Inside the walls of the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City, the possibility of paranormal existence seems promising. In fact, several visitors have reported seeing a woman wearing grey in the women’s prison area on different occasions. Mark Schreiber, a former deputy warden at the penitentiary, said he has not had any personal encounters with other beings but does not discount the possibility.

“If any place should be haunted, this would be the place,” Schreiber said. “Certainly with the thousands of lives that were impacted and the hundreds of people who died here, both for violent and nonviolent reasons, then this would certainly be a place where you would expect for that kind of activity to exist.”

The Missouri State Penitentiary was built in 1836 in an effort to establish the city as the capitol of Missouri. It was the oldest continuously operating prison west of the Mississippi River when it closed in 2004, replaced by thewmodern Missouri State Correctional Facility. The former prison holds an abundance of memories and stories created during its approximately 170 years of operation, which tourists have been able to experience since its May 2009 opening.

“The two main reasons [people visit the penitentiary] are the historical value and the kind of mystery behind it,” said Sarah Stroesser, communications manager for the Jefferson City Convention and Visitors Bureau. “[People are] kind of intrigued by what goes on in there, what it looks like inside a prison.”

Tourist Eva Yeager had never seen anything like the Missouri State Penitentiary before the tour.

“I was just curious to see,” Yeager said. “You always see movies and TV, but to actually get to see the places people were held and get the real stories behind them — I wanted to know more about the existence of it.”

The penitentiary has five head tour guides, all of whom experienced working inside the penitentiary during its operation. One of the  penitentiary’s tour guides, Mark Schreiber, worked inside the walls for a total of 36 years. Schreiber draws from his own memories at the prison to make each tour unforgettable.

“I have 10,000 memories,” Schreiber said. “Every tour is very similar in a lot of ways, but it’s also different because people may say something to you that sparks something in your memory that brings a story to mind.”

One story Schreiber likes to share is the first murder he ever witnessed at the penitentiary. He describes how one inmate chased another inmate across the courtyard with a prison-made shank and backed him against the outside wall of a building before stabbing him to death in the flower bed.

Along with the personal and sometimes gruesome stories, another highlight of the tour is the four-story A4 Housing Unit where several notorious inmates were held. The famous boxer, Sonny Liston, learned to fight in the prison, where public boxing matches were held periodically. Another inmate held in the housing unit was James Earl Ray Jr., who assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. one year after escaping from the prison in 1967.

The penitentiary also has a dungeon intact below the housing unit. Although half of it was converted into showers, the untouched half is still equipped with shackles. In the early days of punishment systems, inmates were held for months in these large, cavernous cells with absolutely no light, sometimes resulting in blindness. Visitors are able to experience the utter darkness to get a hint of how torturous this incarceration would have been.

The last part of the prison tour is the gas chamber, housed in a small building located outside of the courtyard. Thirty-nine people were executed in the gas chamber, which is now open for exploration.

Tourists will have no trouble picturing executions or any other operation of the former prison, because it has been practically untouched since its closing in 2004. Any maintenance or changes to the penitentiary are under the control of the Missouri State Penitentiary Redevelopment Commission in the Office of Administration. Schreiber said there are currently no funds to maintain the prison. However, it has become one of the largest tourist attractions in the area.

“The penitentiary has the ability to make Jefferson City a huge draw to tourists,” Stroesser said. “I believe that if we can continue to grow the tours and expand our offerings, it really will grow to be something close to what Alcatraz is. It’s such a great treasure for Jefferson City, but also for the state of Missouri.”

There are two types of tours offered at the penitentiary — a two-hour walking tour and a more in-depth four-hour walking tour. Typically people start by taking the two-hour tour and come back again for the four-hour tour, Stroesser said. The longer tour allows people to hear more stories and see more buildings, including the women’s prison.

Stroesser said the tourism aspect of the penitentiary could be expanded to focus on the paranormal. Several paranormal investigator groups have contacted the Jefferson City Tourism Board about exploring it, including the Travel Channel’s new series, “Haunted Places in America.” All plans for such groups are pending approval from the Missouri Office of Administration.

Aside from the tourism value, the facility also retains an emotional value. Many former employees and even former inmates have a deep connection to the penitentiary, and they sometimes come to take tours.

“Former inmates want to see what it looks like now, how it’s changed since they’ve been here,” Schreiber said.

The personal connection inmates felt toward the prison was most apparent when it closed in 2004.

“A lot of the men in there actually left me little notes and said, ‘You know we understand how you feel about this place. We feel the same way,’ or ‘I’ve been here for 30 years and this was still my home,’” Schreiber said. “And so it’s kind of like when you go from an old school to a new school. You have a lot of memories of that old school.”

The Missouri State Penitentiary holds the memories of the people who lived and worked within it, and some think that it holds the ghosts of those who lost their lives within it. Visitors can decide for themselves if they think paranormal activity exists within the walls.