The former West Virginia Penitentiary in Moundsville has gained national attention for its historic and ghost tours. According to management, about 75 percent of visitors are from outside the Ohio Valley. However, one visitor on Sunday made the trip for another reason: to celebrate 30 years of being free from the penitentiary.

Jams Tiller said he was 19 years old when he was sent to prison after getting involved in a shooting. He was sentenced to five years behind bars, two of which he spent in Moundsville.

"At that time there were some of the most hardened criminals in the state of West Virginia housed here, and some of them were doing double-life and triple-life, and they would walk around the yard, and I had to obviously get acquainted with some of these individuals," Tiller said. "It was enough to try and stay alive in the environment you were in."

The penitentiary closed in 1995, and now is open to the public for historic tours and haunted tours. Some current employees worked as prison guards when the Penitentiary was still open, managers said.

Tiller said he never thought much about the prison being haunted, but the stories he hears doesn't surprise him.

"I just knew from personal experience that it was a very macabre environment, and it was a very eerie environment, and we didn't really talk about it being haunted, because we were dealing with the real life situations that were bad enough as it was," he said.

Today, Tiller said his life is much different than it was 30 years ago. He's an attorney in Nashville, Tenn., and he also visits prisons to speak to inmates about turning their lives around.

"To have gone 30 years later and I look back at my life and see the transformations -- it's been astounding," he said.