The Old Jail on Route 6A Is Closed Until Summer 2027. Saturday, It Hands Out Candy.

Somebody scratched a ship into an oak wall in Barnstable Village. The building's 1971 National Register nomination recorded "designs of ships and schooners and broad arrow markings scratched there by prisoners." The Barnstable Historical Society says the cell walls also carry graffiti dated 1698, 1798 and 1808.

The building is a small wooden jail, built on the orders of the colony courts and used as the Barnstable County jail until 1820, according to the society. It has six cells. The county sheriff's office puts its capacity at about six people.

Who ended up in those cells is the first surprise. Colonial judges generally granted bail, the society writes, and wealthy defendants generally avoided confinement by paying bribes. So the jail held, mostly, the poorest and the disliked, along with debtors.

The second surprise is how much of what gets said about this jail doesn't match its paperwork, and how much darker the paperwork is than the legend.

The society's page puts it flatly: "Barnstable's Old Jail is the oldest wooden jail in the United States." The sheriff's office repeats it. The Cape Cod Times' Oct. 22 Halloween guide calls it "America's oldest wooden jail, circa 1690."

The federal file is more careful. The National Register nomination, prepared by the Massachusetts Historical Commission and dated April 6, 1971, calls it "the earliest known jail of Plymouth Colony and one of the oldest wooden structures of its kind extant in New England." It also won't commit to a year. A jail for the new county was ordered in 1686, prisoners were being held in it by 1702, and the building "is believed" to date from between 1690 and 1700.

So "about 1690" is fair. "Oldest in the nation" is how the society bills it, and we're leaving that claim with the society.

Then there's the move. Wikipedia says the jail was found attached to a barn, separated from it and moved to the Coast Guard Heritage Museum grounds in 1968. A Cape Cod Times roundup of haunted places gives 1968, too. The historical society and the sheriff's office both say 1972, and the sheriff's account adds that the jail was rolled along Route 6A from Old Jail Lane to Cobb's Hill.

The 1971 nomination takes a side without meaning to. It places the jail "about 120 feet south of Route 6A, about 60 feet west of Old Jail Lane," and adds: "There is no reason to doubt that this is the original location."

Read plainly, that puts the jail on its first lot three years after the year Wikipedia moves it. The 1972 date fits the federal paper. The sheriff's history adds one more entry to that decade: a fire set by vandals in 1973, a year after the move. The walls, it says, remain mostly intact.

The prisoners with a paper trail are where this gets heavy.

On the night of April 26, 1717, a storm put Samuel Bellamy's flagship, the Whydah, onto the bars off Wellfleet. The ship had been built in London in 1715 to carry enslaved Africans and was on its second voyage when Bellamy captured it early that year, according to American Ancestors' Vita Brevis. It was a slave ship before it was ever a pirate ship.

A smaller captured vessel, the Mary Anne, wrecked the same night. As the Provincetown Independent reconstructed it in 2025 from court records, its seven pirates were in the Barnstable County jail by nightfall, and Thomas Davis, a carpenter who came ashore from the Whydah, was in jail by April 29. By the society's dates, the county jail that spring was this building.

Six of the survivors were hanged in Charlestown on Nov. 15, 1717, and two were acquitted in Boston, the Independent reports. A ninth, John Julian, a 16-year-old Native American, was never tried and was likely sold into slavery. A 1999 National Geographic article, as the Independent summarizes it, suggests he was the "Julian the Indian" later enslaved by John Quincy and executed in 1733.

What came up from the Whydah's wreck is now in the old ZooQuarium building on Route 28, which CMC wrote about Oct. 13.

The jail's most famous prisoner may never have existed. Wikipedia says the jail held Goody Hallett, Bellamy's lover, in 1716, the year before the wreck. The society hedges: "Legend has it" that she "spent some time in the Old Jail." The Vita Brevis piece calls Maria Hallett "a prominent folkloric figure" whose "existence is questionable."

In the story, she becomes the Witch of Wellfleet. It's a legend, and we're printing it as one. The men from the wrecks left depositions and trial records. She left a story.

She's also the prisoner said to haunt the place, which tells you which kind of record a ghost story prefers.

The society lists the Old Jail as closed until summer 2027, with one exception. On Saturday, Oct. 31, from 1 to 6 PM, it opens for guided tours and trick-or-treating, according to the society's events page as of Oct. 28. The Times guide lists the tours as free, "historical and spooky." The society says donations are appreciated.

The jail sits on Cobb's Hill, on the grounds of the Coast Guard Heritage Museum at 3353 Main St. on Route 6A. The society says it's also the start and end point for tours of Barnstable Village's reputedly haunted spots. How much of Saturday's tour leans on the court records and how much on the legend is up to the guides.

The walls have ships scratched into them. In 1717, the county jail held men from two.