Old Noxubee County Jail

The jail went up in 1907, a three-story Romanesque brick by the Pauly Jail Company of St. Louis — builders of half the South's surviving historic jails — advertised with steam heat, electric lights, hot and cold baths and 'saw and file-proof cells.' It replaced an 1860 jail so porous that prisoners reportedly picked the bricks out of the walls to leave. It served until 1978, entered the National Register the same year it closed, and reopened as the county public library in 1983–84 with bars, cell partitions and the gallows left in place.

On the executions the record gets interesting: the gallows stand in the building, but the library's own director notes no surviving record of anyone hanged on them — Connor's Beacon coverage places his gallows across the street. Whether Si died inside the jail or in view of it is a detail the file keeps open.

Connor's own account runs further than the scaffold sermon: angels at the gallows telling him 'Si, don't you be skeered or shamed or nothing for you is a child of God'; a flight to heaven where he met his grandmother, his sister and 'my little baby' — and saw 'lots of Noxubee County folks up there. Yassah, white people too.' He preached to crowds in his final days, at his own request public.

The file's dryest detail is the execution logistics: Sheriff Dantzler reportedly could not spring the trap because Connor said Jesus looked just like him — a public executioner had to be brought in to pull it. Lore attributing the jail's apparitions to Connor circulates through Alan Brown's Mississippi ghost books and the local retellings; library staff report the building's reputation far more often than they report experiences. A ghost-hunting team that spent the night got a meter jump on 'Si Connor, are you here' — and, per the director, declared the resident ghosts friendly.

The building itself is a documented type: one of the St. Louis Pauly Jail Company's surviving catalog — the firm had been building county lockups since 1856, and a remarkable share of the South's standing historic jails carry its plate. The Macon jail's advertised luxuries — steam heat, electric light, hot and cold baths — read differently against Connor's calendar. The conversion kept everything atmospheric: third-floor gallows, cell partitions, bars over the windows, the whole interior now wrapped in library stacks. Librarians give tours of the apparatus; ghost hunters book the occasional overnight; the meter reportedly jumped once, which is the whole paranormal file in a sentence.

The Noxubee County Library still loans books between jail bars, under a gallows nobody can prove was ever used. The file keeps the rare combination of a quotable dead man, an instrument of execution in situ, and reports modest enough that the librarian who works late in the attic has never once filed one.