The Ghosts of Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary

On this episode of The Dreadful Truth, Rudy Stankowitz, Donna, and Joy of Paranormal Recon travel deep into the mountains of East Tennessee to investigate one of America's most infamous prisons: Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary.

Built in 1896 and home to some of the nation's most dangerous criminals, Brushy Mountain has long been associated with violent deaths, failed escapes, isolation, and stories that refuse to die. But this investigation wasn't about chasing ghost stories. It was about documenting what happened during four hours inside a prison where history still seems to linger.

Throughout the night, the team experienced a series of events that challenged their skepticism.

A cigarette lit by Rudy unexpectedly continued to smoke on its own after being set aside under circumstances the team found difficult to explain.

Multiple unexplained light anomalies—commonly referred to as orbs—were captured on camera in areas with no obvious environmental explanation.

Apparitions were reported during the investigation, with members of the team independently describing unexplained human-like figures in different areas of the prison.

Joy clearly heard voices when no one else was present nearby, prompting immediate attempts to verify whether anyone else was in the area.

Perhaps the most unsettling moment occurred when Donna entered what the team describes as a trance-like state. During that period she provided detailed information about events and locations within the prison. According to the team, some of those details were later discussed with the current owner of Brushy Mountain, who stated that portions of the information were not known to him at the time.

Whether these experiences have paranormal explanations or conventional ones remains for each listener to decide.

This episode presents the investigation exactly as it happened.

In This Episode

•  The dark history of Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary 
•  Why Brushy Mountain remains one of America's most investigated haunted locations 
•  Overnight investigation by the Paranormal Recon team 
•  The unexplained cigarette that continued smoking after being set aside 
•  Apparitions witnessed during the investigation 
•  Unexplained orbs captured on camera 
•  Joy's unexplained voice experiences 
•  Donna's trance-like experience and the information that followed 
•  Comparing personal experiences with the documented history of the prison 
•  Why documenting evidence is more important than chasing ghost stories 
•  The difference between eyewitness testimony, recorded evidence, and personal interpretation 

Listener Advisory

This episode discusses death, violence, prison history, and reported paranormal experiences. Some descriptions may not be suitable for younger audiences or listeners who are sensitive to disturbing subject matter.

About Brushy Mountain

Opened in 1896 and operating for more than a century, Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary housed many of Tennessee's most violent offenders, including James Earl Ray. The prison became known for its harsh conditions, coal mine labor, escape attempts, and decades of violence before closing in 2009.

Today, the prison serves as a historic site while continuing to attract investigators, historians, and paranormal research teams from around the world.

Connect with The Dreadful Truth

If you enjoy historical investigations, true crime, unexplained phenomena, and evidence-based discussions of the paranormal, subscribe to The Dreadful Truth wherever you listen to podcasts.

One Final Thought

The goal of this investigation was never to convince anyone that ghosts exist.

It was to document unusual experiences, compare them against known history, and allow the evidence—and the listener—to decide what really happened.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

People ask me if I believe in ghosts. Wrong fucking question. Ask me if I believe people experience things they can't explain.

SPEAKER_00 0:14

Yeah. Ask me if I think every creek in an old building is Casper doing laps in the attic. It's not. Old buildings make noise.

SPEAKER_01 0:27

Period. Steel moves, wood shrinks, wind gets in places it shouldn't. Rats apparently wear boots, but brushy mountain that's different. Brushy doesn't creak like an old building. It holds its breath. And I hate saying that because it sounds like something a guy in a black t-shirt says before charging 20 bucks for a haunted hayride. Some places don't feel empty when they're empty. They feel evacuated. Like something left in a hurry.

SPEAKER_00 1:02

Like the walls remembered the last bad thing and were waiting for the next one.

SPEAKER_01 1:10

That was brushy, not haunted house scary, institutional scary, which is so much worse. Because paperwork has killed more people than monsters ever have. Brushy Mountain opened in 1896 in Petros, Tennessee. Not because Tennessee suddenly gave a shit about rehabilitation. Please. Nobody sat around in 1896 saying, you know what? Violent offenders need? Emotional growth and a vision board. Russie was built for punishment, control. Labor. The old American talent for making cruelty look administrative. The state had bodies it could lock up. The mountain had coal it wanted cough. Somebody looked at both, saw some new math. That's how ugly ideas usually start. Not with a strike of lightning, with a budget meeting. Inmates helped build that prison. Let that sit there for a minute. A man could spend the morning raising a wall and the night sleeping behind it. That's not punishment. And when they weren't building the prison, they were working the mines, you left a cell made of steel to crawl into a cell made of mountain. Coal dust in your lungs, water dripping, explosives, bad air. Rock overhead that could stop being overhead whenever it fucking felt like it. Then, after the shift back to prison, it's not a sentence. That's a slow motion grinding machine. Brushy didn't need ghosts. It had history. History is worse because history actually happened. By July 3rd, Brushy Mountain had already been closed for years. During the day, it's a tourist stop. People buy shirts, take pictures. Everybody has a lovely little murder prison afternoon. Then the tourists leave. The doors lock, the lights change, and the place stopped pretending. That's when we arrived. Donna, Joy, me, the paranormal recon team. Nine at night to one thirty in the morning. No crowd. No production crew, no fake screaming, just three people, a pile of equipment, and a prison that had no damn reason to be friendly. Before we unpacked anything, we walked. The whole place. Warden's office, hospital, cafeteria, laundry, solitary, death row, cell blocks. You have to do that. You have to know the building before you start asking questions. Or every draft becomes a demon and every loose hinge becomes Aunt Mildred trying to communicate. That's not investigating. That's being gullible with batteries.

SPEAKER_00 3:55

The hospital was the first place that got under my skin. Empty room, nothing moving, nothing dramatic. But your body knows before your brain admits it.

SPEAKER_01 4:08

Nobody came into that hospital for a wellness check.

SPEAKER_00 4:11

They came in leaking, cut, burned, beaten, broken.

SPEAKER_01 4:18

Some you never walk back out. You stand there long enough and your imagination starts doing things you didn't ask it to do. Solitary was worse. Solitary isn't a room. It's a room designed to make a person disappear while he's still breathing. Take away time. Take away the little human noises that remind you the world still exists. Then leave a man alone with the one thing he can't escape himself. People worry about ghosts in solitary. Cute. Scariest thing in that room was probably the man counting his own thoughts until they started counting back. That'll haunt you just fine. Death row felt different. Death row felt like waiting. That's the word waiting. Waiting for appeals, for footsteps, for keys. For the one walk you don't come back from. You don't have to believe in the paranormal to feel that. You just have to stand there and shut up for ten seconds. Most people can't stand quiet that long. That's why silence still has a job. After the walkthrough, we set up in the first building MF meters, spirit box, audio recorders, full spectrum cameras, all the usual toys. And yeah, before the internet wets itself, I know what half of you are thinking. Spirit boxes are controversial. Dowsing rods are controversial. EVPs are controversial. Good. They should be. Every tool lies sometimes, people do too. That's why you don't marry the equipment. You document, you compare, you try not to embarrass yourself. At first nothing happened. Which is normal. We've started dozens and dozens of investigations just the same way.

SPEAKER_00 6:03

I mean real investigations are mostly boredom.

SPEAKER_01 6:06

You walk, you wait, you stare into a hallway wondering if you made poor life choices. Then something happens that doesn't make you scream. It makes your mouth dry. It makes you listen for your own name in the dark. Around eleven we heard footsteps slow, deliberate.

SPEAKER_00 6:26

Metal concrete metal concrete. Not a bang, not a creak. Walking.

SPEAKER_01 6:35

We stopped. The footsteps stopped. We started again. So did they. Nobody said ghost. Nobody had to. We just looked at each other. Because there wasn't supposed to be anybody there. Then the cold spots. And I don't mean ooh a chilly ghost. I mean instant. Three steps and it felt like someone opened a freezer door. Three more steps and gone. Could it be airflow? Sure. Could it be something else? I don't know. And I don't know is a perfectly good answer despite what the internet thinks. Shadows were worse. Not full body apparitions waving from a balcony.

SPEAKER_00 7:17

Movement.

SPEAKER_01 7:18

Peripheral, quick little slide your eye catches before your brain gets there. You turn? Nothing. Do it once. Fine. In front of cell forty three. I turned quick, and it was still there. There was a full body apparition just for a second, and then gone, and then it happened again. It went on all night. My nervous system started packing its bags early. Then the doors. Heavy prison doors, steel, not bedroom doors, not screen doors, prison doors. We heard them. That deep metal clang that sounds like the building just swallowed somebody. We'd check. Nothing. No open door. No obvious reason. Just silence, sitting there like it knew something we didn't. After midnight we started another spirit box session. Just the three of us. No audience, no theater. I had the box. I had my dowsing rods. Donna sat nearby. Joy watched. I asked simple questions. Anyone here? Can you tell us your name? Did you die here? Static. Fragments. Garbage. Exactly what you'd expect. Then Donna changed. Not movie changed. No head spinning. Thank God. Oh that might have been kind of cool. There was no Latin, no pea soup. She just wasn't with us the same way anymore. She got quiet. Focused. Like somebody had stepped beside her and started talking where we couldn't hear. Then she said one word, James. There was silence. I asked, James? Nah. Then she said Nick. Not Nichols. Not Nicholas. Nick. Okay. Common names. Interesting, but not enough to make me sleep with the lights on. Then Donna said, His only crime was being black. Nobody moved. That's the part people don't understand. Fear doesn't always scream. Sometimes it just removes everybody's ability to make a joke. And for people like us, that's basically an emergency siren. Nobody laughed. Nobody moved. The prison didn't get louder. It got closer. And none of us knew a damn thing about James Nichols. Donna has done enough investigations with us that we know when she's acting and when she isn't, and she is not the type to manufacture drama. Joy isn't either. That's important. We packed up, we left. I didn't leave convinced that we'd spoken to a ghost. I left annoyed. Because now I had a question, and questions are worse than ghosts. Ghosts might follow you home. Questions sit in your skull and they kind of chew at you. The next morning I started digging. James Brushy. Then the name appeared James Nichols. That's when this stopped being a spooky prison story. James Nichols had been convicted in connection with a brutal nineteen seventy two robbery and double murder at Sonny Man's Club near Munford, Tennessee. Two men dead, another beaten. Nichols and James Mitchell were convicted, sent to Brushy. Then the case got uglier. Their convictions were overturned because of unconstitutional racial discrimination in the grand jury foreman selection process. Not because the crime didn't happen, not because everything was clean and tidy, because the system itself was dirty. The state retried them, convicted them again. Back to Brushy. And that still didn't explain Donna's sentence. His only crime was being black. Then I found 1982, racial tension, violence. Men with life sentences and nothing left to lose. Seven white inmates got a pistol inside a maximum security prison. I don't know how. That sentence shouldn't even exist. A gun in a cage full of men, the state claimed it could control. They overpowered guards, took keys, walked straight to the cell block housing the black inmates, not lost, not confused, directed. James Nichols was shot to death in his cell. James Mitchell was also killed. Others were wounded. Then came retaliation. The kind institutions always pretend they didn't see coming. The prison erupted, and the newspaper accounts describe the violence as racially charged. His only crime is being black. Now let me be painfully clear before the comments section theologians start licking their keyboards. I'm not saying we proved James Nichols spoke to us. I can't prove that. Nobody can. What I can say is this. Donna said James. Then Nick, then a sentence tied directly to race. Later we found James Nichols killed in a racially charged attack inside Brushy Mountain. None of us knew his story. None of us were discussing him. None of us were looking for him. Those are just the facts. Everything else? Interpretation. Was it coincidence? Maybe. Was it subconscious memory? I don't know how. Was it something else? Maybe. I don't know. And that's the part that bothers me. Because Brushy didn't give us proof. It gave us a name. Then it waited for us to do the work. That's worse. Proof lets you sleep. Questions don't. People remember James Earl Ray because history loves famous monsters. But James Nichols? Most visitors don't know him. They walk past his story, buy a t-shirt, take a selfie, go home. Maybe that's the most disturbing part of the whole damn thing. Not whether a ghost talked, not whether the spirit box worked, but that a man can die violently in a prison cell, make the newspapers, be part of one of the darkest racial incidents in that prison's history, and still almost disappear.

SPEAKER_00 13:37

The violence was real. The cells were real. The racial hatred was real. The gun was real. The dead men were real.

SPEAKER_01 13:49

That place is not haunted because something dead walks around. It's haunted because something living built it. Men built the cages, men filled them, men looked away. Then everyone acted surprised when the walls learned how to keep secrets. So do I believe Brushy Mountain is haunted? I'll tell you what I believe. I believe three people walked into that prison on july third. I believe something happened we didn't expect. I believe that something led us to James Nichols. And I believe history has a nasty habit of speaking through whatever crack it can find. A newspaper archive, prison wall, a woman in the dark saying a name she didn't know. Maybe that's paranormal. Maybe it isn't. Either way, Brushy Mountain didn't give us proof. It gave us a name. Then it waited to see if we'd bury it too. We didn't. And that's the part I still can't shake. And that is the dreadful truth.