners rioted over overcrowding, poor food, and the use of excessive force by prison authorities. When the inmates refused to return to their cells, tower guards opened fire, killing one inmate and injuring five others. The report that followed placed the blame on the prison authorities themselves, citing lack of experience and a failure to understand how to control a prison population.

The second riot came on June 15, 1953. Inmates again protesting excessive force seized Deputy Warden Ralph Tahash and twelve guards and held them hostage. In the melee that followed, guards killed two inmates and wounded a number of others.

That second uprising forced a move. In 1956 a new facility went up in open country along State Road 14, about eleven miles south of the original prison, and became known as the main unit. The 1885 building was demolished shortly afterward. Apart from a street named Pen Road, nothing of it remains.

A Brief Period of Reform, Then 1980

The new prison had quieter years. Between 1967 and 1970 the population sat below capacity and dorm rooms were used as classrooms. Warden J. E. Baker drew on federal money from President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty for a prison reform effort called Project Newgate, funding prisoner education, job training, and community service.

None of that survived what happened in 1980. Prisoners who had broken out of crowded dormitories at the southern end of the complex took twelve officers hostage and worked their way north to Cell Block 4. Over two days, thirty-three inmates were killed. The accounts are unsparing: men were butchered, dismembered, decapitated and hung on the cells, and burned alive. Cell Block 4 was closed in 1998 and the section is now known as the Old Main.

The aftermath rebuilt the system. Systemic reforms, the Duran v. King consent decree, and the Bureau Classification System implemented under Cabinet Secretary Joe Williams produced the modern New Mexico prison structure.

Doors, Voices and Footsteps in the Old Main

The prison’s haunted reputation rests almost entirely on the 1980 riot and the abandoned block it left behind. What gets reported is unremarkable in form and disquieting in context: prison doors opening and closing on their own, disembodied voices, and footsteps in corridors where nobody is walking. There is no verified account attached to any of it, no documented investigation in the record here, and no named witness. It is a reputation rather than evidence, and it should be read that way.

What is not in dispute is the history underneath the stories. A building where thirty-three men died violently in forty-eight hours will attract this kind of talk whether or not anything moves in it, and a decommissioned cell block full of steel doors and long sightlines will supply plenty of ordinary noise for a visitor primed to hear something else.

Can You Get Inside the Old Main?

Not casually. The Penitentiary of New Mexico is a working maximum-security prison operated by the New Mexico Corrections Department, with roughly 790 men in custody across its three facilities, and the Old Main sits inside that secure perimeter. This is not open ground you can walk. Anyone hoping to see Cell Block 4 needs to go through the Corrections Department, and the sources here do not describe any public access arrangement. From State Road 14 south of Santa Fe you can see the site, and that is as close as most people will get.

Address: New Mexico State Road 14, unincorporated Santa Fe County, New Mexico

See Penitentiary of New Mexico for Yourself

Sources

• 2020 Census – Census Block Map: Santa Fe County, NM (Census (official))
• Adult Prisons Division – Penitentiary of New Mexico, Santa Fe
• Terry Douglas Clark #741
• For Riot Site in New Mexico, a Gift Shop but No Ghost Stories (The New York Times)
• Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture
• Wikipedia: Penitentiary of New Mexico

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