Doors Open at Cornwall Jail Produces A Spirit Orb

We took in Doors Open event in Cornwall on Sunday.  We were also prepared to do some geocaching along the way.  That basically means we didn't see as many Open Door sites as we might have otherwise, but we had a really good time and saw a lot of interesting stuff,  most of which I'll tell you about later in the week.

What I really want to tell you about was our first stop at the Cornwall Jail.  That was a bit of an eye opener.  It was in operation until just 2002, which I found rather amazing,  as it's very primitive.  If more jails were like that, perhaps people would try harder to stay out of them.  I'm sure anyone who was in there at the time that it closed felt like they were being sent to a resort when they got transferred to a newer facility.  I'm very sure people in that area didn't noisily break into homes at this time of year with the idea of spending the winter in jail, like they used to around my village before the local minimum security jail was torn down.



Many of the cells in the Cornwall  jail are just wide enough for the bunk....a thin mattress on a wooden platform. There was no space on either side of that, and only enough room to stand between the end of it and the cell bars. 

As horrible as that sounds, I think I might prefer it to the ones meant for two. That had a bunk bed set up, a toilet and a space narrow enough for one person at a time to pace the length of the bed.  What if you got locked in with someone who was likely to torment you, or perhaps someone who was criminally insane? The shortage of jail space in those days meant everyone, even juveniles and women, where thrown in together. 

This jail was built in 1833 and used to be a maximum security facility, but later became a place where the prisoners would spend two years less a day.  I'm sure such an experience straightened out the lives of anyone who survived it. Because of the conditions though, many didn't. Rumours of restless spirits within the walls are plentiful. 

Let me show you around a bit.  This is the main operations room.  The three panels on the right must have let them know where alarms were being set off, back in the days before 911.

The exercise yard isn't very big either. And though the prisoners had access to the open air, they were also still totally walled in and had no place to see the outside world.  I'm pretty sure that courtyard could get pretty hot during the summer, with more heat radiating off those stone walls.

If a prisoner had a visitor, the prisoner was locked in this little cage and used the phone to talk to the person on the other side of the wall.












A paranormal group did some research there, and there are photos posted on the wall of some of the phenomena they spotted.  Orbs seems to be fairly frequent, and when I was looking over some photos I took, there, without doubt was one of those orbs.  I'm fascinated, and will be doing some research on the subject.  Some people say they are caused by reflections off the dust motes in the air.  If that were the case, I'd expect to see them in many more in the pictures I took, rather than just the one.  Others say the appearance of spirit orbs in a photograph may indicate a spiritual being attempting to communicate with the photographer.

The one I captured was near the floor, in a deserted corridor. If you click on the picture you should be able to see a larger version of it, which might help you see what I've circled there.

Let me zoom in on that a bit.

 I'm not sure why I pointed the camera in that direction. Something told me too, and I'm certainly glad I listened.  Maybe something was communicating with me after all.