...and the story goes...

The story I heard was that a young Native American boy (he had to have been at least 18 to be in the jail) had hung himself from the light fixture in the holding cell by the booking desk. Some of the officers later said he had been Hispanic, others said it was a female, so the facts around who this ghost had been were somewhat iffy. Most stayed with the Native American theory so I have always leaned towards that myself.

I never saw The Ghost. I will put that on the table right away. But I did see some very strange things occur during graveyard shifts and there were several inmates and one officer who claimed they had seen him, cruising around in Dorm One, which at the time held our more dangerous offenders.

My first inkling that someone or something of a paranormal type was malingering in the jail was the elevator. It was a common, run-of-the-mill elevator that led from the booking entry area to the second floor jail. It went nowhere else, not down into any sort of basement and not up to the third floor offices. It was a two-floor elevator, up and down, main floor to second floor, period. The only thing slightly exceptional about it was the constant lingering aroma of, well, it’s hard to say. Just jail.

It took me about three weeks before I realized something rather unusual about the way the elevator performed, or acted, or worked. I’m a little slow sometimes, I suppose, when it comes to catching extraordinary events. Every night, somewhere between two and two fifteen a.m., the elevator would lift up to the jail floor and the door would open, but there was never anyone inside.

It did not strike me as odd until I began working in the Central Control cage. This area is a small, caged rectangle of telephones, TV monitors, buttons and switches where the officer assigned spends his or her shift watching TV monitors to keep an eye on inmates and letting people in and out of the jail through security-locked doors. If one is claustrophobic, it’s not the most pleasant place to be. It is also right in sight of the elevator door. Anyone going down from the jail via the elevator has to pass right by the control cage, and in order for someone to get into the elevator downstairs they would have to come through the locked booking door which can only be opened by the officer in Central Control (yours truly). Plus there are cameras everywhere; it’s a security thing. No one enters or exits the jail without the officer in Central Control letting them.

The night I first noticed the odd elevator behavior I was in Central Control by myself and was puzzled by the elevator door opening when I had not allowed anyone in through the booking door. Nor had anyone gone out of the booking door, at least not in the previous ten minutes. I thought about it briefly but when no one else commented and nothing else extraordinary happened, I filed it under “forget-about-it” and went on with my duties.

It took about four nights of the same empty-elevator activity before it struck me that something odd was at hand. I told you, I am slow at some things. When I finally got the courage to ask one of the other officers, he just shrugged and said, “Ah, that’s just The Ghost.”

Ghost? Really? Now my interest was immediately peaked. “What ghost?”

The officer, named Gary, explained to me that the jail ghost was that of a “kid” who hung himself in the holding cell one night and that Gary, himself, has been the one to find the body and cut it down.

“It happened so damned fast!” Gary explained, shaking his head, “He was pretty drunk and upset,you know how they get sometimes. We were watching him but it was busy that night and we can’t keep an eye on everybody for twenty-four hours a day, y’know?”

I did know. But only someone who spent any time actually working in a jail could really comprehend just how busy and stressful the job of a detention or corrections officer truly is. In 99 percent of all cases, inmates in jails and prisons are treated well, their needs are met and their problems are handled, but it’s a world of over-crowding, deceit and manipulation and sometimes things just happen. Like a drunken Native-American boy hanging himself in the five minutes the officers were not looking. Gary was a good officer. He was known for avoiding work at times by being constantly “on a mission”, but when he was there he was responsible. I knew if anyone had been keeping an eye on the young man in the holding cell, it would have been Gary.

Suicides are not taken lightly in the Yavapai County Jails. Whenever an inmate states that he or she is suicidal they are instantly put on a suicide watch. In fact, if an inmate even breaths a word that might suggest suicidal ideations are present, precautions are taken. Only a qualified psychiatrist can take an inmate off a suicide watch, no matter how much they beg and plead and tell the officers that they were “just kidding”.

According to Gary, the young inmate was not on a suicide watch at all. He had given no sign of being suicidal, he was simply very drunk and very angry and very embarrassed at being in jail. None of those things are unusual or indicative of someone who is planning to kill himself. Unfortunately, in this case, the young inmate must have acted on impulse.

“So,why do you think he’s the ghost?” was my next question.

Gary shrugged, “Well, he died somewhere between two and two fifteen in the morning, and the strange stuff started happening the next night.”

“Strange stuff?”

“Yeah, like the elevator coming up and the door opening, and the stuff they see in Dorm One.”

I had not heard about any “stuff” in Dorm One, but I hadn’t been there too long and there was a lot of “stuff” I had not yet heard about. Still, that was not what I asked about. Instead, I asked, “Why would he haunt Dorn One if he died in the holding cell”

Gary shrugged again, “I don’t know. We figure it’s because it’s the closest cell block and it’s also kinda separated from the others, y’know? Spooky.”

Yes, that was a fact. Dorm One could be very spooky at two in the morning. Most of the jail was. “So,what kinds of things happen back there?”

“Mostly the vision.”

“Vision?”

By then, Gary was getting impatient as he had reports to run as part of his shift duties. “You oughta go ask William,” he said. “He’s seen it,The Ghost, I mean.”

Gary then left me there as he went off to complete his mission, and I found myself anxiously waiting to speak with William about our ghost....