Seeking Beyond Paranormal

Old Pickens County Jail

May 3, 2025 | 3pm — 1am

The Claims | Equipment and Setup | The Investigation | Our Results

The Old Pickens County Jail is a historic jail located in Jasper, GA that was built in 1906 and served Pickens County through 1982. Next to it sits Kirby-Quinton Cabin, a small, one-bedroom log cabin that was moved to the property sometime in the 20th century. For ghost hunters, both buildings are offered as a pair for investigations, so we had the opportunity to investigate both at the same time.

The jail is a two-story structure with a brick and marble exterior, and a steel and concrete jail structure inside, which was considered inescapable for its time. The jail itself exists on the second floor of the building, with a rear entry on the first floor for inmates. The jail consisted of a main cell block for men, having 9 total beds (at the time of our visit), a smaller cell block for women with two beds (at the time of our visit) but presumably enough room to match the men's cell block in terms of capacity. Like any jail, there are claims of overcrowding at times, so the number of beds installed doesn't necessarily correlate to its peak number of housed inmates. At the top of the stairs leading to the cell blocks was the gallows, though the history of the building records no executions having ever taken place (the state took over executions by the time the jail was completed). The first floor consisted of the Sheriff's office, kitchen, and living quarters. The front two rooms appeared to be reconfigurable based on the Sheriff and his family at the time — at the time of our visit, one room was set up as a bedroom, while the other was more of a living room / multi-function type of space. Since 1982, the jail has been converted to a historic museum, and includes a variety of displays featuring jail-related parafernalia and period furniture.

Kirby-Quinton Cabin sits next door on the jail's property. It was built in the 1830s by Charles "Tsali" Dunbean, a local Cherokee who was relocated to Oklahoma through the infamous Trail of Tears. The cabin was sold to Stephen Kirby of Spartanburg, South Carolina, who established the first school in Jasper — Kirby Academy. Sometime after Kirby's death, the cabin was given to Tom Quinton, another educator located in Jasper who used the cabin to teach about local mountain heritage. After Quinton's death, the cabin's ownership was transferred to the Marble Valley Historical Society, and it was moved to its current location next to the jail. It is currently used as a house museum and education center.

The Claims

The claims of paranormal activity at the Old Pickens County Jail are difficult to find at best. There's not much information out there on just the objective history of the jail, so finding some treasure trove of paranormal reports associated with the building was just going to be a pipe dream. This is, of course, incredibly risky for paranormal investigators, let alone investigators like us who have to travel to get to the place. That being said, other teams came in handy when trying to find claims of paranormal activity at the jail, and evidently reports of strange activity started coming in as early as 1981 when the jail's function was being transferred to a new facility. There are reports of disembodied voices, footsteps, inexplicable temperature changes, and potentially even shadow figures.

In my research of the jail, I wanted to research other causes or factors that could possibly bolster the paranormal activity and give investigators good reason to come here. Not that I distrusted any of the claims or needed a certain amount of activity for the trip to be worthwhile, I just wanted to find some kind of angle that put this place on the paranormal map. While the gallows didn't see any deaths during the jail's entire operation, there were two reported suicides in the jail, with numerous other failed suicide attempts. And being a jail dating back to the early 20th century, naturally there is an unknown amount of jail violence, neglect, and related deaths that went unrecorded. So spiritually and/or energetically speaking, the amount of despair flowing through the walls of the building was notable for such a small jail. Additionally, I discovered that Jasper, GA is situated on or near something called an Earth Ring, which is said to be a small, regional, and circular counterpart to a Ley Line. That combined with the despair, deaths, and all around negativity associated with the Trail of Tears (which the jail sits on), sums up a substantial amount of Earth energies at play, if you're into such things.

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Equipment and Setup

This investigation saw the use of a pair of new police bodycams that we purchased on the recommendation of our guides at the Old South Pittsburg Hospital. These were purchased for the sole purpose of just having some static video cameras in our kit, but their small size, portability, form factor, and IR capabilities made them perfect for this investigation. We were able to use them (just one, rather) for an abandonment experiment that we set up early in the evening. If you're unfamiliar, abandonment in paranormal investigation is when you leave cameras and equipment rolling in a potentially haunted location, and then leave the location for a designated amount of time to see what happens while the location is unattended. Our particular experiment lasted only half an hour while we left to pick up snacks for the evening; the particular setup and results of which you can see at the beginning of our video below.

Per usual, we brought the rest of our typical kit, with the exception of one item. Our kit includes our REM Pod, EMF meters, voice recorders, Spirit Box with Estes Method setup, flashlights, catball toys, and our XLS Camera. However, it turns out our XLS camera is down for the count until we can troubleshoot the tablet's charging issue. Hopefully it's just a matter of getting a new cable, because we plan on using this piece of equipment extensively at our next investigation (the infamous Garnett House in Kansas!).

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The Investigation

As mentioned above, the investigtion started out with an abandonment experiment in the jail's office. The office and kitchen are the two hot spots for paranormal activity in the first floor portion of the building. We would return to the office and kitchen later in the evening for more in-depth work, but upon returning from abandonment, we headed upstairs to begin the investigation in earnest.

Being our first team-up investigation, I wanted to start off with something we could do as a group. So we opted to try out a double Estes Method session. This is the same as a normal Estes Method session, except two people went under to listen to the Spirit Boxes instead of just one. Arin and I took turns asking questions, while Liz and Jecca went under. Activity was supposed to take place in both the men's and womens' cell blocks, so we split up the group into each cell block — Liz, Arin, and I stayed in the men's cell block bullpen while Jecca and Dan set up in the women's cell block (while Jecca had a video camera recording her responses, Dan relayed her responses back to us in real time).

Typically with our Estes Method sessions, our responses are cryptic and only tangentially related to our questions. While we saw that here somewhat, there were a surprising amount of direct responses too. We also started getting our own names (David and Arin) here in the bullpen as well, which would continue to be an unnerving theme the rest of the investigation. As the Estes Method session continued, the conversation started to shift in a way that suggested we were talking to two entities, and that they were talking to each other as well. I've mentioned it before, but the paranormal community is still on the fence on the Estes Method's place in paranormal investigations for a few reasons. For one, with as much bias as it removes, it still effectively works on the honor system, so trust and honesty are paramount to its effectiveness. And two, who's to say that the words the listener hears are actually of paranormal origin? In my opinion, provided that reason one is a given, its these statistically odd words for radio broadcasts like names and swear words (these come later in the evening) that give credence to the second reason. Sure, you might hear a name every once in a while on the radio, but how frequently does that actually happen, and the same names repeated over and over? And the same names as the investigators asking questions? The skeptic in me is ready and able to accept a rational explantion, of course, but in instances like this, it's a little too far beyond coincedence for me to just assume there's some non-paranormal reason behind it.

Following the Estes Method session upstairs, we conducted a voice recorder session in the same area. Since we've resigned ourselves to not hearing any potential EVPs in the moment through the speakers on our recorders, we just asked a long string of questions for the purpose of reviewing the audio later on during analysis. We also decided to set out our REM Pod during this session, explaining how to activate it prior to our questioning. It turned out to be a fairly lucrative voice recorder session — we managed to capture two EVPs, one of which appears to be a direct response, and the other captures some footsteps we didn't hear at the time (which correlates with the claims, by the way!). The two EVPs are listed below; we recommend listening to them with headphones and the volume turned up. They've already been edited and cleaned up a bit, but the actual EVPs are still rather quiet. Not only did we capture two EVPs, but as we were wrapping up the session, we started to get our first REM Pod activity of the night. This was particularly exciting because REM Pods are notoriously difficult to get activity from, so when they go off, you know something interesting is happening!

While we were upstairs, our team also worked its way through a personal experience Arin had. We were chatting after a session when Arin saw a cast light (from our camera lights) get blocked out at the back of the cell block. All of us were either standing still or seated at the time of the incident, and we were able to recreate the effect by walking in front of the camera light, producing the witnessed shadow on the back wall. Could this have been the rumored and elusive shadow figure from the claims peering around the corner to check us out? Whatever it was, we put our due diligence into trying to recreate it and find other possible explanations for it, which is critical work for investigations like this.

Back downstairs, we opted to duplicate our efforts from earlier with another Estes Method session. This time around, we had the REM Pod and a flashlight set out on the desk in the office, with listeners in both the office and in the kitchen with the same pairings as before (Jecca and Liz, David and Arin). This is where things started to get weirder in a couple of ways. First, we were getting our names more and more, even including Dan. But we also started getting some pretty negative responses, including profanity and what seemed like a strong desire to end our communication. However, when you listen to the conversation after the fact, it almost seems like we were listening in to some residual conversation. When you watch the video below and see our downstairs Estes Method session, imagine you're looking in on a jailor and a prisoner, or two prisoners and you'll see what I mean. Additionally, we got an absolutely incredible amount of REM Pod activity during this session. Not only was is the REM feature going off, but the temperature probe was going off too, indicating temperature changes +/- 5 degrees, which also lines up with the claims.

Perhaps the weirdest thing to happen wasn't discovered until we all got back home: We found that some of our footage got corrupted. While it was half of our downstairs Estes footage, it wasn't really enough damage to change too much for us (Seeking Beyond). However, disappointingly, most of Arin and Liz' footage got corrupted. They estimate 90% of what they shot became unreadable, which is just a shocking amount of footage to lose for anyone. It's entirely probable that both instances of file corruption have nothing to do with the paranormal, but it happens frequently enough to other investigators that a paranormal cause is certainly on the table. And it's a little too coincedental that both of us suffered some form of file corruption at the same time during the same shoots. I'm just thankful most of our footage was useable so we could produce our video, and I'm hoping our video below makes up for the footage Arin and Liz lost in some way.

With that being said, here is our video of the investigation. It's a hair over an hour long. Sorry this video is so Estes-heavy — the first part is there because that's how the investigation started, but the second part is there mostly just to highlight how much REM Pod activity we got that night. It really was incredble to see, and this one investigation made that purchase wholly worth it. We hope you enjoy the video. And if you don't mind, please head over to the video on YouTube itself and hit the like button and add a comment! We'd love to hear what you think of the investigation and the video itself!

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Our Results

I can't say this enough, but this investigation was absolutely incredible. Not having too many claims up front certainly posed a risk to our collective team since we were traveling several hours to get there. But the activity we experienced definitely showed us that Old Pickens County Jail does not disappoint. I feel we may have left this place a bit spoiled, as the results of our investigation are both those of quality and quantity. If you're a paranormal investigator looking for a good location to visit here in the Southeast, definitely look up Old Pickens County Jail in Jasper, GA. With that said, here are the results of our investigation:

We'd like to thank the Pickens Historical Society for facilitating this investigation. Regardless of what the jail itself represents, it really is a charming place to visit and it was such a fun place to investigate. We'd also like to thank our friends Arin and Liz again for inviting us along. We'll ghost hunt with you any day!

by David Reimer, posted May 10, 2025

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Who We Are

Seeking Beyond Paranormal is a team of paranormal investigators based in Huntsville, Alabama. First started as a fun way to visit some of the country’s most haunted locations, Seeking Beyond now explores the realm of paranormal investigation.

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