Hauntings of The Tennessee State Prison

Posted: 01.31.2025 | Updated: 01.31.2025

Nashville, Tennessee, is known as the heart of American country music and hosts a wealth of vibrant nightlife and eateries. The thriving city, with the pulse of a staccato guitar, line has been synonymous with music since even before the early days of the Grand Ole Opry. 

However rigid and frozen in time, the Tennessee State Prison is a monument to far darker times near the heart of the Music City. Horrendous conditions in haunted prison have created a portal into a shadowy world of pain and torture. 

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Is The Tennessee State Prison Haunted?

The now-abandoned Tennessee State Prison was a place of true suffering, violence, and misery for its inmates. Tennessee State Prison was famed for its inhumane treatment of prisoners and disciplinary brutality. Therefore many believe there remains no peace for those who endured and died in the prison walls, even in death. 

The History Of Tennessee State Prison

This 1898 Gothic correctional creation was built to replace an earlier prison. The old state prison sat across the city and held hard criminals from 1831 to 1898. The previous prison was even a Union Army Prison during the Civil War!

The penitentiary’s eventual demolition made way for this more modern structure. However, materials from the old facility were repurposed for the new prison, importing the predecessor’s harsh methods and placing them in infamy along with them. 

When the new Tennessee State Prison opened in 1898, it was built to house 800 prisoners. On its opening day, it housed 1403. This shocking overcrowding would be a hallmark of the TSP for a century.

In 1982, Chief Judge Leland Clure Morton painted a horrifying picture of life in the prison. “At TSP, housing units I-VI are unconscionably overcrowded. Inmates are double-celled in tiny cages like so many animals in a zoo.”

Furthering the horror, records from the Tennessee Department of Corrections show that in 1908, two 10-year-old and 11-year-old boys were incarcerated here for larceny.

 They were sentenced to three long, grim years. Prisoners could be whipped for so much as talking while prison labor was long and brutal 16-hour days. 

These conditions meant that the prison became well known for incidents and death. With violence rampant and frequent sexual attacks on inmates, prisoners would frequently seek to escape:

• 1902 – Prisoners blow out a wing and escape. 1 shot dead 2, never recaptured
• 1907 – Prisoners commandeer a switch engine and drive it through a prison gate
• 1938 – Inmates conduct a mass escape, setting fires. One destroys the dining hall
• 1975 – Mass riots
• 1985 – Mass riots

Tennesse State Prison In Film 

By 1989, a newer facility was constructed to replace this aged house of horrors. In 1992, this second prison was closed for good. Conditions within the walls were so reviled that, as part of a class action suit settlement, the Federal Court issued a permanent injunction in 1993. The Tennessee Department of Correction was banned from ever again housing prisoners at the Tennessee State Prison. 

A 2020 F3 tornado did enormous damage to parts of the prison ruins. But, even Mother Nature couldn’t tear down the walls that so many had dreamed of seeing fall. Ironically, this abandoned vault of terror became an ideal film location, adding movie glamour to an all-too-real history. 

The prison was used in several Hollywood blockbusters including: The Green Mile, The Last Castle, Walk The Line, and Ernest Goes To Jail. None, surely, could do justice to the suffering within the real prison. 

Slawson’s Graveyard

One man stands above all else in presiding over one of the most deadly periods in the prison’s history. He, however, is certainly not alone. Glenn Swafford, a prison warden since 1915, spent nearly 40 years at the penitentiary. He quickly became infamous for his iron rule. 

One reporter visited the prison during Swafford’s reign. He was informed that 125 men were buried in the prison cemetery by that point. 

Prisoners were well versed in violence at the hands of the warden and his men. They regularly endured punitive action. Fear and violence maintained a strict and inflexible order.

The lack of records mean the true scale of death that the prison spanned is lost to time—perhaps hidden deliberately.

Such was the brutality at the hands of these staff that inmates coined the name ‘Swafford’s Graveyard’ as a macabre moniker for the foreboding castle-like structure. 

When describing his approach to the prison’s front gate, the same reporter who had been shocked by the number of dead lying mere feet from the beast of a prison described his “intuitive, forbidding hesitation” at stepping beyond the front door and into the belly of prison.

With Swafford at the helm, scores upon scores of men were executed, seated in ‘Ol’ Sparky,’ with electrical current ending their lives. 

From Julius Morgan in 1916 to William Tines in 1960, the prison maintained its reputation as the last stop and the end of the line for criminals sentenced to death. 

Despite progressive attempts by prisoners to highlight the inhumane conditions and treatment at the prison, Glenn Swafford and the reputation for violence that the prison had earned in blood would continue for decades. 

Swaffords departure merely ended one gruesome chapter that would swiftly be followed by several others. 

Nashville Prison Hauntings

While the history and conditions of Tennessee State Prison read like the script of a horror movie, for many inmates, the prison would be the end of their own story.

Overcrowding, forced labor, violence, and hard discipline would toll the death bell for many, while executions were not a rare occurrence. 

In the cells, two inmates would share an unfathomably small 6ft x 8ft cell perched on five stories of towering stone. While the rigid limestone building no longer keeps these offenders in its clutches, many believe that prisoners of an unearthly nature may remain trapped within the walls.

Over 100 men were put to death in the prison’s electric chair. Countless others died while incarcerated, making the prison a broken-down monument to death.

Despite the horrendous conditions that await a visitor behind the remarkably preserved stone facade, the foolish and the brave often make visits to the prison illegally. 

Many investigators have ventured into the dilapidated skeleton within. Youtubers and paranormal investigators have all made law-breaking journeys beyond the walls to peer into the prison’s heart of darkness. 

Shrieking and disembodied screaming have been heard like echoes from the afterlife. Odd cold spots in the stuffy air of the prison’s stifling atmosphere have also been experienced. 

This is made all the more unnerving when you consider that inmates in this cramped, claustrophobic environment had no air conditioning or external ventilation to escape the brutal Tennessee summer heat.

Haunted Nashville

The rusting cell doors have been known to swing to and fro of their own accord, while the sound of heavy guard boots has been known to carry in the air overhead on the abandoned walkways. 

Even in death, it seems, the guards and inmates remain bound to their roles for eternity. The idea of souls forever held in this cavernous arena of suffering while guards extend their watch beyond the grave paints a chilling picture. 

Get locked up in the mystery of Nashville Hauntings. 

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Sources:

• https://www.wbir.com/article/news/state/historic-tennessee-state-prison-damaged-in-nashville-tornado/51-6dd3391e-9195-4487-bd5e-785705258ec9
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36310EJVHm0&t=35s
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UvJh2i4v4g
• https://www.wkrn.com/special-reports/haunted-tennessee/tn-state-prison-haunted-history
• https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/local/2020/08/20/lost-nashville-tennessee-state-penitentiary-history/3372707001