Cigar Ghost of the Wyoming Territorial Prison

The Wyoming Territorial Prison in Laramie was built in 1872, took its first prisoners in 1873 and served as a federal and then state penitentiary until inmates were moved to Rawlins in 1901. Its limestone walls later housed a university livestock station, and the site opened to the public in 1991. Its most famous inmate was Butch Cassidy (then Robert Leroy Parker), held in 1894–96. Its best-known ghost story, however, belongs to a far less famous man.

Julius Greenwald, sometimes spelled Greenwelch, was a Polish-born cigar maker, prisoner No. 338. According to published accounts, he was convicted of second-degree murder on September 25, 1897, for shooting his wife, and sentenced to life at hard labor. He persuaded prison staff to let him continue to make cigars and died in custody of a heart attack in 1901. Only two of about a thousand inmates are said to have died in the prison.

Staff and visitors since the site’s restoration have described the smell of cigar smoke with no source, whistling, footsteps and creaks, and the sound of a woman laughing or singing. A night-vision video made by a paranormal team is said to show a figure behind an open glass door on the upper floor. Some tellers suggest the 1989 renovation, which removed his cell, disturbed him. The site’s curator, Renee Slider, has said she neither fully believes nor disbelieves and leaves the decision to visitors.

Mostly sensed rather than seen: the smell of cigar smoke, whistling and footsteps, a woman’s laughter and, in one reported video, a full-length figure behind a door.

The historic prison buildings in Laramie, especially the upper floor; ghost tours run in October.

The prison now operates as a state historic site with museum exhibits, dark-cell lantern tours and family-friendly October ghost tours. The state’s other famous haunted lockup, the Wyoming Frontier Prison in Rawlins, appeared on a television ghost-hunting series.