HGB Ep. 459 - Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary

Moment in Oddity - New Orleans Bull Run

Most of us are familiar with the 'Running of the Bulls' or 'Encierro de Pamplona', a tradition in Spain that originated when bulls were brought from the fields where they were bred into the bullring, located in the city. During the run, youths would jump into the bulls path and attempt to outrun the creatures as a display of bravado. Well, a favorite city of many, decided to take a twist on this tradition. Every July, New Orleanians congregate in the traditional colors of Spain to host their own version of a bull run. During this event, the New Orleans Roller Derby Girls chase runners on their roller blades armed with plastic bats. Runners line up dressed in white with a bit of red included in their attire. The NOLA tradition began in 2007 with just 200 runners and 14 derby girls. Today, nearly 14,000 runners and the Big Easy Rollergirls and guest bulls numbering around 400, participate every July. The bulls attack runners with foam filled plastic bat horns attached to their helmets. From the sounds of it, the festivities are just as much fun for the spectators as the participants. But one thing is for sure, a running of the bulls with people posing as the bulls and getting to whack the runners with plastic bats, certainly is odd.

This Month in History - The First Transcontinental Flight

In the month of November, on the 5th, in 1911, aviator Calbraith Perry Rodgers completed the first transcontinental flight across America. On September 17th, Rodgers took off from Sheepshead Bay, New York to begin the 3,417 mile journey. Just the prior spring, he had become interested in aviation after visiting his cousin John. The cousin was studying at the Wright Company factory and attending flight school in Dayton, Ohio. Rodgers took 90 minutes of flying lessons from Orville Wright and later, along with his cousin, purchased a Wright Flyer airplane. When Rodgers took his official flight examination he became the 49th aviator licensed to fly by the Federation Aeronautique Internationale. In October of 1910, William Randolph Hearst had offered a prize of $50,000 to the first person to fly coast to coast in less than 30 days. Rodger's plan was to fly above railroad tracks to navigate his journey from New York to California. There was a train of three cars to join him on his journey consisting of a sleeper car, dining car and a car of spare airplane parts for any repairs needed along the way. Calbraith hired the Wright brothers' technician, Charlie Taylor, to ride on the train so he could assist with the plane's maintenance and repairs when needed. During the trip there was often significant damage to the aircraft due to more than 15 crashes that occurred. Although he missed the prize money award by arriving 19 days after his 30 day cutoff, Rodgers successfully landed at Tournament Park in Pasadena, California, to a crowd of 20,000 excited spectators. 

Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary (Suggested by: Tammie Burroughs and Kelsey Meyer)

Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary is located in Petros, Tennessee. This was an old coal mining town that only boasts a population of 600 people. The jail is basically its claim to fame and this location is quite famous for being haunted. There were thousands of deaths here and something dark seems to be on the property. Join us as we share the history and hauntings of Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary. 

Did you know there was such a thing as leasing convicts? After the Civil War, southern states were broke, of course. They came up with a means to make the government money, while saving money. They rented out their convicts and Tennessee was one of the states to do that. Companies would pay the state for the convict labor and the state didn't need to bother to build prisons or maintain them. Coal companies made use of this practice and they built their own stockades near the mines. The coal mining industry was expanding quickly in Tennessee. Petros was one of the towns near a coal vein and a coal mining comapny set up operations here, along with a company town. Like many companies, this one took advantage of the coal miners by charging inflated prices for rent, clothing and food. By the end of a month, coal miners had little to show for their work. So they joined together and planned strikes and they made sure to plan them during the Winter when coal demand was really high. The mine workers demanded to be paid in cash, rather than scrip and to be able to choose their own checkweighmen, so they wouldn't get cheated. The companies embraced the convict lease program because they would now have a compliant workforce.

The Tennessee Coal Mining Company in Anderson County started leasing prisoners in 1891. Obviously, the coal miners weren't keen on having criminals take their jobs. They started numerous campaigns to disrupt mining operations, but the mining companies didn't budge because they were getting a steady stream of labor as more and more young men, particularly black men, were arrested for petty crimes and given long prison terms. This was a cash cow for the state. The state may have rethought this practice if it had known it would lead to one of the most significant events in labor history, the Coal Creek War.

This conflict took place on the eastern fringe of the Cumberland Mountains in the towns of Briceville and Coal Creek. The Briceville mine had been shutdown after miners wouldn't sign a contract and was reopened on July 5, 1891 with the goal of using convict labor. The miners' homes were torn down and a stockade erected. On July 14th, 300 armed miners surrounded the Briceville stockade and disarmed the guards without much effort. They then marched the convicts to Coal Creek, loaded them onto a train and sent them to Knoxville. They contacted the labor-friendly Governor John P. Buchanan and told him what they had done and why and asked for his intervention believing he would support them. Two days later, the Governor responded with three Tennessee state militia companies. In their company, they had all the convicts that had been sent to Knoxville. The miners were enraged. The Governor was confronted and he explained that he had a duty to uphold the law. The miners scoffed because he hadn't upheld any laws to protect them and that night, shots were fired at the stockade. The Governor was nearby and he hightailed it out of there leaving 107 militiamen to deal with the miners.

The miners faced off against the militia with 2000 men and the Colonel leading the militia quickly conceded. Months of negotiations and court cases followed with a final case going to the state's Supreme Court and the miners lost. There was a call to arms and on October 31, 1891, a group of miners burned the stockade at Briceville and seized the Coal Creek stockade. They burned company buildings and looted. The 300 convicts at the stockades were given food and freed. A couple days later, another stockade was burned. General J. Keller Anderson was sent with a militia and they built Fort Anderson at the top of Militia Hill that overlooked Coal Creek. Newspapers at the time chose sides with some calling the miners "thieves and outlaws" while other papers called the government "inhuman." Fort Anderson came under attack and Governor Buchanan sent 583 militiamen to restore order. Hundreds of miners were arrested. The uprising had been put down and many things changed. Governor Buchanan didn't receive his party's nomination to run again, so he switched to third party and lost. His political career was over. The amount of money used to keep up the militia far outweighed the leasing of convict labor, so the practice was done away with. Three hundred miners were indicted, but no one got serious jail time. And the state legislature laid aside money for the building of Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Morgan County where convicts would mine coal for the state rather than be leased to companies. And there was one ghost story that came from the melee.

Miner Richard Drummond was hanged in 1893 from what is today called Drummond's Trestle, a bridge that is located near the junction of Highway 116 and Lower Briceville Highway. This was eventually tried as a murder as a militiaman took it upon himself to sentence Drummond to hanging after he had killed a soldier. People who visit the bridge claim to hear disembodied gasping of breath. No cattle will graze near the bridge and dogs won't cross the bridge. An apparition is sometimes seen hanging from the bridge. And a ghost is sometimes seen pacing on the bridge. Amber wrote of her experience visiting the bridge on the Gatlinburg Haunts website, "Before we even saw it, we felt a strange sensation as we drove into the area. The air almost seemed electrified, the trees looked dead, and there was absolutely no movement of the leaves. For it being the middle of autumn, it was strange that no leaves were falling. We left our car and walked towards the river, knowing that the bridge would appear eventually. I began to feel nauseous...Kristin said that she was feeling strange too, that the woods were making her dizzy. As we walked, we were wondering where in the world this haunted bridge was. Just as we questioned it, we finally came upon the Drummond Bridge, and both stopped in our tracks. It stood ominously, towering over the river, a testament to the history of the area. It was stained, rusted, and overgrown. We decided to avoid walking on the bridge, as it no longer seemed sturdy. We sat down on some stumps and just listened for a moment, but all we heard was nothing. Not even birds were singing in the area. After a while, we decided to go back to the car and head out to Sevierville, where our lodging was. As we left, I could have sworn I heard a faint ‘wait!’ as we walked away from the area. When I looked back, I saw a golden orb shoot behind a tree but decided to avoid telling Kristin as she scares pretty easily. Did the spirit of Richard Drummond show himself to me that day? It’s hard to say for sure, but the bridge itself and the area surrounding it do have unexplained energy, one of sadness and life lost too young."

Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary wasn’t just built to be a jail since the main purpose was to have convicts work as coal miners. The original structure was made from wood in 1896. Overcrowding was a persistent problem. In 1931, there were 976 men in the prison, which was 300 over capacity. A new structure was necessary and the wooden structure was replaced with a four-story castle-like stone building made from stone quarried by the convicts. The design of the building was either a cross or upside-down cross based on how you were looking at it, but since the front of the jail makes up the arms, it really does seem to be upside down. And perhaps that is why it feels as though evil is here. Death was just a part of being at Brushy Mountain. There was violence and murder within the walls. Chronic illness was rampant with epidemics of typhoid fever and tuberculosis sweeping through and many convicts were struck with pneumonia and syphilis. Three fourths of the black prisoners had syphilis. These were also convicts, not miners. They weren't trained for this work and the prison wasn't real strict on keeping things safe, so mining accidents were common. By the time the prison shut down in 2009, ten thousand men had died here.

Unruly prisoners were thrown into The Hole to get straightened out. The Hole stopped being used in 1957 when the D-block was built for the really bad dudes. Something that is troubling about the D-block is that it was built where the prison used to have a death house. This was a storage room for keeping the bodies of the dead until families came to retrieve their family member or until the body was buried in the on site pauper cemetery. The mining operations at the mine continued until 1969 when Bushy Mountain was reclassified as primarily maximum-security. Prisoners who only needed minimum-security where moved to a structure that was "outside the walls" and they held jobs in the community. The maximum-security prison remained a place where the worst of the worst were housed. This was the last stop for many inmates who had become too much to handle for other institutions. Others were men who had committed unspeakable crimes. 

Conditions weren't just bad for the prisoners, the guards felt unsafe. In 1972, they went on strike and the prison had to closed. It stayed closed until 1976 when security improvements were made. Mining operations stopped at the prison too. Racism was rampant in the prison at this time. White inmates and black inmates fought against each other often. This came to a head in 1982. Seven white inmates managed to capture several guards at knifepoint and then were able to commandeer their guns. They went to find their black rivals and opened fire on them in their cells, killing two of them. The other two survived because they hid in the corner behind their mattresses.

One of the most infamous people to be held at the prison was James Earl Ray. Ray was born in March of 1928 in Alton, Illinois. He struggled in life, finally ending up in the Army at the end of World War II. He served in Germany, but was eventually discharged for ineptitude. And then his life of crime began. These crimes included armed robbery and mail fraud and he ended up in Leavenworth for four years in the 1950s. After getting out, he went back to his life of crime and was sentenced to twenty years in prison, which he started serving at the Missouri State Penitentiary. He escaped from there in 1967. Ray made his way to Mexico and settled in Puerto Vallarta in October of 1967. There he pretended to be a pornopgraphic director and got sex workers to work for him. After no success, Ray went to California and had rhinoplasty to change his appearance. George Wallace was running for president at the time and Ray was drawn to his segregationist views because Ray was a rampant racist.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was making his way around the country at this same time, spreading his message of peace and equality. Ray hated King and he put the man in his crosshairs. He traveled to Atlanta in March of 1968 and found the house where King lived and the church where King preached. On March 30, 1968, Ray bought a Remington Model 760 Gamemaster .30-06-caliber rifle and a box of 20 cartridges from the Aeromarine Supply Company under the name Harvey Lowmeyer. He had found out that King was going to be in Memphis, Tennessee in early April 1968. Martin Luther King Jr. was standing on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968 when a single shot from Ray's Remington rifle hit him in the lower right side of his face. King was pronounced dead an hour later at the hospital. The hotel remains as it was the day King died. Sheets still rumpled and cigarettes still in the ashtray and King's car still in parking lot. Many people claim to feel uncomfortable at the motel and they believe that King's spirit is still here. 

Ray went on the run, heading to Atlanta and then he made his way to Canada. Then he was off to England and Portugal and then back to London. When he attempted to go to Brussels, He was arrested at London's Heathrow Airport. He was extradited to Tennessee. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 99 years and he ended up at Brushy Mountain in March of 1970. Ray set his sights on escaping immediately and he made several attempts, finally succeeding in 1977. Ray and six other inmates climbed over the wall using a 16-foot ladder made of salvaged pipe. Ray only made it a few miles from the prison walls when he was captured two days later. Ray was later stabbed 22 times by three other inmates in 1981. He left Brushy in 1992 and died at the state facility in Nashville six years later.

Another inmate here was politician Byron (Low Tax) Looper. And yes, he changed his middle name to Low Tax. He campaigned on exposing corruption and eventually got into office where he proceeded to hold a press conference and announce that he’d discovered $100 million worth of property taxes that hadn’t been paid. This was apparently a “normal backlog” for property taxes at that time of year. Looper became a corrupt politician himself and in 1998, shot his opponent in the head. He was arrested, convicted, and served his time at Brushy until it closed. 

One of the worst criminals to serve time here was Paul Dennis Reid. He was first convicted and served time when he was only 20 years old. This was for armed robbery and he got 20 years. When he got out, he went on a killing spree. In February of 1997, Reid would become the Fast Food Killer. His first target was a Captain D’s where he forced a 16-year old employee and her 25-year old manager into the cooler and shot them to death. He then emptied the register. In March, he hit a McDonald’s three miles from the Captain D’s and killed three people. The next month, he killed two at a Baskin-Robbins. Reid was finally caught, convicted and given seven death sentences. He served at Brushy until it closed and died at another prison from pneumonia in 2013. 

There was a deer that did time at Brushy too. This was a young deer that fell off a cliff and into the Brushy yard in the 1970s. The inmates cared for him and named him Geronimo. He liked to chew on unlit cigarettes. When Brushy closed for that brief time in the 1970s, Geronimo was moved with the inmates, but he got unruly, not liking the new location. He eventually broke his leg and it needed to be amputated. No one knows what eventually happened to the deer.

The jail closed to inmates on June 11, 2009. Jail functions were transferred to the Morgan County Correctional Complex. In 2013, the Brushy Mountain Group formed to save the jail and they worked with Morgan County to reopen the jail to the public. Today, the location is open for historic tours and paranormal tours. The Warden’s Table is a restaurant here and offers a variety of southern food. And there is also the Brushy Mountain Distillery, which features Frozen Head Vodka, Double Barrel Whiskey, Brimstone, Copperhead, and End of the Line Moonshine and Struggle Bus Bloody Mary Mix. "End of the Line Moonshine is available in 9 flavors. From farm to still, we use water from the mountains’ natural springs to make this one-of-a-kind moonshine and vodka." And then there's those pesky ghosts.

There were Native Americans on the land before the prison was built and some believe there is residual energy connected to them here. And then, of course, this was the end of the line for thousands of men who died here. Activity started while the prisoners were still housed at the jail. Visitors to the jail get scratched and sometimes feel nauseous in the building. There are several areas that visitors get to explore when investigating including A Block, B Block, D Block, the Chapel, the Auditorium/Hospital, the Gymnasium, Laundry, Cafeteria, Courtyard, The Hole, and The Yard. The cafeteria is said to have many spirits, one who has identified himself as "Waterhead." This was an inmate killed with a meat clever in the cafeteria. The courtyard is home to a female apparition that is named Bonnie. No one knows why she is here since no women served time here. The third floor auditorium has a dark entity that has physically attacked people. Paranormal investigators once played the "I Have a Dream" speech outside the cell that once housed James Earl Ray and they captured a voice saying, "Hush."

The Tennessee Wraith Chasers visited during Season 4 on their show Ghost Asylum. A former inmate told the team that the Chapel was one of the most dangerous places on site. Right as Doogie walked into the Chapel, the Ovilus said "Beast." Later "Hell" came over it. The inmate also told them about Jack Jett, an inmate who was a little person that was stabbed in the neck and then 18 more times at the prison. Later, a couple team members seem to catch some K-2 energy at a lower level and they wondered if they had a kid there. If everything is honest, they didn't know about Jett. Could this have been him? Doogie went down to solitary and banged on a cell door and asked if anyone was still there. He got "Jack" and "me." They heard an audible growl in the cell blocks. Porter was in Maximum Security, the temperature went from extremes of 72 to 100 degrees. The K-2 Meter got several hits and the Periscope, which is a type of K-2 Meter that has vertical rods that light from red to green, also got hits and went from red to green when asked. The group built a Wraith Fog Trap and hoped to get an apparition to materialize with it. This entailed lasers, batteries, a dehumidifier, voltmeter, a fog machine and something called a Jacob's Ladder. This was suppose to give energy to the spirit and the fog was to help see it. When they reviewed the video later, there is no doubt that they caught something walking through the fog. You could mostly only see the legs. It could've been a little person. 

Other hauntings connected to Jett include an area where there were phones. Jett was on the phone when he was attacked. The phone here has been seen levitating off the hook and then being returned to it. There are cold spots felt here and a feeling of dread. Objects in the chapel have been seen floating across the room. Floating orbs have been seen in The Hole in harsh colors like purple and red. Disembodied footsteps and whispers are heard.

Discovery+'s Conjuring Keisha visited the prison in the summer of 2022. Comedian and Actress Whitney Cummings joined Singer Keisha for an investigation at the prison and it didn't disappoint. Whitney had her wrist squeezed really hard before the women even entered the jail and it was enough that she felt like she wanted to leave, but then she was interested to see if it would happen again. They talked to a former correctional officer from the jail named Debbie Williams. She worked at the prison from 1980 to 2009. Williams said that there was violence in the prison daily. Her experiences included being told audibly to "get out" by something she couldn't see. She told Keisha and Whitney that they believe there are two demons in the prison. This was backed up by the owners of the prison, Jaime Brock and her sister Courtney. The property has been in their family since the 1890s. Jaime said that in Cell Block D they have seen apparitions, been touched, things get slammed and they've heard growls and disembodied voices. A woman once recited the Lord's Prayer and the woman said her back was burning and there were three red claw marks down her back.

The sister then mentioned their weird entity here that is nicknamed The Creeper. They call it that because they were using an SLS camera and captured the entity crawling along the floor and then up the wall. On Day 2, Whitney and Keisha brought a Demonologist in with them. A REM Pod in the hospital went off for a sustained period of time and Whitney went to hang out in the area by herself. Shortly after getting in the room, she heard something outside of it. Whitney asked the spirit about gender and the REM Pod went off when she asked if it was a woman. Later, it indicated that it was transgender and had wanted to appear as a woman. Later, the two women used the SLS Camera in here and caught a figure hanging out just behind Whitney on the stairs and then it seemed to climb up the wall and they were pretty sure this was The Creeper. The show ended with Keisha fleeing Cell Block D because they thought they were interacting with a demon. Which we didn't understand because they had a demonologist there and isn't this what they were looking for? 

The Creeper isn't the only weird entity here. There are some who have claimed to see a cloven-hoofed figure. The description matches that of The Goatman.

Kelsey visited this location and had a couple of experiences, "I actually visited there a few years ago and I was at the whipping post there and my mom made a sarcastic comment saying I’d be there all the time and I came home to whip marks on my back. I didn’t feel any pain at all, which was weird and they lasted for a few days. I went into the hole and I sat there for a few minutes while my mom was in another cell and it was just me and her in there no other visitors that day and all of a sudden I hear a noise on the wall in my cell and I ask if anyone is there and all of a sudden I feel a tap on my shoulder. So I ask 'did you just touch me' then immediately after I hear a mans voice say 'yes.'" Many people claim to hear the cries of those who were brutally beaten, sometimes to death at the Whipping Post? 

There seems to be a lot of activity at the prison, which is pretty typical of these tough prisons. This one has one of the highest death counts of any prison. Is Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary haunted? That is for you to decide!