GUIDE TELLS OF FEAR
A PRISON tour guide claims he was burned by a ghost in a former death row cell.
Paul Toole, 42, suffered a nasty scar on his hand after feeling a searing pain as he showed a group of visitors around the abandoned Shepton Mallet Prison.
He had been telling the story of Private Lee Davis, a murderer and rapist who was hanged at the Somerset facility in December 1943.
Paul told the Daily Star Sunday: “As part of the tour we show the visitors the condemned man cells.”
He was standing by the door leading from Davis’ cell through to the execution room.
“It was the first time I had told this story to the visitors.
“As I was talking I felt this very sharp pain but I tried to ignore it. When I looked down at it later it looked like a cigarette burn.”
Paul had researched the story of Private Davis, an 18-year-old American GI, who was executed for the murder of Cynthia Lay and the rape of her friend, Muriel Fawden.
It is claimed that Davis could not accept his fate and as he was led to the gallows he wailed, “Oh my God, I’m going to die”. Paul said his experience in the cell has caused him sleepless nights and he now insists on locking up with a colleague.
He said: “People probably think I’m a bit crackers but there is so much that goes on in the prison.
“Lights go on and off, you can hear doors banging and areas of the prison will get really cold all of a sudden.” The prison, which closed in
2013, is renowned for ghostly goings on.
It is believed the ghost of a woman in white, who died of a broken heart in
1680 after murdering her fiancé, still wanders the empty corridors between wings A and B.
Some prison officers were said to have refused to work night shifts at the jail as they feared seeing the deathly figure wandering the corridors. Shepton Mallet – where the Kray twins were once held – was the oldest working prison in the UK when it was shut down.
Many of the inmates executed there are buried in unmarked graves in the grounds.
It has been opened to the public ahead of a redevelopment which will see it turned into flats.