Allen County’s first jail is brimming with ghosts.
Some are trying to escape. Others teeter on the brink of madness. A few are just plain drunk and disorderly.
Last time I walked by, the specter of Ada Rogers was busy sneaking her incarcerated husband various firearms, irrepressibly repeating an event from the summer of 1881.
She and two accomplices were eventually captured north of Burlington, and sentenced to five years hard labor.
This wasn’t the first time something of the sort had happened, either.
One of the first records regarding the limestone prison from 1870 notes how, on another hot summer night, “six prisoners escaped from the jail by sawing off two of the bars of the window grate.”
They, too, got help from an outsider.
The jail had barely stood a year and already its capacity to “hold the strongest, slipperiest and most expert of lawbreakers” had already come into question — especially after an angry mob lynched Elzy Dalson by pretending to be transporting a prisoner from Chanute.
For some, their struggles bound to the jail were psychological, like Thomas Vanmouse of Elsmore.
After speaking in tongues and being “possessed by the spirit” at a religious gathering (1895), he was thrown behind bars and left to rot after being judged insane.
Another desperate fellow by the name of Erickson had also been judged insane — 13 years earlier — and after his “friends” admitted him, he was found hanging from a makeshift noose in his cell.
If you’re quiet as death, you can still hear the echo of Erickson’s weight shifting and swinging as you tour the jail’s first floor.
Better to end it all quickly than be shipped to the hell of Osawatomie asylum with its thousands of lost and murmuring voices.
Better to meet the Void … after first scratching your will on the walls.
BETTER to have a drink and forget it — like Lulu Rosenburg, who in a news story from Halloween 1916, is reported to have gotten stumbling drunk before visiting her friend Anna Badgley, who’d been imprisoned for operating a house of ill repute.
Lulu already had the dubious distinction of being the first woman in Kansas sent to the penitentiary for repeatedly breaking Prohibition laws, and so was perhaps a bit numb to the prospect of being busted again.
But sure enough, remarking upon her impressive level of intoxication, the jailer decided that Rosenburg and Badgley should share a cell.
