Halloween makes us do some pretty crazy things. Full grown adults eat way too much tooth-rotting candy, consume funky orange beverages to the point of obliterated intoxication, barf up said candy and funky beverages and do so all while dressing like straight-up hoes or gored-out ghouls. Aside from mass consumption of treats, uncontrollable barfing and unintentional hooking, Halloween also marks the time of year when we like to get unnecessarily spooked at collective craziness that wouldn’t necessarily happen to be scary on a day-to-day basis...

On a breezy April day, you might not yearn to walk through a haunted prison just to be greeted by undead prisoners, zombie guards and werewolf stalkers. But open that haunted prison in September/October/November and people are flocking by the hundreds nightly to get inside and lose all bowel control.

That’s why Eastern State Penitentiary’s Terror Behind the Walls haunted attraction has become such a local and national favorite; but the fact of the matter is, whether it’s September or January, Eastern State Penitentiary is a pretty terrifying place. The 180-year-old prison is not only ranked among the Top 10 Haunted House Halloween Attractions annually but is also among the most haunted places in America.

Covered by dozens of media organizations and paranormal investigators, Eastern State has received visits from well-known television programs like America’s Ghost Hunters on TLC, Ghost Hunters on Sci-Fi, Most Haunted Live and MTV Fear. Each found their own set of paranormal occurrences through testing electromagnetic fields, using EVP, EMF, temperature and/or motion technology, but most have agreed that the watch tower, Cell Block 12, Cell Block 8, “Death Row”, the former hospital and Al Capone’s cell possess some of the strongest paranormal forces that seasoned professionals and amateurs alike have ever felt.

In Volume I: The Haunt  and Volume II: Behind the Scenes I told you about the exploits Jenn and I had throughout Terror Behind the Walls and even behind the walls at Behind the Walls. And along with our proper investigation of the Halloween haunt, we couldn’t just exit those walls without going a little deeper.

While we snapped pictures and interviewed some of the zombified actors in the green room, we also got the scoop on some of the legit creepy places in the prison. Sure the haunt itself is terrifying, but the prison possesses a rich history of years of tortured souls.

 

 

Many of the actors spoke about their own experiences; they have either felt a presence or saw a shadow when they knew no other cast member was around. But to be honest, it didn’t actually get interesting until one of the undead guards--whose name we did not ask to protect his identity just in case he wasn’t actually supposed to do it--took us down a long dark corridor on the south side of the prison’s facility.

The area is not used for the Terror Behind the Wall haunt and is also not used in guided day tours of the penitentiary. The only reason for it’s use is for a few of the actors who participate in the haunt on the outside of the facility as well as in the Intake section who must use this corridor to travel from the green room to their respective posts. It’s a desolate, pitch-black narrow hallway that stretches about one quarter of the length of the prison’s outer wall. The hall is surrounded by walls that seem to stretch up into the sky and on the left side of the corridor is a wall which was also the outer wall of another building housing cells. On the right side of the corridor is a wall lined with cells that are barricaded with chain link fences. On the inside of each cell is about 3 feet of crumbled rock and cement, since it seems that the roof of the cells had actually caved in at one point.

 

While there were three of us navigating the corridor we each had to use our cameras and cell phones as lights to guide us through the hall, and it didn’t help that Jenn kept saying that each time she took photos of the cells she expected glowing eyes to be staring back at her. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it) there were no eyes staring back at us, and the end of the hall dropped us off  in an outside yard which is actually used as a corralling area for waiting attendees during the haunt. Although I didn’t necessarily feel any presence, I’m definitely no ghost hunter, nor a ghost believer. But then again we didn’t explore any of the places that most paranormal investigators look into.

As early as the 1940s, just over 100 years after the prison opened, prison guards and inmates began reporting visions, ghost sightings and paranormal experiences. Even one-time inmate and infamous mobster Al Capone’s stint at Eastern State Penitentiary was touched by the paranormal. According to officials at ESP, reports indicate that Capone felt that he and his cell were haunted by former inmate, James Clark’s ghost. Additionally, other inmates actually reported hearing Capone screaming from his cell, “Go away Jimmy! Leave me alone!”

When the prison opened in 1929 , it was considered the first penitentiary, and due to it’s original design and methods of penance through solitary confinement, this type of prison became known as the Pennsylvania System, with over 300 replica prisons built thereafter worldwide.

History indicates that during the Pennsylvania System, in the 1800s and early 1900s, prisoners were kept in constant solitary confinement, which even scholars/writers from the other side of the pond like Charles Dickens and Alexis de Tocqueville noted as an extremely cruel method of psychological reform. Prisoners were kept from speaking or looking at other prisoners. Yard time was restricted to one prisoner at a time in an isolated area connected to their own cell so that no one prisoner would ever have any reason to interact with another. The system even went as far as placing hoods over the inmates heads to avoid even the accidental eye contact with another inmate as they were led around the prison. The psychological turmoil often grew so painful that many of the prisoners ended up committing suicide.

While in 1913 the Pennsylvania System was officially abandoned, that didn’t necessarily mean that the conditions got better. It seemed that despite leaving the Pennsylvania System behind, prisoners were still experiencing tough conditions, committing suicide or going completely mad. And according to countless paranormal investigators and ghost enthusiasts, many of the spirits of those prisoners still inhabit the walls of Eastern State Penitentiary today.

In addition to its grim past, Eastern State also acts as a year-round slice of Philadelphia and prison history, and even serves as a creepy film location of the present. In the 1990s, the penitentiary was used as the site for the mental institution in Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys staring Bruce Willis. And in June 2008 Eastern State acted as a filming location for Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen…which with Michael Bay’s direction promises to be more terrifying than anything any ghost hunter could POSSIBLY turn up in this place.

To watch videos from Most Haunted Live and other investigations at Eastern State Penitentiary go to the official Eastern State Penitentiary website or scroll up and watch more video right here.

And if you missed it, check out Volume I: The Haunt  and Volume II: Behind the Scenes

 

For pricing and more information visit the official Eastern State Penitentiary website.

Special thanks to program director Sean Kelley and the entire Terror Behind The Walls cast and crew!