By Caleb O. Brown
Snitch Staff Writer
You pay to get in, not to get out,” says Paul McCoy, innkeeper at the Jailer’s Inn in Bardstown, eagerly rattling through a list of, ahem, arresting slogans. “We pamper our prisoners … It’s a captivating experience.”
As one of his guests inches toward the front door, weighed down by her luggage, McCoy says, “Breakin’ out, huh?” As if it’s the first time the quip has come to mind.
The woman chuckles politely and tells McCoy she left the key to her room upstairs. McCoy nods, then obliges the departing visitor with some directions out of town.
McCoy likes to refer to his guests as inmates because the Jailer’s Inn was, until 1987, the Nelson County Jail, the oldest operating slammer in Kentucky.
Now it’s a popular bed and breakfast in the center of Bardstown’s historic square.
McCoy, as much as being the innkeeper, has also been thrust into the position of local historian. Stories from centuries past amble back to him through elderly locals, brittle books and even the occasional former inmate.
And McCoy, a clean-cut blond with a broad grin, enjoys retelling them, his eyes widening at key moments in numerous tales — true, legendary and otherwise — of jailbreaks, famous inmates and recent ghost hunters who sometimes appear in search of the supernatural.
The jail
There was a wooden jail on the same site before the current stone structure.
Short and sweet, that jail’s story goes something like this: Around 1790, a husband and wife in Nelson County had a spat. The wife had the police put her husband in jail. A short time later, she decided she’d been without her beloved long enough. After being refused the company of her husband by the sheriff, the young lady hit upon a solution: Burn the jail and get her husband back — preferably uncooked. And so she did. But crime does not pay. She was caught and convicted.
Rather than accept a year in jail, the woman submitted to 40 lashes on her bare back in the court square. Or maybe it was just five, McCoy says, noting a second version of the story. Mere details.
The current structure is two parts. The front was built in 1820 with 30-inch-thick limestone walls, inch-thick iron bars on every window and topped with a high ceiling of black, 18-inch oak beams. When Kentucky law demanded that the jailer live on site, the front was converted to housing and another building was attached to the back for prisoners. A separate cell with a solid iron door was maintained for females, complete with its own private shower. It’s the only room at Jailer’s Inn that still looks like a jail cell, with iron bunks on one wall.
McCoy added some softer mattresses and a waterbed.
All of Nelson County’s jailers have been men, with one exception: Maxie McCay, jailer from 1950-62. After the death of her husband, Mrs. McKay was elected jailer to continue his job, but also to keep a roof over her children’s heads.
McKay’s matronly face looked more suited to adorn cans of “homestyle” soup or marmalade and simply not the face you’d fear in jail. After all, this is a woman who turned the “upstairs dungeon” into a room specifically for curing hams.
But McKay knew more about running a jail than many would have initially given her credit for. She rewarded good prisoners with “trusty” status, allowing them home-cooked meals and frequent trips into the courtyard behind the jail. Poorly behaved prisoners had their diets switched from ham and gravy to bread and water. Dietary discipline usually worked like a charm.
McCoy says many of McKay’s children and grandchildren, who grew up in and around the jail, recently held a family reunion at Jailer’s Inn.
In 1970, McCoy says, an 18-year-old woman — arrested for passing bad checks — tried to escape from the relatively posh cell. She stripped down to nothing, soaped herself up and tried to slide her slender frame through the iron door’s portal through which the jailer would pass meals. The young woman got halfway through before she got stuck. With the help of jailer Norris Conder, a doctor and the “Bardstown Night Police Chief,” the woman was soaped up further and popped through the portal. She paid court costs, fines and restitution and was released.
McCoy details another daring escape in the jail’s final year as such, this one with more soap sophistication.
Wayne Greenwell and Doug Hamilton, both of Bardstown, found themselves on the wrong side of the jail’s iron bars. Early one Sunday morning in 1986, they decided they wouldn’t be staying. Fashioning a phony gun barrel from two bars of soap and some ink, the men covered the fake barrel with a small rag and forced the deputy jailer to turn over the keys.
Their freedom, however, was short-lived, as the law caught up with them.
Behind the jail, a walled courtyard surrounds flowers and an outdoor kitchen.
That new-fangled electricity wasn’t to be trusted indoors, so cooking was mostly done outside. Against the wall of the jail, where flowerbeds now sit, tall wooden gallows stood waiting for the condemned.
Phil Evans learned the meaning of swift justice in Nelson County. Charged with rape in October of 1893, he was kept in Jefferson County for his own safety before the trial. Evans pleaded not guilty on Nov. 9. He was convicted two days later. With townspeople sitting along the high stone courtyard walls, Evans was hanged on Jan. 5, 1894.
McCoy grins as he explains that he likes to serve breakfast in the courtyard on clear days.
Checking the register
Famous inmates included John Dillinger, who stayed one night as he was en route to another, less forgiving facility in Indiana. Legend has it that Dillinger’s fans simply couldn’t bear the thought of their beloved staying in such cold confines and would have sprung him from anywhere, had they only known his name. Dillinger’s keepers, wise to the fact, made sure this particular prisoner checked in under an alias.
Frank and Jesse James stayed at the jail, too, though never as inmates. It was among the places the James brothers found safe haven as they were being hunted for attacks on Union sympathizers. The two outlaws had the distinction of being relatives of the sheriff at the time, A.D. Pence. Pence married into the Samuels clan (of Maker’s Mark bourbon fame) of Bardstown, who were related to the James brothers.
John Fitch, the celebrated inventor of the steamboat (long before Robert Fulton, mind you), is rumored to have died in the Nelson County Jail after he’d developed a habit of drinking a fifth of bourbon each day. The sheriff reportedly cared for Fitch through his final days.
The bed
The rooms have all undergone a great deal of renovation since McCoy and his wife purchased the property shortly after it became available. The rooms barely hint at their former use.
“The 1819 Room” is nicknamed the “upstairs dungeon,” since it was little more than an empty room with several iron o-rings in the floor to keep prisoners from moving around too much. The room now features thick carpeting and a canopy bed. Instead of country hams, small cherubs hang from the walls, and a double-jacuzzi is tucked away in the bathroom.
Several of the rooms feature bits of furniture from different periods, but they blend with a quiet relaxation that comes with rocking chairs, thick quilts and lacy coverings for seemingly everything.
Unreal guests
Paul McCoy has seen a new kind of guest visit since the fall of 2002. The Travel Channel featured the Jailer’s Inn among the 10 spookiest places in America.
Since then, seasoned bed and breakfast guests and ghost hunters have sought out the inn as a place to stay and have a paranormal experience.
A few guests have checked in, only to vanish in the middle of the night, leaving a key on the front desk and issuing a rushed, but apologetic, phone call in the morning as they ride away, clearly spooked by something most guests never experience.
McCoy, reluctant to play up the reports of ghosts and other such visitors to his inn, does admit to what he calls “a unique presence.”
“I believe there’s something here, but I don’t know what causes it,” he says.
Though he says he’s never seen anything unusual himself, he’s sure his pets have.
And the inn’s reputation has also cost McCoy an employee.
“A girl who worked for me, cleaning one of the rooms one day, saw a man in the upstairs dungeon room in the mirror. She turned around and saw nothing. She turned back around and saw him again in the mirror. She got so spooked she ran downstairs and out the front door.”
McCoy says the young woman quit about a week later.
Poor reviews
Aside from the impressive guest register, a few former inmates have left their own mark on their one-time home. “The Nelson County Jail” is among several poems still emblazoned on the jail’s inner walls (and pardon the misspellings).
When I was young I used to mess around
In a little hick place called Bardstown
When one night I went to get drunk
And I ended up on the bottom bunk
When I woke I felt like hell
I was in the Nelson County Jail
The Nelson County Jail is no place to be
If you got a wife and a baby
So if you fell you hafe to raise hell
Stay away from the Nelson County Jail.
“Soon to be Free”
Once I was in the Nelson Co. Jail
They said I was there for raising hell
I tried to tell them that
I was only drunk
But they laughed
and showed me a bunk
They tried to break my soul into
But that’s one thing they’ll never do
They took me away
from the one I loved
And placed me in a cell above
But one day soon I’ll be free
And then it’ll be my ladie and me
When it’s all over and done
I will no longer hafe to run
I’ll be free to live my life
Me, my child and my lovely wife
“Outlaws”
Life as a outlaw is not always fun
You are always out there on the run
You stay ahead of the law for a while
And say screw the world, with style
When the party’s over,
you can always ride
But sooner or latter there
will be no place to hide
You may never know where
they hell you are
You just roam from bar to bar
You may son be known as one of the best
Like Frank and Jesse and all the rest
They were the outlaws who rode thru hell
But even they ended up in jail
So before you head out for life of crime
Think of all the outlaws still doing time
