Gettysburg has no shortage of places said to be haunted–the Jennie Wade house, the Farnsworth House Inn, Iverson’s Pits. But few have a documented history quite as dark as the old Adams County jail.

Today, the building at 59 East High Street forms part of Gettysburg’s municipal complex. Before that it was a library. Before that, for nearly a century, it was the county prison.

And before that prison existed, another jail occupied the same site.

That earlier building witnessed a convicted murderer hang himself rather than face the gallows. It held a man for almost nine years after a jury found him insane in the case of an axe murder. In January 1850, that prisoner and another mentally ill man died when the jail burned around them.

Then came the Battle of Gettysburg and one of the strangest stories in local lore: the sheriff supposedly released the prisoners as the armies approached, only to have them return voluntarily because jail seemed safer than the streets.

It is a wonderful story.

There is also a problem with it.

A Murder Near Arendtsville

In November 1840, Gettysburg newspapers reported what they called an “unfortunate occurrence” in Hamiltonban Township.

A man named Jacob Roberstein had been struck in the back of the neck with the edge of an axe. He survived only a short time.

The man accused of killing him was Isaac Musselman, whom the newspaper immediately described as being “of unsound mind.”

The case eventually reached court. In 1841, a jury found Musselman not guilty because he had been insane when the killing occurred. But acquittal did not mean freedom.

The court ordered him held in “strict custody” in the Adams County jail for as long as his insanity continued. His father was expected to pay for his maintenance.

That detail tells us something important about nineteenth-century jails. They were not simply places for convicted criminals and defendants awaiting trial. They could also function as makeshift mental institutions for people whom communities did not know where else to put.

Musselman was one of them.

Frederick Smith Chooses His Own Death

Musselman was still confined when another extraordinary death occurred inside the jail.

In 1849, Frederick Smith was convicted of the first-degree murder of Frederick Forster near Arendtsville.

The surviving newspaper account of Smith’s sentencing and final hours is unusually intimate. It describes his meetings with clergy, his reading of Scripture, his meals, his demeanor and his insistence that although he had killed Forster, he had not intended to commit murder in the first degree.

The court sentenced him to hang.

Smith had other plans.

Shortly before the scheduled execution, he was found dead in his room. He had improvised a noose and hanged himself rather than allow the Commonwealth to execute him.

The newspaper went into remarkable detail about the circumstances of his death, even reconstructing how he appears to have arranged the rope.

Gettysburg did not need a ghost writer to make the jail macabre.

The primary sources were doing a fine job on their own.

The Jail Burns

Only months later came something worse.

At about three o’clock on the morning of January 7, 1850, fire was seen coming from an upstairs window of the county jail.

The Gettysburg Compiler reported that citizens quickly gathered and tried to save the prisoners.

Two men were trapped.

One was Isaac Musselman.

The other was John Toner.

Both men were described as insane and confined “for safe-keeping.”

John Toner had been active in local Democratic politics for a decade or more, offering his home as a place for party meetings and polling stations. Musselman, of course, had committed an axe murder.

The fire originated in Musselman’s room, but the newspaper was careful on an important point: “how, no one can tell.”

There is no basis for saying Musselman set it.

By the time rescuers reached his room, it was engulfed in flames.

Toner’s room had not yet burned, but when rescuers opened the door they were driven back by dense smoke. The newspaper believed Toner had already suffocated.

His body was eventually recovered.

A portion of Musselman’s body, “mutilated and blackened,” was found after part of the structure collapsed. He was buried in the graveyard at St. James’ Church.

Almost everything combustible in the jail was destroyed. According to the Compiler, little remained beyond the “bare blackened walls.”

The jailer and his family escaped, and officials reportedly managed to save most county papers.

The tragedy also supplies one of the stranger family connections in the building’s history.

When Adams County built a replacement prison in 1851, one of the county commissioners involved was John Musselman Jr.—Isaac Musselman’s brother.

The Jail People See Today

The prison that survives today is therefore not the building in which Frederick Smith, Isaac Musselman, and John Toner died.

The original county jail dated to the early nineteenth century. Adams County Historical Society research places a log jail on the property by 1804. After the 1850 fire, the county erected a replacement in 1851 at a reported cost of about $10,000.

That distinction matters when ghost stories enter the picture.

If Smith, Musselman, or Toner haunt anything, according to the folklore, they would be haunting the site, not the structure in which they actually died.

The replacement jail was an imposing building. Later descriptions call it “bastille-like,” with a stone prison-yard wall roughly sixteen feet high. The front portion was enlarged to three stories in 1889. The Old Adams County Prison at …

Then, twelve years after it opened, Gettysburg became a battlefield.

And that is where history gets considerably murkier.

The Prisoners Who Supposedly Came Back

One of the most charming stories attached to Civil War Gettysburg concerns the prisoners in the Adams County jail.

As Confederate troops approached town, the story goes, the sheriff opened the cells and released everyone.

Within about an hour, the prisoners returned voluntarily.

Why?

Because they had decided the jail was safer than Gettysburg.

It is exactly the sort of story one wants to be true.

Unfortunately, we cannot yet demonstrate that it is.

The current Adams County sheriff history attributes the story to an account passed down through descendants of a Sheriff Wolf or Wolfe. But the county’s own historical materials disagree about who actually held the office during the battle.

The Adams County page identifies Samuel Wolf as sheriff. Another history published by the Sheriff’s Office itself lists Samuel Wolf’s term as 1860–1862 and identifies Adam Reber, 1863–1865, specifically as the sheriff during the Battle of Gettysburg.

That alone should make us cautious.

More importantly, no contemporary jail register, diary, newspaper report, prisoner affidavit or court record has yet surfaced confirming that the prisoners were released and returned.

The presently traceable story is a family tradition recorded much later.

That does not mean it did not happen.

It means several different claims have gradually become one story:

The sheriff released prisoners.

All of them were released.

They returned voluntarily.

All of them returned.

They did so within an hour.

And they specifically explained that jail seemed safer than Gettysburg.

At present, none of those details has contemporary documentation.

Perhaps strangest of all, we still do not know who the prisoners were.

A surviving jail register or reconstruction from Adams County criminal dockets might someday answer that question. Until then, the people at the center of one of Gettysburg’s most entertaining civilian legends remain anonymous.

Chickens and the Wall

Not everything about the jail was murder, madness, or war.

In June 1910, for example, prisoner John Lee decided he had had enough.

Lee had been jailed for stealing chickens.

In broad daylight, he got over the western prison wall, landed in a neighboring yard and ran down the alley toward the countryside.

The story is almost comic compared with the earlier tragedies, but it reminds us that this was a working county jail filled for generations with petty thieves, drunks, defendants, the mentally ill, violent offenders and ordinary people who had made bad decisions.

The alley itself accumulated appropriate names over the years: Jail Alley, Wall Street and even Gallows Avenue before Gettysburg officially settled on Wall Alley in 1978.

From Jail to Library

The prison era finally ended around 1948–1949.

Then the building underwent one of the stranger transformations in Gettysburg.

On April 6, 1949, the Adams County library organization purchased the abandoned jail at auction, reportedly for $9,000. The library moved in that year and remained until 1992.

A building designed to keep people from leaving had become a place where anyone could walk in, take something away, and be trusted to bring it back.

Gettysburg Borough eventually acquired the property, and today municipal and police functions occupy 59 East High Street.

Somewhere during the building’s later life, the ghosts began to arrive.

Or, perhaps more accurately, stories about them did.

Who Is “Gus”?

Modern paranormal accounts attach various strange experiences to the former jail and library.

One supposed spirit is known as “Gus.”

According to a modern paranormal database, Gus has been blamed for riding the elevator and even, in one particularly odd version, cooking food.

The obvious question is: Who was Gus?

At present, nobody seems to know.

No historical evidence located during this research connects a prisoner named Gus with the jail, establishes that he died there, or explains how the name became attached to the alleged phenomenon.

For historical purposes, Gus is therefore a folklore figure, not an identified former inmate.

There is another problem.

Mark Nesbitt began publishing his influential Ghosts of Gettysburg series in 1991, although he had collected Gettysburg ghost stories for decades before that. His commercial ghost tours began in 1994.

Yet no dated source uncovered in this research establishes a specific haunting tradition at the old jail during the 1950s, 1960s or 1970s.

That could change. Former librarians may have stories. Old Gettysburg Times Halloween issues may contain forgotten reports.

But at present, saying the old jail has been regarded as haunted “since the Civil War” would get ahead of the evidence.

The People Who Really Stayed Behind

That may be the most interesting thing about the old Adams County jail.

The ghosts are difficult to identify.

The dead are not.

Frederick Smith sat in his room knowing the state intended to hang him and found another way to die.

Isaac Musselman killed Jacob Roberstein while, according to a jury, insane, then spent nearly nine years confined in a jail because Adams County had nowhere better to put him.

John Toner was also considered insane and kept there “for safe-keeping.” When the jail burned, townspeople nearly reached him. Smoke stopped them.

Their building disappeared in 1850.

Their stories nearly did too.

Perhaps Gettysburg’s old jail is haunted. History has no useful way of proving or disproving that.

But long before anyone called a spirit “Gus,” real people suffered and died on that piece of ground.

For Gettysburg history, those are the names worth remembering.