Jerome sliding jail

The mines that did the damage built everything else first. The United Verde and its successors made Jerome a city of fifteen thousand in the 1920s; underground fires smoldered in the tunnels for years — a 1905 explosion, fed by floodwater hitting burning sections of the mine, killed or maimed a dozen miners waiting for the cage during a shift change. Underground mining was phased out in 1918 in favor of the pit, which is why the mountain eventually moved.

Jerome itself started as a claim, not a town: prospectors staked the copper in 1876, the United Verde grew into one of the richest mines in the territory, and the camp climbed Cleopatra Hill to fifteen thousand people by the 1920s — then fell to under a hundred when the pits closed in 1953. The National Historic Landmark district came in 1967; the artists and the haunting reports arrived together, which is how Jerome does things.

The jail came to rest, was rendered unusable but not destroyed, and became the town's most honest monument. ADOT later shifted it to its current footing; in March 2017 the Jerome Historical Society acquired it, stabilized the walls, and fenced it. It remains where gravity left it, more or less — the only municipal building in the file whose address was assigned by dynamite.

The reports are sparse, consistent with a building that has been empty since the slide — figures at the jail, a collective the file calls the prisoners. Jerome itself supplies the ambience: a town where the ground demonstrably moved, where fires burned under the streets for years, and where the local hospital is now a hotel guests report as occupied past capacity.

No prisoner is named, no death is attached to the cells. The file records the jail as the rare haunted site whose supernatural reputation is less remarkable than its documented commute.

The Historical Society intends a full restoration; for now the jail sits behind its iron fence on the slope it chose. Whatever the prisoners are reportedly doing there, they are doing it two hundred feet from where the law put them — a detail the file finds worth keeping.

The jail's legend, such as it is, benefits from proximity: Jerome's sliding blocks cracked a post office, a bank, and a drugstore along the same slope, so the prisoners' old address shares a file with half a downtown that emigrated downhill on its own.