The 1.5-acre parcel on Reville Street has a cute garden path leading to the porch and front door. At the end of the path is a large building containing a single-family home with an unsavory history.

From 1896 until 1986, this structure served as the Meriwether County Jail. Now the section of the building that was once the jailer’s residence is a cozy two-bedroom, 1,450-square-foot home.

But the section of the structure that served as the 8,500-square-foot jail hasn’t been touched and awaits a new buyer’s ideas.

Gosdin paid a measly $5,000 for the property back in 2009. It’s now available for $499,000. The listing agent is Charles Wilkerson.

“I just so happened to be at a county commissioner’s meeting, and they were about to vote to tear it down, and I just went crazy,” Gosdin says of the day she heard that the property she had always coveted might be available.

Instead of bringing in the wrecking ball, the county decided to accept closed bids. Many folks looked at the property, but in the end, only Gosdin put in a bid.

“I didn’t really go after it, it just fell into my lap,” she says. “I went there and I had three envelopes in my hand, one with $5,000 in it, another with $10,000, and a third with $20,000. When they said nobody had bid on it, I gave them the one with $5,000 in it. Before I knew it, it was mine.”

Despite the paltry offer, the commissioners accepted the bid because it would have cost more than $5,000 to tear the place down.

For Gosdin, the work was only just beginning. What was once the jailer’s residence was completely separate from the jail area. And its walls are about 2 feet thick.

Everything had to be updated, and Gosdin estimates she spent more than $200,000 on the renovations. As she tells us, “Everything had to be torn apart before I could put it back together.”

“It was horrible. There were like nine layers of flooring downstairs and many layers of paint on the upstairs floors, but I finally got down to the hardwood floors,” she says.

Many of the old pecan trees in the yard were rotten, so some of the wood from those trees is now repurposed as trim inside the house.

Despite its history, the renovated home has a cozy feel, with high ceilings and lots of wood and brick.

Beautiful bedrooms offer that same warmth. The two bathrooms were also updated, and one displays a touch of the home’s history.

In a nod to the building’s past, a cell door leads into a toilet.

“The downstairs bathroom used to be a holding cell, where they would hold you until they decided to keep you,” she says. “If they kept you, they put you back where the big cells were.”

Gosdin hasn’t done any work to the jail area, which used to have at least 48 beds. At the moment, it has no power or plumbing.

“It’s peeling paint, rust, steel, and concrete. The beds are still in there that the prisoners slept on. I don’t want to touch it,” she says. “It looks just like it did when they built it, and I don’t want to mess with it.”

The jail has been the subject of both a 1976 book and a movie, “Murder in Coweta County.” Margaret Anne Barnes wrote the book, based on an infamous murder in 1948 involving a wealthy landowner and the corrupt sheriff of Meriwether County. In 1983, a popular TV movie based on the book starred Johnny Cash and Andy Griffith.

Gosdin says folks often come by the house to tell her about experiences that either they or their relatives had in the jail. Some have even showed her writing on the walls and pointed out other personal details.

One person showed her footprints in the concrete that they said were their grandfather’s. Gosdin loves hearing their stories.

Gosdin’s favorite room in the former jail offers the best views of the surrounding town—but comes with a creepy history.

“I do oil painting, and it is my art gallery. It’s a place where I get motivated and inspired,” she says.

It was also once a room where inmates were hanged.

“I had to put a ceiling in there, but before I did, you could see the mechanics of how it worked,” she explains. “There is a large beam up there with an iron ring screwed into it that they tied a noose to. It was directly over a wooden door, with a lever attached to it.”

In her extensive research about the property, she says she found no evidence of people being hanged in the room. The room below is now Gosdin’s laundry room.

While the jail was in operation for nearly a century, it became notorious, and apparently some former residents still voice their complaints. Gosdin laughed when asked about the presence of ghosts.

“Everyone asks me that. I’ve had some weird stuff happen, and I have pictures with my ghost in it,” she says. “My lights go on and off sometimes, doors open and close sometimes, I hear pots and pans. I hear a room full of people talking, and when I notice it, it will abruptly stop. It’s like an auditorium full of people talking, and then it stops.”

One comforting thought is that apparitions in the building at least seem friendly.

“If they scared me, I would leave. I talk to them,” Gosdin says. “If I hadn’t bought this place, they would have no place to be. I say, ‘All right, you be nice.’”

The spirits aren’t always around.

“Sometimes, I’ll go months and nothing, and then I wonder if I have changed something they don’t like or if I changed something and they do like it and are just letting me know.”

Gosdin says she loves the place and wants to do more with it, but the opportunity to build a country house near her children on 180 acres outside of town beckons.

“I wish I could finish it,” she says. “I want to make a museum out of the jail and the murder in Coweta County, and I want people to be able to come in here all the time.”

She has many ideas about who might buy the property. One might be someone who will keep it accessible to people and love it. Another is a refreshing business idea.

“It might be a good place for a brewery,” she says. “You could put the vats in the basement and have your brewing going on.”

Then she says, you could install a bar and give tours. We’ll raise a glass to that idea!