Episode 106: The Collection

This is the story of the one.

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When the German authorities began to investigate Cornelius Gerlit for tax evasion, they were only looking for proof of illegal accounting.

What they found, though, was an entire apartment filled with artwork worth over a billion dollars.

Gerlit's father had been an art dealer during the early days of the Second World War.

He He was one of only four dealers who had Nazi permission to sell what they considered to be degenerate art.

So as tens of thousands of pieces were stolen from museums and private collections all across Europe, many of them landed into Gerlitz's father's hands, and he kept them.

These are pieces that have been hidden away for nearly 80 years, considered lost by many art historians.

They include work by Picasso, Monet, and Renoir, among many others, all all gathered together inside a 1,000-square-foot apartment in Munich, a collection that finally saw the light of day in February of 2012.

Humans are collectors.

Whether it's paintings or beer caps, stories or trophies, we have a knack for assembling and arranging things into groups.

These collections might remind us of our childhood.

or of a better time.

They might represent a partnership with a loved one or a challenge to be conquered.

But we also collect the immaterial.

Specifically, we've become very good at collecting the darker elements of our world.

We've gathered the worst of us, the most horrifying elements and the most frightening realities and pushed them all into one place, hoping to lock it all away from the rest of society.

It's a flawed practice, for sure.

But the use of prisons has been around for nearly as long as humans have.

We want to feel safe, to feel in control, to photoshop those flaws out of our image of society.

Out of sight, out of mind, as they say.

But it's not always that simple.

Just because we can't see it doesn't mean it's not there.

And sometimes, the very act of hiding the darkness away

only makes it stronger.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore.

Not long after the start of the Civil War, the state of Virginia found itself in the midst of a crisis.

The Battle of Fort Sumter on April 12th of 1861 drove a wedge into the cracks that had been forming for years between the North and the South.

Shortly after, Virginia voted to secede from the United States and join the Confederacy.

But not everyone in the state was happy about that.

As a result, a significant number of people, mostly living in the mountainous western region of the state, used the moment as their chance to set up something new.

On June 20th of 1863, the plan became reality.

and West Virginia was welcomed into the Union by the United States Congress as the 35th state.

But this left the newly formed West Virginia with a problem.

Having cut themselves off from the support of their former state, they lacked a lot of the infrastructure they would need to grow and develop.

And one of the things they discovered they needed was a prison.

In fact, for those first few years, convicts were just scattered across West Virginia in various jails.

And they were running out of space.

Conversations began in 1864 about building an official state penitentiary, but the issue was largely ignored until December of 1865, when nine prisoners escaped to jail in the town of Wheeling.

With that sort of bad press behind the issue, the state legislature finally agreed to set up funding for land and construction.

What they bought was a troubled 10-acre plot of land in the town of Moundsville, close to the Ohio border.

The evidence of that trouble still sits right across the street in the form of a massive Native American burial ground.

It's the physical proof of the Adena culture that thrived in the area long before white settlers arrived, and it communicates just how sacred the land there was to them.

And yes, most stories that place troubled buildings on top of Native American burial grounds are inappropriate and inaccurate, as if we can somehow blame all of our problems on the ghosts of another culture.

Trust me, I've read more tales of folklore than most people, and it's a trope that pops up time and time again.

But in this one very specific instance, at least, there is some truth to it.

Just take that with a very large grain of salt, and I think we'll be alright.

The original prison was designed to look very similar to the Illinois State Prison in Joliet, although the Moundsville structure was only half that size.

It was built in the Gothic Revival style that created an imposing castle-like appearance.

Yes, the building was meant to keep people in, but the designers also hoped that the mere sight of it would keep would-be criminals out by intimidating them.

Keeping them in were 25-foot-tall exterior walls that also extended 5 feet into the ground.

They were 5 feet thick near the base and gently narrowed as they rose higher.

These walls surrounded a rectangular plot of land with a handful of buildings, and almost all of it was built by the very same prisoners who would call it home once it was finished.

They built their own cage, so to speak.

And I can't help but wonder how they would have felt about that.

The first phase of the prison was completed in 1876 and included cells for the prisoners, a kitchen, dining room, and a chapel.

The administrative building nearby housed the warden on the fourth floor, as well as a handful of female prisoners who were sent there.

And built directly into the exterior wall was another structure known as the North Wagon Gate, standing roughly two stories tall.

But it wasn't enough.

As the decades rolled on, more and more prisoners were sent to Moundsville, and the Great Depression in the early 20th century didn't help.

Desperate people tend to do desperate things, and that landed a lot more people in prison.

To accommodate them all, an addition was built beside the original rectangle, another rectangular wall containing more buildings for housing and other functions.

All the while, the prison became more and more self-sufficient.

It had its own blacksmith and carpentry shops.

a tailor and shoe repair shop, and even a bakery and a hospital.

Later inmates even performed that stereotypical job we always tend to see in Hollywood films, making license plates and highway signs for the state for a small hourly wage that was put into an account for withdrawal upon release.

They even owned and operated a 200-acre farm nearby, as well as a small coal mine.

Everything they would ever need was produced right there, in the prison by the prisoners.

And it was something that the wardens who ran the facility were respected for.

So respected, in fact, that it became a fashionable thing to be invited to dine with the warden at the prison.

Guests there would be entertained by performances from the prison orchestra and even the occasional play or minstrel show.

And as if that weren't enough, locals in town had the ability to rent inmates to come to their house and do jobs for them, like cleaning or farm work.

And yes, Many of us have heard people talk about prison as the new slavery.

Little details like this, the renting of prison labor, adds just one more line item to the list of reasons why that's true.

The Moundsville prison had begun to be treated as if it was another world outside our own, where people could glance in and observe, or even shop for services.

The people of West Virginia had pushed their worst criminals into a box complete with guards and walls and metal bars, thinking that it would solve their problems.

But that didn't mean that it was safe.

It's not that they weren't trying.

When the state of West Virginia set out to build a new prison, they had two simple goals in mind.

To provide a strong enough deterrent against crime, and to keep the rest of the world safe from those who commit it.

West Virginia Penitentiary was a new facility built on the foundation of an old idea.

Back in 1818, a philosophy was developed known as the Auburn system, and it has all those elements that would sound familiar to anyone who has watched a prison movie set in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Let me run you through a few of them.

New prisoners would arrive at the penitentiary and be run through a series of intake steps.

They'd be logged in and receive a serial number before being taken off to have a required shower and haircut.

Then they would have been handed a set of prison clothes, complete with black and white stripes.

And whenever they moved through the prison as a group, it was done so in lockstep, where each prisoner was chained to the ones behind and ahead of them.

When they weren't moving about the prison, inmates were in their cell.

Originally, West Virginia Penitentiary was designed to give each prisoner a cell of their own.

They weren't luxurious, mind you, but they were large enough for a bed, toilet, and sink, measuring about 5 feet by 7 feet.

But of course, nothing ever goes to plan, does it?

Soon enough, the facility began to overflow.

Within 50 years of opening its doors, the prisoner population had exploded to nearly three times the original limit.

Bunks were added to those tiny cells, and multiple inmates were housed in each one.

And the conditions inside the facility began a sharp decline.

Diseases like tuberculosis and smallpox were common, as was malnutrition, lice, lice, rats, and roaches.

And that antique plumbing system designed for 800 prisoners began to fail beneath the strain of over 2,000.

It might not be surprising then to learn that even their food was contaminated.

Windows were broken and left unprepared.

The stench of sewage filled the halls throughout the entire building.

It had become hell on earth.

and the behavior of the prisoners began to reflect that.

And no better place in the prison represents that decline, like like the Sugar Shack.

That was the name given to the recreation area down inside the basement of the prison.

Thanks to its cramped space and single entrance, guards tended to avoid the area, leaving inmates to do whatever they wanted inside.

As the prison became more violent, those things included beatings, physical and sexual assault, and even murder.

In fact, over the course of the prison's long history, the number of murder and suicide victims has earned West Virginia Penitentiary a place on the Department of Justice's list of the top 10 most violent correctional facilities in the country.

Estimates place the number as low as 36, but as high as nearly a thousand.

But not all of the violence inside the facility was perpetrated by the inmates.

According to the historical records, there were a number of ways in which the prison staff used their power to abuse and torture the people they had been tasked to look after.

Things like the shoe fly.

From what I can tell, the shoe fly was an early version of waterboarding.

Prisoners would be strapped naked to a board that immobilized their head and limbs, and then a large hose would be turned on.

Ice-cold water would be sprayed into the victim's face, suffocating and drowning them in many instances.

But you didn't need to be jumped in a dark hallway or tortured at West Virginia Penitentiary to experience death.

Over the century it was in operation, at least 94 prisoners were executed for their crimes right inside the facility, and most of them were hanged.

There's a bit of a debate about where in the prison those hangings took place.

A small building referred to as the North Wagon Gate has a room near the top with a trapdoor, but others believe the executions were conducted in a nearby building known as the Death House.

It's easy to prefer the latter, and not just because of its name, because once the prison phased out hanging, they replaced it with a device that they installed right there inside the death house.

What was it?

The electric chair.

And not only did the prison install it, but they used one of their own prisoners, a man named Paul Glenn, to actually build it.

The chair quickly became known by that deceptively loving name, Old Sparky.

but it was also responsible for taking the lives of nine men in the eight years between 1951 and 1959.

The final execution in the entire state of West Virginia took place in Old Sparky on March 3, 1959.

Murderer Elmer Bruner ate his final meal, took a nap, and then climbed the stairs to the chair at the top of the building.

After being strapped in, his body was flooded with 1,700 volts of electricity for eight minutes.

And then it was over.

Today, if you tour the building, you can still see Old Sparky in the prison museum.

It's a deceptively simple wooden chair, but the leather straps give away its more sinister function.

It's a relic, for sure, and a reminder of how dark our history can be sometimes.

But the only thing enjoyable about seeing it is the fact that it's empty.

And that's the trouble with a building like the West Virginia Penitentiary.

We can shut it down, close the doors, or even give it a fresh cone of paint and put it on display.

We can write about it and have polite debate about the cruelty of its existence or the flaws of those who managed it.

We can try to move on, but the past will always be there, pointing at our failures.

And if the stories are true, Old Sparky isn't the only dark reminder on display.

The West Virginia Penitentiary officially shut its doors in 1995, but it's far from empty.

Most of that activity is of the human kind, with the building serving as a training ground for law enforcement officials and the occasional historical tour.

But you can't run a prison as brutal and offensive as this one without leaving a bit of darkness behind.

And there are plenty of stories about whatever it is that remains.

The stories are older than you might imagine, too.

Some of the first tales of hauntings inside the prison actually date back to the 1930s, when the prison was packed with inmates and smack in the middle of so many dark events.

One of the events was made by guards who believed they saw the shadow of an inmate walking along the massive exterior wall, outside the prison yard.

Naturally, alarms were sounded and guards were called.

but as they searched the exterior of the prison, they came up empty.

To make matters more confusing, each each and every one of the inmates were accounted for inside their cells.

Whether the guards had simply seen a random animal lumbering along the wall or had witnessed a bit of the darkness leaking out into the world, it's hard to say.

Most modern sightings have taken place in the locations where the old violence was the worst.

The Sugar Shack, that small recreational area inside the prison basement, has been home to many of these experiences.

Visitors to the space have heard disembodied voices as if someone were whispering at them from a great distance.

Others have heard heated arguments and other unnatural noises.

Some have even felt the typical cold spots that have been noticed inside extremely haunted locations.

One witness claimed to see a person approach them from the shadows, but when she spoke to them, the shape vanished before her eyes.

And one staff member in particular has even felt invisible hands grab his arm there.

But let's be honest, it's incredibly difficult to stand inside a building that contains so much evil for so long, between the violent inmates and the cruel guards who tortured them, and not feel a sense of oppression.

The walls of the prison have borne witness to dozens of murders over the years, and many of them were incredibly brutal.

One such victim was a man named R.D.

Wall.

He wasn't an angel, let's be clear about that.

Wall had been sent to Moundsville in the late 1920s after being convicted for rape, but somehow managed to worm his way into the warden's good graces.

He was given better jobs around the facility and was treated more favorably than his peers.

A rumor also began to spread that Wall was serving as the warden's eyes and ears, reporting back with his observations.

In prison terms, he was a rat, an informant who exposes the crimes of other people.

And as you can imagine, that was enough to put a target on his back.

On November 8th of 1929, Wall was jumped by a number of other inmates in an area of the basement known as the Hole and stabbed repeatedly with homemade knives.

Then, to hide the evidence, his body was literally butchered, cut into small, manageable pieces, and then disposed of.

It was a dark moment in the prison's past, but visitors to the hole today seem to keep bumping into it as if it's never really gone away.

Many people claim the area is inhabited by a dark, featureless shape they refer to as the Shadow Man.

Some believe it's a former guard doomed to walk the halls he once protected.

Others, though, think it might be R.D.

Wall himself.

While the Shadow Man has been witnessed in various parts of the prison, from the main lobby to the basement and everywhere in between, the most significant sightings have all been inside the hole.

And that's where one tour guide had a horrifying experience many years ago, one that I doubt she'll ever forget.

This guide was getting ready to host a new group for the evening, and so she made a quick inspection of all the rooms she planned to take them through, making sure doors were unlocked and lights were on.

But when she descended the steps into the basement, that casual inspection turned dark.

According to her story, she caught movement out of the corner of her eye and glanced down the hallway.

For a brief moment, she was certain she'd seen the dark shape of another person slip through the doorway into the hole.

Assuming it was another museum employee having a bit of fun, maybe playing a practical joke on her, she decided to return the favor.

She crept toward the door with the plan to jump into the room and surprise whoever it was that had hidden inside.

When she did, though, she discovered that the room was completely empty.

The doorway she had entered was the only exit.

Which begs the obvious question: what sort of person can enter a room and then disappear?

One final tale from the hole.

Along with the frequent reports of being touched, moving shadows and angry whispers, there's one more story that lends weight to the assumption that one of the prisoners still haunts the room.

Years ago, one visitor to the prison made an audio recording as she toured through the facility alone.

and she later noticed something odd.

It was from her time inside the hole.

It wasn't much, but it seems her audio recorder had picked up the voice of someone else talking.

The words were clearly spoken, with a lot of anger behind them.

Or perhaps it was something else.

Desperation.

Or maybe fear.

And what did that voice say?

Three simple words.

Let me out.

I think every home has that one drawer or closet where all the unwanted things get put.

The half-spent battery, the spare part that shipped with that new gadget, or every twist tie that ever came off a loaf of bread in the kitchen.

It's the place for things we don't want anyone else to see.

So we shut them away.

But hiding things away never makes them disappear forever.

Just like those old sitcoms and cartoons, all it might take is for someone to open that closet door and everything inside will come spilling out.

And the West Virginia Penitentiary is no exception.

You can't fill a place with that much darkness and not expect it to go somewhere.

Of course, there are all the obvious results, like the countless murders and suicides inside the walls of the prison.

And on rare occasions, some of the people trapped inside managed to break out.

The escape of 15 inmates in 1979 and another involving three men in 1992 both come to mind, and some of those men never returned to their cells.

But the biggest impact of all that concentrated violence and suffering might just be the things we can't see with our own eyes.

The torture and murder.

and the emotional and physical trauma that came with putting that many desperate criminals into such a poorly managed and highly toxic facility.

All of that has consequences.

It's turned the physical structure of the building into something more than a 150-year-old Gothic revival fortress.

It's filled those walls with stories of dark shapes and even darker crimes.

And all of that together has generated a sort of reputation, one that will most likely outlive us all.

In the early 1980s, one particular criminal decided that the reputation of West Virginia Penitentiary was exactly what he wanted to be associated with.

Because of the location of his crimes, he was sitting inside a California prison cell, but Moundsville sounded a lot more like home to him.

He wanted darkness, and that's where everyone said he could find it.

So he requested a transfer.

Of course, that's not how he sold it to the powers that be.

When he sat down to handwrite a letter to the warden of Moundsville, he didn't hint at his attraction to the violence and darkness of the place.

He He simply promised to be a good worker and that he would start no trouble.

There were other reasons for his attraction to Moundsville as well.

It turns out that his mother had actually served time there many years before.

And maybe the warden already knew that, having access to his own prison records.

Or perhaps he just had a gut feeling about the letter after reading it.

Either way, it felt as if the prisoner was hinting at a family tradition that he was proud of, and that didn't sit well with him.

The warden's response was a powerful refusal: It will be a cold day in hell, he wrote, and refused to allow the transfer.

Because, for as dark as Moundsville's reputation might have been, there was simply no way he was going to allow one of the most notorious serial killers in history to come and make it worse.

That prisoner, of course,

was Charles Manson.

The history of West Virginia Penitentiary is full of dark tales and horrifying truths that all twist together into something bigger than the sum of its parts.

But there's one more tale I want to share with you from the heyday of executions there.

Stick around after this sponsor break to hear all about it.

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I mentioned earlier that there is some confusion about exactly where the hangings in Moundsville Prison took place.

The trouble is that there are two separate buildings, almost contemporary to each other, that each have a room near the top with a trapdoor in the floor.

It's the perfect setting for an indoor gallows necessary to a prison tasked with capital punishment.

And yes, it's possible that the hangings took place in both spaces, or that we've settled on the wrong location as the one true spot.

But there's there's a lot of evidence to suggest that at least some of the executions took place in the building known as the Old North Gate.

Hangings at the prison were a public event for a very long while.

Locals from town would come and watch as murderers were given the ultimate punishment.

But those public viewings came to an end in 1931 when something horrific happened.

The prisoner was a man named Frank Heyer.

He had been convicted of killing his wife and sentenced to death, and and his home while he waited had been the Moundsville Prison.

As usual, a crowd began to gather hours before his execution, with that nervous anticipation that comes with the sad mixture of excitement and morbid curiosity.

And then, Heyer was finally brought out.

These executions weren't amateur hour, usually.

I know it's easy for us to look back on hangings as a product of a less advanced era, but there was a science to everything they did.

They used each prisoner's weight and height to determine the right settings necessary to break their neck.

Except Frank Heyer didn't fit the norm.

He was short and stout, with a good 200 pounds on his frame, but a skinny neck up top.

So when the noose was placed around his throat and the platform was opened, he didn't just fall and die.

The full weight of his body put too much strain on his narrow neck.

and his head was torn completely off.

Stories say that it fell to the floor with a sick thud, landing right in front of the gathered audience.

Needless to say, executions after that were all conducted privately, lest anything else unsightly take place.

And that was a good thing, because just seven years later, the executioners of Moundsville Prison would hit another snag.

It happened during the hanging of three men on the same day.

Arnett Booth, Orville Adkins, and John Travis had all been convicted of kidnapping and murder of the same victim, and the phrase, thickest thieves, apparently carried over to their deaths as well.

On the day of their execution, all three men were removed from their cells and walked lockstep to the indoor gallows.

But there was a problem.

The platform the hangings were to take place on was so small that not all of them could fit on it at the same time.

A coin was flipped.

and one of the men was ushered back out of the room to wait his turn.

Orville Adkins would be the first to die.

He was led to the platform and given a moment to say his final words.

And then the trapdoor dropped out from beneath him.

The trouble was they hadn't had a chance to put the noose around his neck before it happened.

So Adkins simply fell a dozen or so feet to the hard floor below.

His feet and hands were still bound, so I imagine it was a painful fall.

But bloody or not, The guards were there for a proper hanging, so he was picked up and carried back to the gallows above.

The second time he dropped through the trapdoor was his last one.

The noose did its job and the guards moved on to the second and third men.

But it would be hard to forget poor Orville Adkins, broken and bloody from a fall to the concrete, having to go through it all a second time.

And if the stories are true, Adkins hasn't forgotten it either.

Modern visitors to the old North Gate have reported all sorts of unusual experiences inside the building.

Some have heard footsteps on the trapdoor above them, as if someone were pacing back and forth in the old gallows room.

One visitor reported feeling the sensation of someone running an invisible object across the back of her neck.

Perhaps it was just a shiver of excitement, or maybe it was the same feeling men like Orville Adkins felt as the noose was being slipped over their heads.

It seems that no matter where you go inside the old prison, there is always a shadow waiting around the corner, or the echoes of the past just waiting to make their presence known.

Whether it's the horror of the events themselves, or some supernatural experience made possible by a century of suffering, one painful truth is clear.

The darkness we try to hide away

is never really gone.

This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research by Sam Alberty and music by Chad Lawson.

Lore is much more than a podcast.

There is a book series in bookstores around the country and online, and the second season of the Amazon Prime television show was recently released.

Check them both out if you want more lore in your life.

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Each one explores other areas of our dark history, ranging from bite-sized episodes to season-long dives into a single topic.

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