The Hand Print in Cell 17

Scrub it, paint it, demolish it, but this creepy prison's bloody hand print won't go away.

In the tiny town of Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, once voted the fourth most beautiful small town in America, a macabre mystery well over a century old sits locked in a jail cell. For 139 years, an executed man has proclaimed his innocence in the form of a bloody hand print, a mark that won't go away no matter how hard anyone tries to remove it.

In 1877, four men accused of being Molly Maguires, a group of Irish revolutionaries accused of murder, arson, kidnapping and other crimes aimed at an unscrupulous coal industry, were sentenced to hanging in the Carbon County Jail. To this day, many believe the men were innocent victims of coal baron’s intent on sending a message to potential revolutionaries.

One of the accused was Alexander Campbell, a man who shouted his innocence loudly from jail cell 17, but to no avail. Legend says that on the day he was to be executed, Campbell leaned down to rub his hand on the dirty cell floor before pressing it to the jail wall.

"This is the hand of an innocent man!" he proclaimed. "It will remain forever, to shame the county for hanging an innocent man."

He was hung just hours later.

Sooner after his body was buried, jailers scrubbed Campbell's handprint from the wall. To their surprise, the print reappeared days later, clear as ever. As the efforts of increasingly frightful guards continued to prove unsuccessful, it began to appear that Campbell's last statements were coming true. Despite crowding, they never used the cell to hold prisoners again.

In 1930, Sheriff Robert L. Bowman decided to put an end to the legend of the "hand on the wall." One night he brought the county road gang into the jail and had them tear out the wall that bore the bizarre shadow of a human hand. When the rubble was cleared, the workers put in a new wall and covered it with fresh plaster.

Sheriff Bowman, who supervised the work, retired for the night, confident that he had removed the "Irish miracle" forever. When he awoke and visited the cell the next day, he was shocked to see that the fresh plaster was marred by the vague outline of the hand. By evening, the palm of a hand was clearly visible on the cell wall.

Today, the mysterious hand print is still visible on the wall of the Carbon County Jail, having reappeared after countless scrubbings, re-paintings, re-plastering’s, and even the demolition and rebuilding of the entire wall.

Image by www.weirdus.com