Haunted San Quentin State Prison

Haunted San Quentin State Prison
Paul Dale Roberts, HPI's Esoteric Detective
Halo Paranormal Investigations
www.cryptic916.com/
Email: jazmaonline@gmail.com
HPI Schedule: jazmaonline.boards.net/thread/1748/hpi-schedule-2021
Sacramento Paranormal Haunted Hotline: 916 203 7503

I can honestly say that I believe that ALL prisons are haunted. The reason why I say that is because of all the inmates that die in prison from being murdered by other inmates, suicides, executions, etc. I have been to San Quentin. No, not as an inmate, but as a guest. My former best man invited me and my family to have lunch at San Quentin Prison, his name is Sandy Ewing. Sandy's wife for a small period of time was the acting warden of San Quentin and Sandy was a very established attorney for the State of California. From Sandy's home, you could see the prison. When we arrived at the prison to have lunch, we were told not to make any kind of eye contact with the inmates. So, when I was eating my lunch, I definitely kept focused on my food. In my family, I have two former correctional officers that would shower me with stories about working in the prison system. When I was eating my lunch at the prison, the only thing I could think about was just how haunted is this prison?

Fortunately for me, I already knew a few stories. Stories that I didn't get from Sandy, nor did I get them from my family members who work in the prison system. I got my stories from the time I worked as a Key Data Operator in the California Department of Justice. When I worked at the Department of Justice, there were two notable cases I worked on, they were Charles Manson's file and Roman Polanski's file. My job was to key in new information into these files. During my short time at this Department, I met a couple of correctional officers that worked at San Quentin. The first things I asked these two correctional officers is if they ever experienced anything paranormal at the prison and to my surprise both officers said "yes".

Before, I talk about their experiences, let me tell you a story about Amos Lunt, San Quentin's executioner. Amos was a veteran of the Civil War and served with the 3rd Infantry Massachusetts Regiment and he was a former police officer. Amos before becoming San Quentin's executioner had already seen a lot of death. The first execution that Amos performed was for condemned prison Lee Sing who committed a first-degree murder of Ah Kee. Lunt would oversee 20 executions during his career at San Quentin. Lunt started having PTSD when he saw prisoner John Miller's execution. John Miller basically had no neck and Lunt told the warden, perhaps Miller should have a shorter drop, the warden didn't listen to Lunt and when Miller was executed, there was blood all over the place and Miller was practically decapitated. After this execution, Lunt became a mental wreck. Lunt experienced extreme PTSD and claimed that 20 ghosts of the people he executed were haunting him. Lunt felt like he was being followed by ghosts, they would wake him up in the middle of the night. Lunt felt the ghost were trying to kill him. Lunt finally had to be sent to an insane asylum and finally he died on September 19, 1901 at the age of 55.

One of the correctional officers that I befriended made claim that Amos Lunt still haunts the prison and that he has seen the ghost of Lunt during the time he worked at San Quentin. The correctional officer said another time he encountered Lunt, he was sitting on the floor weeping. Both correctional officers said that inmates complain at times about seeing ghosts in their cells and one inmate complained that a ghost kept pulling his blankets off of him. The inmate requested to be moved into another cell in which he eventually was accommodated.

At San Quentin, 215 prisoners were hanged. 196 prisoners went to the gas chamber and 11 have received lethal injection. With all of these deaths, not counting the murders and suicides, there have been a lot of people that died in San Quentin. Women also get executed at San Quentin. Women death row inmates are transferred from Central California Women's Facility (Chowchilla, CA) by bus to San Quenton for execution. That is probably the reason why a couple of inmates have claimed that they saw a ghostly woman at the prison with long brown hair floating around from cell-to-cell.

San Quentin opened in 1852. From 1852 to 1944, when prisoners were interrogated, they were tortured. Some were even tortured to death. That all ended in 1944. The torture of inmates would leave a strong residual energy in the prison. San Quentin was actually named after a Coast Miwok Warrior named Quentin. San Quentin has had its share of infamous notables from Charles Bolles aka Black Bart to the singer Merle Haggard to Charles Manson to S.S. Millard - filmmaker to actor Danny Trejo to Robert Kennedy's assassin Sirhan Sirhan. With all of the negative energy that resonates in this prison, the hauntings must be a hundred-fold.