Hostelling International obviously saw past the local opinion when it opened the capital’s newest budget digs: “Moral pest house…dingy, damp, dark and unwholesome. The privy overflowing with abomination sending out a stench which poisons.”

So described was the Carleton County jail shortly after it opened in a violent, lawless 1862 Ottawa. The hostel opened in 1973, a year after the jail closed due to inhumane conditions.

Walls between three cells were torn down to bunk two, the prison chapel became My Alibi Café serving up to-die-for meals, and a “haunted” Death Row is now the jail’s Heritage Centre, the hub of Haunted Ottawa’s excellent, nightly hour-long Crime and Punishment Tour ($8.50 for hostel guests; $12.50 for the public).

Bars still secure doors and windows, and grids enclose stairwells. There’s even a working gallows.

But today’s accommodations at the Ottawa Jail Hostel are welcoming—deluxe even—compared to the three-by-nine-foot dank drum cells once rampant with disease, bed bugs, even snow (the windows didn’t have glass).

If bars aren’t your thing, stay in the adjoining governor’s mansion: bright dorms with high ceilings; plus the comfortable warden’s quarters (where he lived with his family) with its bay windows, kitchenette, walk-in closet and original clawfoot tub.

Rates start at $27 for members, $32 for non-members.