My Week in Jail

As I lay on the bottom bunk of a six person jail sell I surprisingly sleep peacefully. There is something strangely safe and secure about being a guest in an old prison. A building that was one constructed to keep people in has now been reconstructed to ensure they stay out. Upon entering the building on the main floor one would never realize they were in a building that was one a jail, the lobby is warm, filled with music, chatter, chairs, posters. It it's until you check in and receive your pass code, turn around and see the big old wooden door leading into the hostel rooms with a passcode code lock that you really begin to think about where you are. Passing through the big heavy wooden door into the stairwell is when you really realize this building housed criminals. Dimly lit, no windows (at least none that were unbarred) and the metal staircases were connected between with a metal cage to catch any falling people  guards I would assume but perhaps for prisoner safety as well (though considering the age of the building I very seriously doubt it). It was in this moment the first eerie feeling began to settled through my body. The stairwell was silent, too silent and the only sounds were my boots as they clanged against the metal as I made my climb to level 4.
Once exiting the stairwell through yet another heavy wooden door, this time with not even a hint of a window, simply labeled '4' I entered into the floor that would be my home for the next five days. Save for a bright light at the initial entrance of the floor, the corridor was lit only by the sunlight streaming through the still barred windows. The only signs of life being the green plants climbing their way on the side of the old stone and toward the windows.

Again, met with silence, the whole floor was silent, cold and damp. Each sound I made echoed through the corridor, yet the only sounds that followed were my own footsteps on the stone floor and the rolling of my bag behind me as I made my way to cell number 3. The door, was narrow, more so than I'd expected and the bars had been blacked out with a wooden plank to at least give those of us who were staying there the illusion of privacy. The only peek into the room itself was through the top and bottom of the cell door where the natural light could peek through the bars that had been left exposed. Pulling out my key to unlock the call door, I had a bit of difficult with the lock and pulling it open. It is somewhat ironic that I had difficult with the door as I had read a review of someone who'd stayed there previous and had a similar complaint but once I got the hang of it, the door was an easy fix.
As it was the middle of the afternoon, the cell was empty, though quite obvious that it had been well lived in. Blankets, beds, sheets, clothes were sprawled over the beds and my lone bunk 4-3 Bunk 1 was neat and tidy, the blanket folded and awaiting my arrival. Settling my things in I locked my bags in a locker and made my bed with the sheets I'd been given before I settled onto my bunk. I glanced around at the other four bunks and began to realize the room had been expanded. What was now a room that housed 6 people, had once been two separate cells, the wall had been torn down between them to offer more room. That's when it all started to churn. What small rooms, how many prisoners had stayed in each cell? Who were they? Was I sleeping in the same place as a murder? Was this death row? The Federal prison is from a time when Canada very much still held law for Capital Punishment, and the jail building even had a functioning gallows (One, thankfully I did not ever have to see). I'd heard the building was haunted, but of course, how could it not be? Not only the lives of the criminals who had been hanged for their crimes (all I could think of was vengeful ghosts are created from violent death), but the criminals who had been killed by other prisoners, the guilty and maybe even innocent parties that had died a natural death in the cold, damp stone rooms.
It was after all these thoughts began to run through my mind I knew I had to get out of the building. Sitting, alone, in the silence was getting to my head. A chill I didn't like had settled into my spine and the nerves were high. As if it weren't nerve wracking enough that it was my first solo trip, and stay anywhere, but once the idea of angry criminal ghosts got under my skin it was safe to say I needed some air, something I wasn't going to find in the enclosed cell.