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Heavily Investigated

The drum doesn't spin anymore, but people say the Squirrel Cage Jail still knows you're inside it. Jailors in the 1950s reportedly refused to sleep in certain wings; today's visitors describe cold drafts with no source, tugs on their sleeves, moaning from empty tiers, and shadow figures drifting between the iron wedges of cells. EVPs have been recorded, temperature spikes charted, and more than a few investigators have simply turned around and walked back out. Four men died here — one hanged, one fell three stories, one ate glass — and the weight of all that suffering has a way of pressing back.

Pottawattamie County built its rotary jail in 1885 — a three-story iron drum of 64 pie-wedge cells that spun on a hand crank, theoretically requiring just one jailor. One of only 18 ever constructed, it was hailed as a "19th-century marvel" and promptly became a documented disaster: limbs were crushed when the drum jammed, inmates couldn't be segregated, and the noise alone reportedly drove men to madness. It was declared unfit for human habitation in 1969. Historical Society members literally stood in front of bulldozers to save it. The building is now a museum — which is either ironic or inevitable.