Haunted Prisons, Asylums, and Reformatories in the United States

When it opened in 1829, the Eastern State Penitentiary was the most expensive prison ever built in the United States. A pioneer in the use of solitary confinement (the cell was supposed to encourage prisoners to pay religious penance for their crimes), Eastern State became a model for prisons worldwide. Throughout its 142 years of operation, the penitentiary housed a number of notorious criminals, including Al Capone, bank robber Willie Sutton, and the perpetrators of the Kelayres massacre, a mass-shooting in a coal-mining village in 1934. And despite the inhumanity of solitary confinement, cells at Eastern State were fairly cushy for their time with running water, flush toilets, and central heating. But, like most early prisons, Eastern State had a dark side. Prisoners were routinely tortured physically and psychologically for small infractions with punishments that included chaining an inmate’s tongue to their wrists, dousing an inmate with freezing water outside in winter, restraining an inmate to a chair for days on end, or throwing an inmate in “The Hole,” an underground cell with no light and no human contact. Finally shut down in 1971, the prison was reclaimed by nature and stray cats until it was turned into a museum and historic site in the mid-90s.