‘This is the entrance to the Witch Well and behind that door you’d face your worst nightmare. Don’t ever go through there.' Night falls, the portcullis rises in the moonlight, and young Billy starts his first night as a prison guard. But this is no ordinary prison. There are haunted cells that can’t be used, whispers and cries in the night . . . and the dreaded Witch Well. Billy is warned to stay away from the prisoner down in the Witch Well. But who could it be? What prisoner could be so frightening? Billy is about to find out . . . An unforgettable ghost story from the creator of the Wardstone Chronicles (Spook's Apprentice) series.

Through a study of ten commercially published prison autobiographies, Haunting Prison: Exploring the Prison as an Abject and Uncanny Institution unveils how prison is narrativized and socially represented as an abject and uncanny institution, shedding new light on what prison is and does in Western carceral imaginations.

The darkest stories from the nefarious “Castle on the Cumberland” from a former prison guard and paranormal expert. “The place sits on blood as surely as it does on stone and earth.” The Kentucky State penitentiary opened its heavy iron gates to the condemned over 100 years ago—yet many of them, long deceased, still walk its corridors. Noted paranormal researcher Steve E. Asher provides true, first-hand accounts of the paranormal as well as his own personal experiences at the state’s most violent, controversial—and haunted—prison. He uncovers the shocking testimonies of the men and women who have actually worked behind the prison walls and their encounters with the spirits of dead inmates. The compelling facts found inside this book will leave you questioning everything you ever thought possible about life after death.

From Chicago Public Library Foundation award-winner Ursula Bielski comes the first, shocking look at the ghosts of Old Joliet Prison. In the fall of 2018 Ursula gathered together a team of veteran paranormal researchers to host the first ever paranormal investigations and ghost tours at one of the world's most notorious penitentiaries: the Old Joliet Prison. Illinois' second state penitentiary, the prison was constructed in the mid 1850s, and hosted thousands of murderers, rapists, thieves and confidence men during its nearly 150 years of operation. In addition to the crimes these men--and women--perpetrated before their incarcerations, once inside the chaos continued. Countless numbers of stabbings, shootings, rapes and suicides occurred inside the prison walls, along with hundreds of deaths from disease and illness. Now, step inside the abandoned cell blocks and darkened prison yard, the old prison hospital and the lost convict cemetery on the hill. The ghosts of Old Joliet Prison will hold you captive indeed.

The earliest known prison memoir by an African American writer—recently discovered and authenticated by a team of Yale scholars—sheds light on the longstanding connection between race and incarceration in America. “[A] harrowing [portrait] of life behind bars . . . part confession, part jeremiad, part lamentation, part picaresque novel (reminiscent, at times, of Dickens and Defoe).”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE In 2009, scholars at Yale University came across a startling manuscript: the memoir of Austin Reed, a free black man born in the 1820s who spent most of his early life ricocheting between forced labor in prison and forced labor as an indentured servant. Lost for more than one hundred and fifty years, the handwritten document is the first known prison memoir written by an African American. Corroborated by prison records and other documentary sources, Reed’s text gives a gripping first-person account of an antebellum Northern life lived outside slavery that nonetheless bore, in its day-to-day details, unsettling resemblances to that very institution. Now, for the first time, we can hear Austin Reed’s story as he meant to tell it. He was born to a middle-class black family in the boomtown of Rochester, New York, but when his father died, his mother struggled to make ends meet. Still a child, Reed was placed as an indentured servant to a nearby family of white farmers near Rochester. He was caught attempting to set fire to a building and sentenced to ten years at Manhattan’s brutal House of Refuge, an early juvenile reformatory that would soon become known for beatings and forced labor. Seven years later, Reed found himself at New York’s infamous Auburn State Prison. It was there that he finished writing this memoir, which explores America’s first reformatory and first industrial prison from an inmate’s point of view, recalling the great cruelties and kindnesses he experienced in those places and excavating patterns of racial segregation, exploitation, and bondage that extended beyond the boundaries of the slaveholding South, into free New York. Accompanied by fascinating historical documents (including a series of poignant letters written by Reed near the end of his life), The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict is a work of uncommon beauty that tells a story of nineteenth-century racism, violence, labor, and captivity in a proud, defiant voice. Reed’s memoir illuminates his own life and times—as well as ours today. Praise for The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict “One of the most fascinating and important memoirs ever produced in the United States.”—Annette Gordon-Reed, The Washington Post “Remarkable . . . triumphantly defiant . . . The book’s greatest value lies in the gap it fills.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “Reed displays virtuosic gifts for narrative that, a century and a half later, earn and hold the reader’s ear.”—Thomas Chatterton Williams, San Francisco Chronicle “[The book’s] urgency and relevance remain undiminished. . . . This exemplary edition recovers history without permanently trapping it in one interpretation.”—The Guardian “A sensational, novelistic telling of an eventful life.”—The Paris Review “Vivid and painful.”—NPR “Lyrical and graceful in one sentence, burning with fury and hellfire in the next.”—Columbus Free Press

Few sounds are as chilling as the metal bars of a prison slamming shut. Often, criminals are locked up in cells with other murderers, thieves, and robbers—sometimes for years, sometimes for life. Yet what about being locked up with a ghost? Some people say that the souls of those who died in prison are unable to rest in peace. As a result, ghosts and other spirits are often reported to haunt jails and prisons around the world. Among the 11 prisons in this book, children will discover Alcatraz, the legendary prison that housed some of America’s most dangerous criminals, and which is said to still be home to some of their spirits; a Civil War prison where some people claim to hear the whispers of dead soldiers; and the Tower of London, where a headless queen haunts the hallways. The spooky photographs and chilling nonfiction text will keep children turning the pages to discover more creepy stories.

The Kentucky State penitentiary opened its heavy iron gates to the condemned over 100 years ago—yet many of them, long deceased, still walk its corridors. Noted paranormal researcher Steve E. Asher provides true, first-hand accounts of the paranormal as well as his own personal experiences at the state’s most violent, controversial—and haunted—prison. He uncovers the shocking testimonies of the men and women who have actually worked behind the prison walls and their encounters with the spirits of dead inmates.The compelling facts found inside this book will leave you questioning everything you ever thought possible about life after death.