Before it was a prison at all, the ground south of Ashwell was a wartime airfield and camp, home in early 1944 to paratroopers of the US 82nd Airborne Division's 505th, 507th and 508th regiments as they trained for the Normandy landings. Ashwell Prison itself was built on part of that site and opened in 1955 as an open prison for adult men, later converted to a secure Category C establishment in October 1987 and expanded again in 2008 with a new £6 million wing that brought capacity up to 619 inmates.
The prison's final years were troubled. A serious disturbance in 2003 caused damage in one wing, and in the early hours of 11 April 2009 a much larger riot broke out, eventually involving around 400 prisoners and requiring the specialist Operation Tornado response; by the time it was brought under control roughly three-quarters of the prison had been made uninhabitable. With repair costs judged too high to justify, the prison formally closed at the end of March 2011, and Rutland County Council acquired the site in 2013, converting most of it into Oakham Enterprise Park for office and light industrial use.
What survives of the original cell blocks and fencing has found a second life as a venue for commercial paranormal investigation and airsoft events rather than sitting entirely derelict. Ghost-hunt companies running events there report a fairly standard but consistent set of claims: voices heard calling from empty cells, footsteps pacing the upper landings, cell doors opening with nobody near them, objects moving on their own, and shadowy figures glimpsed watching from the balcony wings. No specific former inmate or incident is named as the source of any of this; the attribution offered, when one is offered at all, is simply to the prison's own population over more than fifty years of use, and further back to the wartime paratroopers who occupied the site before it. As with most closed-prison ghost-hunt venues, the claims come entirely from event organisers and participants rather than any documented history of disturbance while the prison was operating, and should be read as recent, promotional single-report material rather than an older local tradition.
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