Morgan County

Let's step out of the story for a moment and talk about the real place, because the truth behind Brushy Mountain is every bit as heavy as any ghost story I could invent.

Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary sits in the community of Petros in Morgan County in the rugged Appalachian foothills of East Tennessee.

To understand why a prison stands on that mountain at all, we have to go back to a fight over coal, labor, and who gets to be forced to work for free.

In the late 1800s, Tennessee practiced something called convict leasing.

The state did not decide it no longer wanted the labor of its prisoners.

It decided it wanted to keep the profit for itself.

So Tennessee bought its own coal land in Morgan County and built its own prison and its own mine.

Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary opened in 1896. and roughly two hundred and ten convicts from the old lease system became its very first inmates the original prison was a wooden structure built by prison labor and the mines were not off in the distance the mouth of the mine was tucked right up against the prison itself the men did not commute to work they lived at the doorway of it The coal on that mountain was reportedly rich in methane, the explosive gas that haunts every coal mine.

We're

in the Scott County and Morgan County area.

That way, if you're coming through, you can actually investigate the jail and investigate the Village of Historic Rugby because they're only about 20 miles apart.

So we're trying to kind of create, rather than just a pass-through, something that you can do all weekend long if you're in town.

I slept for about three and a half hours and got like a solid three minute and 15 second, when I compiled it all together, series of EVPs.

And what's fascinating about Brushy Mountain is that's where we would have sent all are state or federal prisoners from the jail.

So, you know, being a county jail, you know, you have typically shorter sentences, but the ones who were murderers or, like I said, had committed a state or federal crime and they were sentenced, we would send them to Brushy Mountain or to Morgan County Correctional Facility.

If they if they had the longer sentence.

Mm-hmm.

So I would rather take chances on a universal healthcare system than, again, here in the state of Tennessee, in my career, I was in Morgan County, Tennessee, which is where Lynchburg is, and which is Jack Daniels, and I was working with the health department.

And she said, "Oh, we're writing a grant to get a blood pressure monitor." And I said, "What?" And she said, "We actually don't have a blood pressure monitor open to the public that people can use."

Mm.

He came to believe that some British elites would be much happier doing more physical or practical kinds of work, and he thought they'd thrive in a place like America, where people didn't get so hung up on class distinctions.

So he found some land in Morgan County, Tennessee, and developed it as a place where those men from the UK could come to shed the limits and expectations of the British upper class.

He built the town up pretty quickly.

There was an Anglican church, of course, a library outfitted with first edition books, an inn named for a passage in Canterbury Tales, houses, workshops.

Cordell climbs cell towers for a living, and on the afternoon he wrote about, he was two hundred and sixty feet up one with nothing to do.

That was October of 2019 on a ridge in Morgan County, Tennessee, up on the Cumberland Plateau.

He was thirty-three, and he worked for a contractor out of Knoxville that swapped out antennas for the phone carriers.

The job that week was a three hundred-foot tower at the end of a mile and a half of gravel road with a fenced compound at the bottom about the size of a tennis court.