The Myths of the Old Knox Jail

The Knox County Old Jail is a former jail that sits on the Knox College campus and is one of the few jails in the country that even sits on a college campus. It was built in 1874 and used up until 1974 to originally function as a Jail to hold criminals, but after a few rennovations to the building, it now sits the present day and now currently serves a different purpose as a building which hosts offices for teachers and a place in which the capmus bicycle mechanic shop can function for staff and students. Though even after rennovations, the building still has many of the remaining cells and infrastructure left over from when it functioned as a prison. 

Recalling back to when the building previously acted as a jail, an assistant librarian at Knox College, Micaela Terronez, tells a story of a prisoner who managed to escape the jail, only to be captured later and commit suicide. Since this moment in time, there have been numerous incidents in which people have reported strange behaviors such as an overarching sense of dread, random knocking on the pipes, and a frightened dog barking at a doorway at 3 in the morning. Because of this, many rumors have speculated that the building itself is haunted by the very same prisoner that was mentioned earlier. Unfortunately, any useful identifying information of the prisoner has been lost to time. The building is also connected to Undergroud railroad tunnels, which appears to be a common trait of many ghost stories in Galesburg.