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Moundsville State Penitentiary is eerie during the day, but at night without electricity, in the company of ghost hunters, it's downright scary. Even in broad daylight, the Gothic building looms ominously behind its reinforced barbed-wire fence. The prison itself is old—parts of it date back to 1876—and it was used as a prison until 1995.
Ninety-four men were executed there, and others died at the hands of other prisoners. Jason Gerrard believes some of the inmates might still be hanging around. “What we do is we go around and invest paranormal activity claims,” Gerrard said. “We try to get down to the cause of the haunting.”
Gerrard’s team, Mountain State Spirit Seekers Society, is in Moundsville on a warm August evening. They’re locked in the prison for the night as they conduct their investigation. It’s dark inside—there are no lights, and the place is infested with bats that occasionally swoop past.
The ghost hunters get their gear set up—computer monitors, infrared cameras, sound equipment. Then they disperse and start roaming the prison. Billie Fazenbaker and Cindie Harper go into the cell of a white supremacist who was murdered by a fellow inmate.
Fazenbaker considers herself a medium. She says she’s communicated with spirits before, and even let herself be possessed. On the group’s last trip, to Blennerhassett Island, Fazenbaker says she was possessed by the spirit of a Native American man. This time, she’s trying to channel inmates.
“I guess you’d call me the seeker because they seek me out,” she said. “I can close my eyes and actually picture them standing in front of me." "Besides what their little things that they let in my head say and do. And a lot of times its little pictures of things that are really silly. But when you stop and think about them, they’ll add up and make sense.
“You know, it’s just their way of communicating with us and letting us know whether they’re okay or whether they want to tell us something.” After a long night in the prison, Gerrard and his team take the hours of video and audio back to Clarksburg. Several weeks later, he’s going through the evidence.
“So we just pass it through, let everybody listen to it, get their opinion,” he said. “If we think it’s legit material, we’ll keep it. If we think it’s not anything we get rid of it. We try to eliminate the ‘nots.’” Gerrard says his team’s evidence from Moundsville proves the existence of disturbed spirits there.
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