Historic Pennsylvania jail is for sale, ghosts included (video)

JIM THORPE, Pa. — The asking price — $749,000 — includes gallows, nooses, handcuffs, the everlasting handprint of a hanged coal miner, and possibly some ghosts who have good reason to be ticked off.

“Oh, we have ghosts here,” Betty Lou McBride said last week. “Tons of ghosts.”

McBride, 84, and husband Tom, 87, purchased the former Carbon County Jail in Jim Thorpe in 1995 when it still housed prisoners, and took over once the county moved the last of them to a new facility in Nesquehoning. The McBrides have spent the last two decades running the imposing, 147-year-old stone building as The Old Museum Jail.

“We’ve been saying we were going to sell it for a long time, but it’s hard to let go,” she said.
The two-story, 27-cell jail is tucked into a rocky hill atop Broadway in the quaint mining town formerly known as Mauch Chunk on the Lehigh River. Pennsylvania has plenty of old stone buildings where nothing much happened, but the jail is on the National Register of Historic Places because of its unique and ominous place in the history of labor unions in America.

In the late 1800s, immigrants were pouring into Northeastern Pennsylvania and heading down into the mines to extract anthracite coal. Faced with low pay, meager living conditions and discrimination, Irish miners turned to fraternal organizations such as the Ancient Order of Hibernians for solidarity and, eventually, to fledgling trade unions to organize.

“What they were, basically, were miners who were just trying to get the mine owners to treat them fairly,” said Karliene Zack, of the Mauch Chunk Museum down the street.

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