WANDERING WILBURY'S: Brushy Mountain State Prison

Way up in the hollows of Tennessee stands a large fortress named  Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary that opened in 1896 and closed in 2009. It was a Maximum security prison that was one of the worst places you could land serving your sentence! It was called "THE END OF THE LINE"!
  When it first opened IN 1896 it used prison labor to mine the local coal mines, if you didn't dig 2 tons a day you got strung up on a pole in the main yard and got whipped! Or you got strung up by your thumbs and put in THE HOLE, a 8' X 6' totally dark cell in the basement where after a few days you would go blind from the darkness! Prisoners were housed four to a cell designed for two inmates. Two would be at the mine and two would be in their cell on a constance rotation. The prison was designed to hold 600 prisoners and at one time housed 1100 prisoners!
Its most famous prisoner was James Earl Ray, the convicted assassin of Martin Luther King, Jr., and one of the only ones to ever escape this place, notable inmates included Bryon Looper, who was convicted in 2000 for the murder of State Senator Tommy Burks and began serving his life sentence at Brushy Mountain. In the novel The Silence of the Lambs, Dr. Hannibal Lecter makes a deal in which he is to be transferred to the prison in exchange for information about the serial killer Buffalo Bill that would enable authorities to rescue his latest victim.
It now is open to the public for tours and also has a moonshine bar and a nice café along with a few classic car shows and concerts in the Summer.
Geni and I enjoyed walking around this prison, it takes two to three hours and we were lucky we hooked up with a old guard to explain to us the history of this dark place, and are very glad we did not spend time here!