HAUNTED PLACES / PENNSYLVANIA

EASTERN STATE,
PHILADELPHIA.

Eastern State Penitentiary opened in 1829 as the first true penitentiary, built to hold every prisoner alone, closed in 1971, and stands today as a stabilized ruin and museum in Philadelphia. Here is its history, what people report in its cellblocks, and what a visit looks like now.

The history

In 1787 a group of Philadelphians, Benjamin Franklin and Dr. Benjamin Rush among them, founded the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons. They wanted a penitentiary in the literal sense: a person kept alone, with work and a Bible, might come to penitence. The legislature funded it in 1821, construction began in 1822 on farmland beyond the city, and the first prisoner arrived on October 25, 1829.

Architect John Haviland gave it the plan that made it famous: an octagonal hub with seven cellblocks running out from it like the spokes of a wheel. Every cell had its own skylight, a small walled exercise yard, a feed door for meals, running water and central heat. The radial plan became the model for more than 300 prisons around the world.

The separate system drew visitors from across Europe and America. Charles Dickens came in 1842 and wrote that he believed the solitary confinement he saw there to be "cruel and wrong". Overcrowding did what argument could not: cells built for one held two or three, and in 1913 Pennsylvania gave up the system and ran Eastern State as an ordinary prison. By the mid-1920s about 1,700 people were held there, and by 1956 the complex had grown to fifteen cellblocks on eleven acres.

Two later blocks tell the harder part. Cellblock 15, built in the late 1950s and known as Death Row, held men under sentence of death, though no executions were carried out at Eastern State. Beneath Cellblock 14 were four punishment cells, called the Klondike or the Hole, with low ceilings and no plumbing, where former prisoners recalled stays of ten to thirty days. Its most famous prisoner was Al Capone, who served about eight months in 1929 and 1930 after a Philadelphia arrest for carrying a concealed pistol.

Pennsylvania closed Eastern State in 1970, and the city used it for county prisoners until 1971. The city bought the property in 1980 to redevelop it, and the cellblocks stood open to the weather for most of two decades while trees grew through the roofs. In 1988 a task force persuaded Mayor Wilson Goode to halt redevelopment, and tours began in 1994. The nonprofit Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site now keeps the building as a stabilized ruin, a National Historic Landmark since 1965. Over its 142 years it held somewhere between 70,000 and 80,000 people; the counts differ.

What people report

The stories gather in a few places. In Cellblock 12, visitors and staff describe voices echoing along the gallery. In Cellblock 6, people report shadowy figures moving along the walls. In Cellblock 4, the reports are of faces in the cells. Across the complex visitors speak of footsteps and whispers in empty corridors.

The account repeated most often is Gary Johnson's; he maintains the prison's old locks for the museum. In the early 1990s, he has said, he had just opened a lock in Cellblock 4 when something took hold of him so that he could not move, and faces appeared on the cell walls, one of them beckoning. He told the story to NPR in 2013, and television crews have retold it since.

The museum keeps its distance from all of this. Tour guide Ben Bookman told NPR in 2013 that it is harder to find a believer than a skeptic among the staff, and that Eastern State does not claim the prison is haunted. Its point is simple: the people held here were real, and their lives and deaths belong to history, not to stories told for a shiver.

Accounts of hauntings here are folklore and entertainment, not verified events.

On television

Eastern State Penitentiary was filmed for Ghost Hunters twice: for the show's first season, in an episode first broadcast on November 3, 2004, and for its second, in "Return to Eastern State" on September 28, 2005. Ghost Adventures filmed there for its second season, in an episode first shown on July 10, 2009. BuzzFeed Unsolved: Supernatural visited for its third season, in an episode released on October 27, 2017.

The BuzzFeed episode is on the show's own channel: Watch the BuzzFeed Unsolved visit on the BuzzFeed Unsolved Network's official channel. There is no official upload of the two cable episodes to link to.

Visiting and running your own session

Eastern State is open nearly every day of the year, generally from mid-morning to late afternoon; check the museum's site for the day's hours. Admission includes the audio tour, "The Voices of Eastern State", narrated by the actor Steve Buscemi, and the exhibits include Al Capone's furnished cell and the 1922 synagogue.

Personal photography is allowed, but the museum's code of conduct bars video and live streaming during public hours, tripods need an equipment pass, and flashlights are not allowed inside. Paranormal investigations and their equipment are not permitted during public hours, and no overnight stays are offered. Each autumn the Halloween Nights event, which began as a fundraiser in 1991, fills the yards on select evenings with haunted houses and live entertainment alongside historic tours of the real cellblocks. The museum asks that visitors touch nothing, stay out of closed areas, and remember whose home it was.

So where does a session fit? Not inside on a day ticket: the code of conduct is plain, and a phone running a spirit box app counts as investigation equipment. If you want a session tied to the place, set the phone down on the pavement beneath the wall on Fairmount Avenue after the museum closes. If the museum ever lets a group inside after hours, people would point to the far end of Cellblock 12, where the voices are reported, or the quiet of Cellblock 4, away from the lights and the crowds in the hub.

Try a session there

Bring Spooky Box and run a Spirit box session there. The phone's sensors decide the moment a word arrives and chance decides the word, and each word shows the reason it came up. Record the session as audio or video, and replay it afterwards from any word in the log.

Sources

Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site: History of Eastern State: the museum's own timeline, 1787 to 1994.
Eastern State Penitentiary: Visitor Code of Conduct: the rules on photography, video and investigations.
NPR, "Is Eastern State Penitentiary Really Haunted?" (2013): the locksmith's account and the museum's stance.
National Park Service, National Register record 66000680: the landmark listing, with architect and dates.

Questions

Is Eastern State Penitentiary really haunted?

Nobody can say. What exists is a body of accounts from visitors, staff and television crews, concentrated in Cellblocks 4, 6 and 12, and the museum itself does not claim that the prison is haunted. Treat the stories as reports and folklore rather than verified events, and the history as the solid part.

Can you stay overnight or run a paranormal investigation at Eastern State Penitentiary?

Not as a visitor. The museum's code of conduct does not permit paranormal investigations or investigation equipment during public hours, video and live streaming are not allowed, and no overnight stays are offered. Check easternstate.org for the current rules.

Is Eastern State Penitentiary open to the public?

Yes. It is open most days of the year, generally from mid-morning to late afternoon; the museum's site lists the day's hours. Admission includes the audio tour narrated by Steve Buscemi, Al Capone's cell and the 1922 synagogue. The museum does not recommend the visit for children under seven.

Spooky Box is paranormal entertainment. It uses device sensor activity and a word engine to create atmospheric sessions. Generated words and sensor readings do not establish the presence of spirits or verified communication.

EASTERN STATE,PHILADELPHIA.