They had a party at our prison last night and they thought
we couldn’t see.
This rotten stone hell where we walk in darkness forever is
not as it was when I faced the hangman in 1932 or as it was when my companion
in eternal misery met his end in the electric chair 27 years later. Both of us
thought that death would free us from the horror and unforgiveable conditions
of the West Virginia Penitentiary at Moundsville, West Virginia. We were wrong.
My name is Harry Powers. My companion inside these walls is Elmer
Brunner. I came to end in this
madhouse of pain because I killed people, lots of people. I lured women, and
sometimes their children, into my trap in a town called Quiet Dell with
promises of romance and marriage. Instead, I dispatched them to the next world,
confiscated their money and belongings and dumped their remains in shallow
graves. Elmer was far less sophisticated. He murdered an old woman in a botched
home burglary in Huntington. His biggest mistake was using a claw hammer to do
the deed and leaving it behind, bloodied and marked with his fingerprints.
I remember the cloudy cool morning of March 18, 1932 when
they marched me up the scaffold, draped a hood over my head, placed the noose
around my neck and dropped me through a trap door. I thought it would end my
travails. Instead, I was still there and watched helplessly as the guards
brought me down, a doctor proclaimed me dead and my body was stuffed in a bag
and hauled away for burial in a nearby unmarked grave. But, I remained and have
remained stuck inside these huge stone walls of silence and pain ever since
that moment when the rope did its worst to my earthly shell.
Elmer has a similar story to tell but his end came in 1959
in a rugged wooden chair that was connected to an electrical power source. They
gave him a 1,600-volt surge of power that killed his brain and a second that
fried the rest of his internal organs. He recalls it vividly and now walks
these grounds at my side silently watching all that happens here.
Elmer and I are not the only tortured souls that walk these
grounds. In all, 94 men were executed here and many more were slaughtered by
fellow inmates, killed themselves or died from disease or at the hands of
ruthless guards. Like us, many of them remain, silent, undetected and tortured
by an eternal sentence to walk these grounds and watch the odd behavior of the
living who use our tomb for entertainment and amusement.
When they erected these massive stone walls in what they
called the gothic style in the 1870s they put in turrets and battlements that
made the prison look like a castle. I guess they wanted people to think they
were safe from the evil men entombed inside.
Over the years, we watched prisoners defeat internal locks
and wander freely to torture, abuse and kill each other.
We watched them gamble, fight and rape in the “Sugar Shack,”
the underground room where most people now fear to even enter.
We watched the state cram 2,000 prisoners into a prison
built for half that number in the 1960s and all the suffering and violence that
resulted.
We watched 15 prisoners escape in 1979 and kill an off duty
state trooper on the street outside in the process.
We watched them riot in 1986, kill three of their own and
get the state’s governor to come in to negotiate.
By 1995 they finally moved all the living prisoners out and
we had little to watch.
We were astonished when they began to use these rotting old
halls and cells to train cops and guards about how to handle prison riots after
the living prisoners were moved out. They came in with all their modern weapons
and tactics and practiced how to subdue make believe rioters who were hired to
play the rolls of evil men.
More astonishing still to us was when they began to give
children tours of our prison. Now, they use the sites of our misery as a
Halloween joke and laugh with glee when they pretend to lock each other in our
old wretched tiny cells.
Through all that, we watched—and, we watch still.
Last night, hundreds of people came in through the old North
Gate where our earthy remains were once removed from the prison for burial.
They came in for a massive alcohol infused party that they called a steak fry.
As moonlight reflected off razor wire atop fences inside the
weathered stone walls, they rolled massive charcoal grills into our old prison
yard. People grilled thick juicy
steaks by the glow of flashlights where men once traded cigarettes for simple
comforts.
Odd loud music erupted from the big open building they built
in the later years of the prison as a cafeteria and then modified to be a
teaching facility and party room for hire.
There were kegs of beer set up where men used to be fed slop
on metal trays.
Intoxicated young people danced and sang with their arms in
the air and their voices raised in song where men were once humiliated and
abused.
And we watched.
The people we watch will never know the terror, fear, and
death that once dominated these grounds. It is all locked away in
little-studied public records and in the fading memories of the few men who
survived this particular brand of hell. But it also survives among those of us
who wander this site undetected, unremembered and unknown forever. 
