A creek-side home is available in Belton. It has 18-inch-thick exterior walls, which suggest unusual energy efficiency. The three-bedroom, two-story structure stands out prominently when compared to other properties near it in the 200 block of North Pearl Street.

“It’s a fun place for somebody that likes antiques,” said Ron Welch, who owns the home with his wife, Chita.

The Welches have filled the home with antiques but the home itself is, quite literally, a collector’s item.

Before it was a nice quaint home capable of sheltering a family from the elements, it housed some of the most notorious men in Bell County. The home at 210 N. Pearl with stained glass accents adorning the front entrance was originally a county jail when it was built in the 1800s.

The building has also been a pool hall and a battered women’s shelter, according to Welch, and he and his wife see potential for much more.

Take a tour of the 2,400-square-foot building with Welch, a retiree with a food service and sales background, and he espouses the possibilities. The building is zoned both commercial and residential.

Welch envisions a restaurant tea room, law office, rehearsal dinners or small receptions at the building with Nolan Creek serving as a backdrop for photographs of brides and grooms.

“We were going to put a bed and breakfast in here,” Welch said.

He even suggests the space would make a great corporate apartment for weekly rentals.

The asking price for the jail, which more recently used to be the home of a local bail bondsman, is less than $200,000, Welch said.

Another way the building could be marketed is as a haunted house, although apart from a few stone walls and steel bars that have been preserved, the building does not feel eerie.

Welch said he has on occasion spent the night in the home and has never been awaked by the clattering of horses at 1 a.m.

Horse hooves were among the final sounds heard by eight prisoners massacred at the site on May 25, 1874, in a nighttime raid of men executing vigilante justice.

Welch points out pockmarks in a stone wall in an upper room of the building and suggests they might be from shotgun blasts from that fateful night. He says some of the prisoners shot to death were in that part of the house.

At the top of a staircase near that upper room, a set of French doors opens up to a small outdoor balcony.

Earlier this year, Mrs. Welch described a noontime meeting with a member of the Belton Area Chamber of Commerce where she was telling the story of the massacre and showing the woman the house.

The women were standing on the balcony when a gust of wind, or something more dastardly, pushed the door closed behind them.

“We had just been talking about the possibility of the house being haunted,” Mrs. Welch said.

The worry didn’t set in until Mrs. Welch tried to use the door key, which she had in her pocket.

It didn’t work.

With no way down, anxiety filled the air until the women hailed down a current jailer for Bell County. He responded to the pleas from the damsels in distress, and, as he has likely done in his everyday job, released the prisoners from their bondage.

Mrs. Welch describes her rescuer as a large, capable man. She said it added intrigue to the situation when he struggled himself to open the French doors.

“I’m not a believer in ghosts,” Mrs. Welch said, “but it was a funny situation.”

Mrs. Welch laughed when asked whether the incident on the balcony led to her putting the home up for sale.

An ad for the old jail ran recently in the classifieds of the Telegram.