Penitentiary of New Mexico

The story

The Penitentiary of New Mexico is a working men's maximum-security prison in unincorporated Santa Fe County, about 15 miles south of central Santa Fe, run by the New Mexico Corrections Department. Its haunted reputation, however, belongs to one building on the grounds: the "Old Main," the cellhouse that opened in 1956, was the scene of the February 1980 riot and has been closed to inmates since 1998.

The institution is much older than that building. Congress authorized a territorial penitentiary in 1853, the territorial legislature approved it in 1884, and it opened in 1885 on Cerrillos Road in Santa Fe, built to the same plans as Sing Sing in New York and Joliet in Illinois. A favorite local story claims Santa Fe's citizens were offered a choice between the prison and the region's first university and picked the prison. It is not true: lawmakers created the University of New Mexico only in 1889, five years after approving the penitentiary. The prison's first industry was brickmaking, and starting in 1903 New Mexico became the first western state to put prisoners to work building highways.

Two riots shaped the prison's future. On July 19, 1922, inmates rebelled against overcrowding, bad food and brutal treatment; when they refused to return to their cells, tower guards opened fire, killing one man and wounding five, and the official report blamed inexperienced management. On June 15, 1953, prisoners protesting excessive force took the deputy warden and twelve guards hostage; guards killed two inmates in the struggle that followed. That second riot led the state to build a new prison in 1956 in open country along State Road 14, about 11 miles south of the old one, which was soon demolished. Today only the street name Pen Road recalls the original site.

Over roughly 36 hours in February 1980, prisoners who broke out of overcrowded dormitories at the south end took control of the building. They held 12 officers hostage and killed 33 fellow inmates, many of them in Cell Block 4, the protective custody unit at the far north end, where men were tortured, mutilated and burned. More than a hundred people were injured or overdosed on drugs taken from the pharmacy. The killers used blowtorches and hatchets left behind by construction crews. It is often described as the most violent prison riot in American corrections history. The reforms that followed, including the Duran v. King consent decree and a new classification system under Cabinet Secretary Joe Williams, created New Mexico's modern prison system. New facilities opened in 1985 and 1990, and the old cellhouse was closed in 1998 (one 2013 news report says 1988, apparently a typo).

The legend

Wikipedia sums up the reputation briefly: doors that open and close by themselves, disembodied voices and footsteps. Most of the detailed lore, though, has been gathered by one man, the Albuquerque paranormal author Cody Polston, who investigated Old Main eight times between 2002 and 2010 under strict escort and who ended up one of its more skeptical voices.

By Polston's account there were no recorded haunting reports at all before October 2002, when the radio station 94 Rock staged an overnight contest inside Old Main modeled on the MTV show Fear, with a $1,000 prize. That night participants reported cell doors banging in Cell Block 3, a thump traveling along a ventilation pipe, a locked door in Cell Block 4 found standing open and a light burning in Cell Block 3 when the power was supposed to be off. Polston suspected some of it had been staged but could not prove it. His later visits produced far less activity, sometimes none.

The stories collected since then cluster around a few places. Cell Block 3, the solitary confinement unit, is said to produce odd noises, a smell described as burning flesh, doors moving on their own and lights flicking on and off; Cell Block 4, where most of the 1980 killings happened, has similar reports. In the basement laundry people describe unease, whispers and human-shaped shadows, and both corrections officers and Guard troops who used the building for training have described shadow figures too. Single-source accounts add a man dressed in green prison garb, spotted one night at about ten by a member of a film crew outside the accounting office, who watched him step into a bathroom that turned out to be empty; a dark shape passing across the far end of a corridor, which retired guard Rick LaMonda, the building's informal custodian, says he has witnessed four times or more; and a film extra who was shut in a cell when the door closed, was found shivering and quit. Actor Scott Patterson, filming The Boys of Abu Ghraib there, described a winged demonic shape in a stairwell and dark seated figures in the gas chamber viewing room. In October 2010 a reporter for the Santa Fe New Mexican, sitting alone in one of the Cell Block 4 cells, heard a thud followed by a "shhhh." The legend generally ties all of this to the 33 men killed in 1980, but no source links any ghost to a particular victim, and none is named.

The skeptical case is unusually well developed here. In 2005 Polston's team ran acoustic tests in the basement corridor and found that sound travels its whole length with strong echoes, a plausible source for many noises, though the tests were not conclusive. Marcella Armijo, a former corrections officer who helped in 2006 and 2007, discovered that most of the people claiming firsthand experience had not been on staff at the time of the riot, and that their stories had absorbed details from novels about it. Polston disputed the verdict of the Southwest Ghost Hunters Association, which judged that the building qualified as haunted. He calls Old Main a "haunt factory," where acoustics and atmosphere prime visitors to experience things, and argues it is haunted by memory rather than by inmates' ghosts. No major ghost-hunting TV episode has been confirmed.

What remains today

Old Main still stands inside the grounds of the active prison. Its cell blocks have been used as film sets, including for the 2005 remake of The Longest Yard and scenes in Zero Dark Thirty. Hatchet marks remain in the floor of Cell Block 4, where one prisoner was beheaded in 1980. Nothing remains of the original 1885 penitentiary on Cerrillos Road except the name of Pen Road.

Visiting

Old Main sits on the grounds of an operating maximum-security prison, so it can only be visited on official tours. Never try to approach the facility on your own; it is a secure state property, and trespassing is a serious offense. The Corrections Department began guided tours in 2012, the state's centennial year: they lasted about two hours, cost $16.50 at the time and in 2014 were offered twice monthly between May and October, often led by prison staff. As of November 2026, the Corrections Department's page says only that Old Main is used for tours and film sets, so ask the department for current dates and rules.

Ghost tours were permitted at times in the past, but a 2013 New York Times headline, "a Gift Shop but No Ghost Stories," suggests that the official tours came to favor history, which suits the place. Thirty-three men were killed here in 1980; treat the visit as one to a site of real violence rather than an attraction.

Sources

1. Wikimedia Commons category : Penitentiary of New Mexico — Wikimedia Commons
2. USGS 1:125000-scale Quadrangle for Santa Clara, NM 1892 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1892 · Public domain (USGS)
3. USGS 1:24000-scale Quadrangle for Turquoise Hill, NM 1951 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1951 · Public domain (USGS)
4. USGS 1:250000-scale Quadrangle for Albuquerque, NM 1958 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1958 · Public domain (USGS)
5. "… (Investigations Summary of 2005)" — Cody Polston — Cody Polston
6. "… (More Witness Accounts and Ghost Stories)" — Cody Polston — Cody Polston
7. "… (My Opinion)" — Cody Polston — Cody Polston
8. "New Mexico State Penitentiary, Santa Fe, NM (Paranormal Claims)" — Cody Polston — Cody Polston
9. "NM prison may reopen as museum" (AP, 5 Aug 2013) — KRWG — KRWG
10. "NM selling tickets for prison tours" (AP, 25 Feb 2014) — KRWG — KRWG
11. "Penitentiary of New Mexico" — New Mexico Corrections Department — New Mexico Corrections Department
12. "… (Personal Experiences)" — Cody Polston — Cody Polston
13. "Site of gruesome prison riot becomes New Mexico tourist attraction" (Joe Watson, Apr 2017) — Prison Legal News — Prison Legal News
14. Wikipedia article — Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Text written by AI from the sources above and checked by a separate AI fact-check (how we work). Images: credits and licenses under each picture.