The Grave Talks Best of 2025🦇| Writing with Ghosts: These Walls Still Talk, Part Two
The Grave Talks | Haunted, Paranormal & Supernatural
Ghost Stores, Haunted, Paranormal & Supernatural Stories
4.6 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 24 December 2025
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Author Brian Paone spent eight weeks writing his novel These Walls Still Talk inside the Missouri State Penitentiary, one of the most notoriously haunted prisons in America. Working alone at night, surrounded by abandoned cellblocks, execution chambers, and decades of unresolved history, Brian immersed himself completely in a place where silence never feels empty.
As fiction took shape, reality pressed closer. The prison has its own rhythm, its own presence—and its own way of reminding visitors they’re not alone. Writing in a place like this doesn’t just inspire a story. It tests it. This is Part Two of our conversation.
Today on The Grave Talks: Writing with Ghosts, a conversation with author Brian Paone.
You can buy his books wherever books are sold, and you can get more information at his website, brianpaone.com.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Today on the Grave Talks, part two of writing with ghosts. |
| 0:05.1 | These walls still talk. |
| 0:07.0 | A conversation with author Brian Payone. |
| 0:10.6 | When I started reading the book and you were talking about the get haunted investigation, |
| 0:16.7 | I was like, well, that's a real company. |
| 0:20.0 | That's really interesting to me. And then as I'm reading the well, that's a real company. That's really interesting to me. |
| 0:21.9 | And then as I'm reading the book, all of the things that you mentioned, |
| 0:27.1 | because I have done a deep dive into the penitentiary, |
| 0:30.1 | and we did an episode a couple years ago, |
| 0:32.9 | what you're saying in the book is accurate. |
| 0:35.9 | And so I really appreciated that because you really do feel |
| 0:39.4 | like this is what the paranormal investigation at the Missouri State Penitentiary would be like. |
| 0:48.8 | Right. And then some. Yeah. Yeah. And the other thing that I did too, if you, in the Kindle version, I'm sure it's in the Kindle version, but in the paperback, it absolutely is. But before page one, before chapter one, is a map of MSP. And the, in the buildings are numbered. So as you're reading, you can flip back and you know where the characters are at |
| 1:11.5 | that point in the book. And something that I did in Reese, she's one of the tour guides at MSP. |
| 1:18.6 | When she read the book, one of her first things she texted me and she thanked me for |
| 1:25.5 | keeping MSP looking exactly like it does in real life. I didn't add or take |
| 1:32.8 | away anything from it. I didn't, I didn't like add a scary, you know, um, hole somewhere that |
| 1:40.9 | doesn't really exist. I didn't, I didn't add a staircase, uh, somewhere that doesn't exist. I didn't, I didn't take exist. I didn't add a staircase somewhere that doesn't exist. |
| 1:46.3 | I didn't take away a floor because it didn't work for the plot. |
| 1:50.9 | I, you know, Reese was very impressed with the fact that it's described exactly how it exists |
| 2:00.1 | in real life. |
| 2:01.0 | Everything. And Reese is in the book. You have her exists in real life. Everything. |
... |
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