EMERALD BAR AND GRILL
Location: The Emerald Bar and Grill is located at 1165 West Avenue in Historic Boise (modern Snowden), Idaho near the conjunction of Highway 30/Interstate 84 and Interstate 184.
Description Of Place: The Emerald Bar And Grill is located in the former Snowden Correctional Institute, a massive three-story brick and mortar structure in the heart of Snowden, Idaho. It consists of three cell blocks and the main administration building which includes offices, processing rooms, the commissary (now a bar and grill) and the medical ward. Much of the cell blocks are intact and used for storage. Five towers surround the old exercise area which has been converted into a garden. With the current public access, the location has been designed to accompany community gatherings.
Ghostly Manifestations: Prisons and hospitals have something in common in paranormal circles; they are both huge batteries of human emotion. Massive amounts of human energy from the most basest mortal emotions imbed these locations and cause what it believed to be hauntings and place memories, and if the energy is strong enough, it can cause the mortal shades or ghosts of human beings to become what are known as earthbound spirits. While it may not be as infamous as Alcatraz or have the presence of Eastern State Penitentiary, the former Snowden Correctional Institute also seems to home for something that is sometimes invisible, mostly quiet but unable to be ignored.
"Do I believe the place is haunted?" Eric Sommars is a tall, burly former Marine, former cop, former bouncer and current bar owner who looks as if nothing scares him. He's part Cherokee Indian, and on his arm which is as large as a telephone pole, he has a faded tattoo of an eagle carrying away a young maiden. "I don't know. but when I say it's time to close, I'm closing whether you're done with your drink or not!" In November 1992, he was accompanying writer William Collins on a tour of the Old Snowden Correctional facility to discern if it was really haunted for a story. At that time, no one knew what to do with the old outdated structure, but based on an investment by Collins and the imagination of the late Walter "Curley" Green, Sommars found a way to keep the old prison intact and recreated as a prosperous business.
"At that time," Sommars continues. "I was wanting to open a bar, but my money status was out the window. All I had was an idea, but after some cajoling between the bank, the zoning commission and the city council, I acquired legal custody of the building and the property it's on. The idea was to reconvert the prison commissary into a public tavern with a penitentiary theme, and why not? I'd seen former jails turned into everything from youth hostels to restaurants. Why can't you do it with a bigger version of the real thing? So, I did it, and I got away with it. Unfortunately, I forgot to get the permission of the ghosts!"
Sommars and his employees have heard voices, footsteps and sounds of people in the commissary area. The echoes often sound like a mass of men coming in to drink, but when one looks up, no one is there. Where men used to line up to get trays of food is a long counter area with a shelf area of glasses, but every so often, a glass slides upward at the angle they're on and crashes on the floor. It's an almost common activity. Where tables and chairs were bolted to the concrete floor are now booths and tables on a wood floor with police memorabilia on the walls amidst movie posters like "Escape From Alcatraz," "Dirty Harry" and "The Untouchables." The guns are fake or have the trigger mechanism removed. The old handcuffs are wielded shut, but the sound of a former security guard walking through the room is still heard to this day.
Reports of strange activity appear to come from all areas of the former reformatory and include strange anomalies in photographs, as well as visual and audio recordings. The prison cells as well as the former chapel, appear to have more than a few stories. The sometimes violent past of the facility also appears to have left its mark. The solitary confinement area or "The Hole" where guard Edward Wolowitz was beaten to death has been noted as a particularly active spot. People believe its his spirit taking offense to the current use of the property who is mostly active.
"I knew Ed." Leonard Ward was guard at Snowden from 1958 to 1963. "He was a good guy. His death was the most unnecessary act in the whole history of the prison, and although I don't believe in ghosts, I do believe its possible he would stay behind to do his job because that's the sort of man he was."
Visitors to the area around the old commissary have reported feeling an overwhelming sense of despair and depression. Near the West Gate where guard Sheldon Wilford was gunned down after a struggle with former inmate Philip Pratt, people have reported seeing the scene play out before their eyes before the men vanish completely. At night, people think they see Wilford standing up there and looking down, but when you look back, that tower is empty.
"You can't even get up there anymore." Sommars adds. "The stairwell in that tower came crashing down a few years back after a bad storm. I guess the rust compromised it something, but if someone wants to get up there, I hope they got a three story ladder in their back pocket."
Perhaps the most famous reputedly haunted area of the prison is in the superintendent's quarters of the administration building. Ironically, people report the most imposing presence of the entire facility is in the warden's office where Warden Colin Harris holed up during the 1963 fire until rescuers and SWAT could get him out alive. People feel there is a presence in there. They hear coughing sounds and feel a choking sensation as if something was making it hard to breath. In addition to those feelings, others have reported being touched or unnerved by the sensation of being watched.
"Over the years," Sommars adds. "I've found new and creative ways to exploit the building and get money out of it. I tried renting the offices as living space but couldn't make it work, and I'm renting the old cells as storage space, but people are always asking to move their stuff to new cells because something... or someone... keeps popping open boxes, spilling the contents or just moving things around."
Storage customers have a pass key to the cell block and and an individual key numbered to the cell they are renting. Several of them have reported hearing boisterous voices and laughter from over their heads even during the day and the sounds of doors opening and closing. Much of the security features are still used today, and motion detectors go off by themselves in the cell blocks even when the rooms are locked up tight. One of the bar employees has seen a figure rushing from the administration building into the cell block, and while looking for that figure, became distracted by another figure rushing back the same way behind them.
"For obvious reasons," Sommars adds. "No one wants to be alone here after dark, but I do host nightime parties and it does become necessary to be here to close up even if you have to run as you clean the tables and rush through picking up the stools, but when the stools slide off by themselves or the chairs end up ten feet where they once were, then I can understand if you really got to go."
"I'm pretty rational when it comes to the activity here." Junior manager Kaley Galecki is the niece of former guard Leonard Ward. She handles the day to day duties and supervision of the bar. "I have yet to be trully scared of this place, and sometimes, I get kind of complacent about it. I've seen the shadows and dismissed them as tricks of light. I've heard the noises and learned to zone them out, but some things are a bit harder to ignore.
"Last December, we were hosting a birthday party for a police officer and had a band here. There were decorations, dozens of people, a large buffet set up - I mean the full works, but the second the cake came out and on the first lyrics of "Happy Birthday," everything shut down. Poof! Pitch black. Nothing. It took, what, almost an hour to track down the fuse box and check it, and it's in a locked secure room, the same way it was when this was all a prison. It's hard to get to in the middle of the day."
"Someone here was not thrilled to be celebrating a police officer's party." Sommars adds.
History: Built sometime between 1870 and 1873, the facility known as the Snowden Correctional Facility near Boise, Idaho served as a prison for close to one hundred years and was built on the site of a former military compound for holding military deserters, outlaws, undesirables and illegal immigrants. It was rebuilt and refurbished to its present state as a Federal prison in the 1930s to hold bootleggers and supposed gangsters. Seattle-based architect Wallace M. Langham, one of the architects who worked at Rose Red, was hired to design the structure, and he immediately consulted sketches of Eastern State Penitentiary near Philadelphia to serve as his guide, improving and simplifying the design to accompany a small construction site. Many of the first inmates came from military prisons and local jails, but facilities were not ideal at first as the local sewer system was not designed for such a large facility. Eight years would pass until the updates to the sewer would be brought to code. It is believed that the facility has held over 2,400,000 inmates between 1874 and 1963 when it closed. Only seven men were ever able to successfully escape in those years, but there were countless deaths and murders in those years. In 1963, a small-time criminal named James William Brady was incarcerated here, and on the day he was locked up, he set fire to his bed with a blaze that took over much of the prison as inmates rioted, attacked the guards and tried to escape in the confusion. Many of the guards managed to escape, running ahead and locking gates behind them as some inmates and guards stayed behind to stop the fire. Fifty-eight men lost their lives, including Brady, but many of the details never reached the public, instead getting overshadowed by the events of the Kennedy Assassination.
During restoration, inmates had been moved to Idaho State Penitentiary, and before repairs were over, it was decided to leave them there and close the facility. Although maintenance had slowed to a crawl, the structure remained in limbo between demolition and declared a historical site until 1992 when it was sold in auction. Today, the property occupies land with a strip mall and occupies several franchises exploiting the existing Emerald Bar and Grill and storage cells as well as seasonal ghost hunts and walks to curious guests. The ghost hunts are overnight investigations that allow their guests to explore the facility for paranormal activity, while the ghost walks are a guided tour through the facility that takes guests to the paranormal hot spots to hear the accounts of ghostly activity. The reported haunting of the old prison has even attracted the attention of several paranormal-themed television shows over the years. It was featured in a segment on the TV series, "Sinister Sites," which fictionalized some of the history and embellished the facts. Interiors were also used in the movie, "Caged," starring Mikayla and Chad Dylan Cooper.
Identity of Ghosts: Quite a number of spirits are believed to haunt the location. Former guard Edward Wolowitz was first identified in 1971 by a building inspector who reported that a guard on the site escorted through the location. Former guard Sheldon Wilford has been observed in the tower intermittently between 1975 and 2005. The one spirit everyone tries to contact is that of James William Brady to learn why he started the fire. A petty thief known for eleven bank robberies in the Fifties, he was mostly known for using "John Wilkes Booth" as an alias and for complex car chases that crossed state lines and involved dangerous stunts. Arrested and extradited from Las Vegas in 1960, he was serving a fifty year sentence for nine counts of theft, twenty-three counts of evading the police and seventy three counts of public mischief when he took his life in 1963.
"A psychic who visited here last year said she felt spirits going back before the prison was here." Galecki mentions. "She thought their could be as many as thirty ghosts here if not more."
Source/Comments: Behind Bars (1973), Activity based on Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Idaho State Prison Penitentiary in Boise, Idaho, Moon River Brewery in Savannah, Georgia and the Manhattan Bistro in New York City.
"Sinister Sites" from House of Bones (2010)
Mikayla from "Hannah Montana" (2005-2011 TV Series, Disney Channel)
Chad Dylan Cooper from "Sonny With A Chance" (aka "So Random") (2009-2011 TV Series, Disney Channel)