This place isn’t a movie set, it's not a haunted house in an old grocery store—it's quarried sandstone cut by convicts, scarred by fires, and patched back together for another century of stories. When you feel the chill on your neck, it’s not just our fog machines.

In 1862 the Nevada Territorial Legislature turned the Warm Springs Hotel into the state’s first penitentiary. Prisoners quarried the on‑site sandstone that later built the State Capitol, then rebuilt the cellblocks—twice—after fires in 1867 and 1870.

Over the next 150 years the walls absorbed jailbreaks, riots, a full‑blown inmate casino, and America’s first gas‑chamber execution, forging the haunted legend you’re about to walk through.

One‑hundred‑fifty seasons of scorching summers, brutal winters, and countless ghost stories separate the day Abraham Curry housed his first inmates from the day the gates clanged shut for good. Nevada State Prison outlived stagecoaches, two world wars, and even its own purpose—finally closing in 2012 as one of the oldest continuously operating prisons in the United States. Its scars—and its spirits—remain.

From 1924 to 1979 the prison’s infamous gas chamber claimed 32 lives, earning national notoriety after executing Gee Jon—the first person in U.S. history put to death by lethal gas. Eleven more inmates later met the needle on the same steel gurney. Witness windows are still smeared by the breath of journalists, clergy, and guards who watched justice—and sometimes controversy—play out in deadly silence.