HauntBound archive · catalog record
Reported phenomena — as catalogued
1869 Saloon, Funeral Home, and Jail Turned B&B
349 West Government Street, Taylors Falls, MN 55084
Research updated May 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
$$$
Suites from approximately $166 per night. Rates include full breakfast served in suite, internet, A/C, kitchen, and parking.
Access
Limited Access
Multi-building inn with stairs; original 1880s jail structure
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1869 · Oldest Jail in Minnesota (1884) · National Register of Historic Places · Prohibition-Era Bootlegging Tunnel · St. Croix River Valley Heritage
The Old Jail occupies a cluster of nineteenth-century buildings in Taylors Falls, a St. Croix River town in eastern Minnesota's Chisago County. The original saloon was constructed in 1869 by the Schottmuller Brothers and connected to a cave that ran to their nearby brewery. A two-story stable and livery dating to 1851 sat atop the saloon as living quarters.
The property's 'Cave' space, named for the brewery cave beneath it, has housed an unusually varied succession of businesses: a general store, a chicken-plucking operation, a beauty shop, and a mortuary. During Prohibition, when the building operated as a haberdashery, a back room opened into a tunnel that led through the hill to a bootleggers' route. Sections of the tunnel remain visible inside the property and in the hillside today.
The adjacent jail was constructed in 1884 and operated as a working county jail until the early twentieth century, when it was converted to living quarters for guests. It retains original wrought-iron bar doors and windows. The structure is built with two-inch-by-four-inch boards stacked flat rather than studded, an early heavy-timber construction method preserved in the jail walls.
The complex is the oldest registered B&B in Minnesota and is composed of buildings on the National Register of Historic Places.
Sources
Witness accounts collected by regional travel and paranormal-tourism coverage describe two recurring figures at the Old Jail. The first is a boy seen on the second and third floors of the Inn, most often in the rooms above the former funeral-home preparation area on the second floor. The second is a woman whose apparition has been reported on the third floor.
Guests and staff have additionally reported phantom cell doors slamming shut, shadow figures glimpsed in corners, and a sense of being watched in the jail wing. Reports cluster in the Cave and the original 1884 jail spaces, where the building's history of confinement and undertaking overlaps physically.
The property's narrative blends the funeral-home origin of the second floor (visible in surviving features like a former body-loading sliding door, now a window) with later jail and Prohibition-era uses. Sequential changes of use across more than 150 years have generated a layered ghost-lore record that the inn references in its public materials without packaging it as a paranormal-investigation product.
Notable Entities
Stay in apartment-style suites built into Minnesota's oldest jail (1884) and a Prohibition-era tunnel space called the Cave. Each suite includes private entrance and breakfast served in the room. The jail building retains its original wrought-iron bar doors and windows.
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