Judge Isaac C. Parker Courthouse

Isaac Parker sat as federal judge for the Western District of Arkansas at Fort Smith from 1875 until his death in 1896, with jurisdiction over more than 74,000 square miles of Indian Territory. He heard nearly 13,500 cases and sentenced 160 people to hang; 79 were executed on the gallows here. The nickname that followed him, the Hanging Judge, sat oddly with the man: Parker opposed capital punishment and lobbied without success to have the laws requiring it changed. The courthouse and a reconstruction of the gallows are now part of Fort Smith National Historic Site, open as a museum. Visitors describe the gallows ropes moving with no wind. Separately, staff at the Fort Smith Museum of History, which holds the original furniture from Parker's courtroom, report the sound of a gavel in empty rooms, and investigators working there have recorded it.