In 1912, when residents divided Imperial Calcasieu Parish into smaller parishes, Beauregard Parish was created, and in DeRidder its people expressed confidence in the new parish by building a Gothic jail and parish courthouse, completed in 1914, to symbolize progress and stability. The jail, described as perhaps the country’s only penal institution in the Gothic style built during the first decade of the 20th century, featured Tudor arches, an ornamental tower, hood molds, false corner buttresses, roomy cells around a central spiral staircase, and unusually modern amenities including windows, toilets, showers, and lavatories in each cell for 13 prisoners, reflecting a changing belief that a jail should be a house of correction rather than a dungeon of punishment. Architects also included an underground tunnel linking the jail and courthouse so guards could move prisoners between them, tying both buildings to the era of change brought by the regional timber boom. DeRidder and its jail stood in Louisiana’s No Man’s Land, a former Neutral Strip created in 1806 after the Louisiana Purchase left the western boundary south of the 32° parallel disputed between Spain and the United States, with Thomas Jefferson claiming land to the Rio Grande and Spain claiming land to the Mermentau River; to avoid war, both nations barred troops from the strip between the Sabine and Calcasieu rivers, but the area instead drew smugglers, squatters, fugitive slaves, outlaws, bandits, and highwaymen until settlers pleaded for intervention. The jail later gained the name Hanging Jail after a double execution by hanging in 1928, the only hanging there, following the 1926 murder of DeRidder taxi driver J.J. Brevelle by Joe Genna and Milton Brasseaux, who killed him for $14 after luring him to an isolated road in eastern Beauregard Parish; gallows were erected at the top of the three-story spiral staircase, and the memory of the event endured for decades. Local legend also holds that the jail is haunted, with reports of mysterious figures, footsteps, running water, the spirit of a former jailer associated with pipe smoke and a bibbed shirt, and a photograph by Christine Smith that appeared to show a figure on the front porch.