Tennessee State Prison

A castle-front penitentiary on Cockrill Bend, 6 miles west of downtown Nashville, shut since 1992. Hollywood kept using it after the state stopped: “The Green Mile” and “Walk the Line” both shot here.

The prison opened on February 12, 1898, behind a stone front designed to look like a castle. Its roughly 800 cells were over capacity on the first day.

From 1916 to 1960 the state put 125 men to death in the electric chair here, each one recorded in the warden’s ledger. The chair later moved to Riverbend.

A federal court ruled the overcrowding unconstitutional in Grubbs v. Bradley, the prison closed in June 1992, and a 1993 injunction bars the state from ever housing people here again.

Guides and the few people allowed inside over the years describe screams, cell bars clanking shut with no one there, and footsteps in corridors that have stood empty for decades.

Shadow figures turn up in other accounts, moving along the outer walls and through the cell blocks, sometimes in groups that read as a line of prisoners.

There is no public access. The buildings have been sealed since 1992 and closed for asbestos since 2011, trespassing is prosecuted, and the stone facade from the public road is the whole visit.