Eastern State Penitentiary’s Ghosts and Its Rule of Silence

Content note: this piece describes historical punishment, a death in custody, and solitary confinement.

Affiliate disclosure: this article contains affiliate links to books and accommodation. If you buy or book through them, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Stand in the central rotunda at Eastern State Penitentiary and every corridor opens away from you at once, long barrel-vaulted passages running out like the spokes of a wheel, lined on both sides with the doors of cells. The walls between those cells are twenty inches of masonry. When the first prisoners arrived in the autumn of 1829, each of them was brought in with a hood over his head, so that he would never see the building he was entering or the face of anyone else inside it.

The guards wore woollen socks over their shoes. The carts that brought the food were muffled with leather straps. A man could spend years here, and the whole structure had been designed, at enormous public expense, so that in all that time no other prisoner would ever hear his voice.

It was one of the most expensive experiments of its age, and one of the most copied. More than three hundred prisons around the world were built on its plan. The idea was that a man left alone with his conscience, in a cell with a skylight and a Bible and no one to talk to, would come out of it changed.

Today Eastern State Penitentiary is a museum, and it is one of the most famous haunted places in America. Sound runs through many of its best-known ghost stories. Cackling in one cellblock. Whispering in another. Footsteps in empty corridors, wails behind closed doors, voices that seem to come out of the walls themselves.

A prison built so that nobody inside it would ever be heard has become famous for what people say they hear in it. That could be an irony and nothing more. But the records of what actually went on inside those walls suggest something more uncomfortable: that the voices were always there, that the institution spent the better part of a century trying to stop them, and that the way we listen to them now owes a great deal more to the men who ran this place than to the men who were locked inside it.

Listen to The Dark Atlas on Spotify. The Eastern State Penitentiary episode is coming soon. Until then, the player above features the latest available episode from the series. Follow the show to hear each new location when it is released.

The Place: Where Eastern State Penitentiary Stands

Eastern State Penitentiary occupies a full city block in Fairmount, a neighbourhood of brick terraced houses a little north-west of central Philadelphia, a short walk from the art museum. When it was built the site was open country, a former cherry orchard on a rise outside the city, and for most of its working life the prison was known as Cherry Hill. The city grew up around it. Now there are cafés and rowhouses on the far side of Fairmount Avenue, and the prison’s outer wall runs along the pavement like the side of a fortress somebody forgot to take away.

That is roughly what its architect intended. John Haviland, an English-born architect working in Philadelphia, gave the front of the prison a Gothic gatehouse with battlements, narrow slit windows and a massive arched entrance, a medieval castle set down on the edge of a republic. It was meant to be read from the road. Nobody walking past was supposed to be in any doubt about what happened to people who went in.

Inside the wall lie about ten acres of ground. From the central hub a single guard could look down the length of each of the seven original cellblocks. The original ground-floor cells each had a door onto a small walled exercise yard and, remarkably for the 1820s, running water, a toilet and heating from pipes that ran along the walls. Over the following century the prison ran out of room and built more cellblocks in the spaces between the spokes, until there were fifteen, the last of them a death row.

After the prison closed it stood empty for years, and trees grew in the cells and through the roofs. When it reopened to the public, the decision was made not to restore it but to treat it as what preservationists call a stabilised ruin: to stop it falling down, but not to make it look new. So the corridors are peeling and patched, the cells still hold broken chairs and rusted bedframes, and light comes in through holes where it was never meant to.

A handful of spaces have been restored for particular stories, among them a synagogue built by Jewish prisoners and the cell furnished for Al Capone. In the yard stands a large sculptural graph, installed in the 2010s, that shows the rise of the American prison population since the building closed.

The History of Eastern State Penitentiary

The prison began as an argument about the soul. In 1787 the physician Benjamin Rush argued against public punishment, and that same year a group of Philadelphians, many of them Quakers, formed the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons. They had looked at the city’s jails, where men, women and children were held together in squalor, and concluded that such places only taught crime. What they proposed instead was solitude. A prisoner kept apart from all corrupting company, with work to do and time alone, would repent. The building that housed him would be a penitentiary, a place for penitence.

Eastern State Penitentiary was the fullest expression of that idea. Its first prisoner was a young burglar named Charles Williams. Under what became known as the Pennsylvania System, or the separate system, prisoners spent around twenty-three hours a day in their cells, working at a bench or a loom, eating alone, exercising alone in their own yards and seeing almost nobody but guards, officials and approved visitors. A moral instructor, the Baptist minister Thomas Larcombe, went from cell to cell and kept notes on the state of each man’s soul.

Visitors came from all over the world to see it. Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont came from France in 1831 and interviewed prisoners in their cells. Charles Dickens came in 1842 and wrote in American Notes afterwards that the system amounted to a slow tampering with the mind that no man had the right to inflict on another.

The rule that mattered most was the one against communication, and it never held. In their standard history of the prison, published in 1957, Negley Teeters and John Shearer report that in the journal of punishments kept for a time by the prison, cases of talking with another prisoner outnumbered every other kind of offence. Prisoners talked through the walls, tapped on the pipes and the floors, and dropped notes into the plumbing. By 1834 they were using the sewer pipes to plan a general rising, and in 1838 the inspectors had the pipes altered to stop it. Cracks in the hot-water pipes opened new channels. One prisoner was found to have tamed a rat and trained it to carry messages to his neighbours.

In the spring of 1862 Elizabeth Velora Elwell, a white woman imprisoned for larceny at seventeen the previous year, and a Black prisoner named Albert Green Jackson carried on a love affair by letter, passed through what her letters suggest was an entire secret postal system inside the walls. She called the place a house of bondage. Their correspondence was not discovered until after both had been released, and it survives today at the American Philosophical Society.

The institution answered with force. The punishments recorded at Eastern State in its first years included the straitwaistcoat, the so-called mad chair which immobilised a prisoner with tight restraints, ducking in cold water in winter, and the iron gag. The gag was a flat bar of iron placed over the tongue and chained to the prisoner’s wrists, which were bound behind his back, so that any movement of the arms pulled it harder into the mouth. It was a punishment for speech.

On 27 June 1833 the warden, Samuel Wood, ordered it placed on a prisoner named Mathias Maccumsey, a man from Lancaster County two years into a twelve-year sentence, who had repeatedly been caught talking to the men in the neighbouring cells. Maccumsey died with the gag in his mouth. According to later testimony, his body was carried out of the prison at nightfall, no inquest was held, and the guards involved were advised to keep their own secrets. They did not.

In 1834 the Pennsylvania legislature opened an inquiry into cruelty and corruption at the prison. The testimony exposed abuse, but the majority report in 1835 defended the administration. Thomas B. McElwee published a sharply dissenting account. Wood kept his post, while the prison’s unofficial matron, Mrs Blundin, was dismissed.

The separate system did not survive the numbers. Eastern State was built for a few hundred prisoners and by the later nineteenth century held more than a thousand, doubled up in cells designed for one. The state formally abandoned solitary confinement as a system in 1913, and for the rest of its life Eastern State was an ordinary, crowded American prison, with workshops, a baseball team and a riot or two.

Al Capone served time there in 1929 and 1930. Newspaper stories made his cell famous for its rugs, furniture and radio, but the museum’s later research complicates that picture: he had a cellmate, and the extent of his special treatment is disputed. Willie Sutton and eleven other prisoners tunnelled out under the wall in 1945. All were eventually recaptured, some within hours and others months later.

The prison closed in 1971. The city bought it, and for twenty years proposals came and went to turn the site into housing, a shopping centre or a criminal justice facility, until a coalition of preservationists won the argument. Eastern State Penitentiary opened for tours in 1994, and it now runs as a historic site and museum.

For more than three decades it has also run one of the largest Halloween attractions in the United States. It began in 1991 as a small fundraiser, grew under the name Terror Behind the Walls into a production that brought tens of thousands of people through the cellblocks every autumn, and since 2021 has run as Halloween Nights, with five haunted houses, themed bars, live performers and night-time history tours. Visitors who want the full experience can wear a glow necklace, which tells the actors they may be grabbed, pulled into hidden passages and separated from their group.

The proceeds go to the site, to preservation, education and programmes that include a fellowship for people returning from prison. Through the same years, the museum’s exhibits turned firmly towards the present: to what the country’s prisons are like now, and to who is in them.

The Legends of Eastern State Penitentiary

One of Eastern State Penitentiary’s best-known haunting stories begins with a locksmith. In the 1990s, the story goes, a man named Gary Johnson was working on the old locks in Cellblock 4 during the early stages of the building’s preservation. As he worked to remove an old lock from one of the cells, something came out of it, a force that seized him so hard he could not move, and a wave of what he described as negative, horrible energy. When he could look into the cell, he saw faces on its walls, twisted and in torment. The story is widely repeated in accounts of the prison as a haunted place, and it has become the building’s origin myth: the ghosts came out when the cells were opened.

After that, the building is mapped by its phenomena. Cellblock 4 is for faces. Cellblock 6 is for shadows, dark shapes that move fast and flat along the walls. Cellblock 12 is for voices: laughter, cackling, murmuring that seems to come from inside the cells and echoes along the corridor. A figure is reported standing in one of the guard towers on the outer wall, taken by some to be a guard still on duty. Staff and visitors describe footsteps where nobody is walking, doors that move on their own, cold that comes and goes in a single cell, the sense of somebody standing just behind them.

A widely repeated line, which traces back to a 2013 NPR feature, holds that such stories have been told by guards and prisoners since the 1940s, and that visitors, staff and inmates have corroborated one another ever since.

The one ghost with a name belongs to Capone. According to the story, during his imprisonment at Eastern State the gangster believed he was being visited by James Clark, known as Jimmy, one of the seven men murdered in Chicago in the St Valentine’s Day Massacre earlier in 1929, a killing widely attributed to Capone’s organisation. Other prisoners are said to have heard him at night, shouting at Jimmy to leave him alone, and visitors to his restored cell report the air turning heavy and cold. Some versions say the ghost followed him on to Alcatraz, and home to Florida after that.

The prison has a gentler legend too, and it is the one the museum tells itself, with a smile. In 1924, it is said, the Governor of Pennsylvania, Gifford Pinchot, sentenced a black Labrador named Pep to life at Eastern State for killing his wife’s cat. Pep was given a prisoner number, C-2559, and a mugshot. The dog was real, and so were the number and the photograph. The sentence seems to have been a newspaper’s invention. Pinchot had sent Pep to the prison as a companion for the men, and the dog became a prison mascot. The surviving correspondence supports a gift, not a criminal sentence.

Eastern State’s reputation was built, like so many others in this series, in front of cameras. Ghost Hunters, Ghost Adventures and a string of other paranormal programmes have filmed there. For most of the years since it opened to the public, the museum let paranormal investigators in after hours. In 2012 its website reported that more than sixty teams were investigating the building every year, and ghost hunters with recorders sat in the cells listening to the silence for anything that might come back.

The Sceptics: What the Record Says About Eastern State Penitentiary

Start with the locksmith. The Gary Johnson story has a name, a cellblock and an approximate period, but the widely circulated account is still a report of an experience, not independent evidence of a haunting. Laurel Dalrymple’s 2013 NPR feature recounts it, and former guide Kate Duffy Osheim also remembered hearing Gary tell ghost stories. Neither establishes a supernatural cause. Notice where the encounter sits in time, though: at the moment the building was becoming a heritage attraction.

The line about the 1940s needs the same care. NPR reports that guards and prisoners told ghost stories then, but does not identify contemporary prison logs documenting them. That does not prove nobody had such experiences. It means a later account should not be presented as an archival record. What the prison’s records do document, from the 1830s onwards, is men punished for communicating.

The building itself explains a great deal. In a 2023 piece for Atlas Obscura, a former Eastern State guide put the question to the acoustic engineer Trevor Cox, who pointed out that long, hard, vaulted corridors carry sound much further than people expect, and that small stone cells resonate. A laugh from a visitor two cellblocks away, a pigeon in the roof, a door moved by a draught, traffic on Fairmount Avenue, a raccoon behind a wall: all of it arrives in that building bent and displaced, and often from nowhere you can point to.

The keepers of the age knew this problem well. At Auburn, the New York prison whose rival system Eastern State was meant to outdo, guards found in its early years that in the dark it was extremely hard to tell which cell a sound was coming from. The ghost hunters have inherited the guards’ difficulty, along with their post.

There is a darker version of the sceptical case, and it deserves to be put fairly. Observers from Dickens onwards argued that long solitude damaged the minds of the men subjected to it, and the prison’s own physicians reported cases of insanity among the prisoners. Some writers have suggested that the building’s first ghosts were the hallucinations of men kept alone for years. That remains a hypothesis, not an established explanation for any particular account. It does not explain a visitor who spends an hour in the cellblocks on a Saturday afternoon and walks out through the gift shop.

For that visitor, expectation does the rest. The same Atlas Obscura piece quotes the psychologist Chris French on how strongly a place’s reputation shapes what people perceive in it, and Eastern State’s reputation is announced to every visitor before they reach the gate. People who arrive expecting voices in Cellblock 12 may interpret ambiguous sounds that way, because the building supplies the raw material and the mind supplies the shape.

Capone’s ghost is a special case, because it was never Eastern State’s to begin with. James Clark died in a Chicago garage. He was never a prisoner in Philadelphia. If Capone was haunted, he brought the ghost with him, and by the story’s own account he took it away again to Alcatraz. The versions in circulation offer no contemporary record of what Capone said in his cell, only later retellings of what other prisoners are supposed to have heard.

And the institution itself has stepped back. In 2019, Eastern State Penitentiary stopped hosting paranormal investigations, saying it wanted to concentrate its resources on programmes about the prison’s history and its connection to criminal justice reform today. Its visitor rules now go further: paranormal investigations, including the use of mediums, EVP recorders and other investigation equipment, are not permitted, Halloween included. The museum does not claim the building is haunted.

None of this leaves the building silent. It leaves something better documented than any ghost. The Elwell and Jackson letters show that an entire hidden postal system was operating inside the walls, and that the prison never found it. Nobody knows how many other conversations got through, how many messages went down the pipes and were never intercepted, how much of what was said in that building was never written down in the punishment journal because nobody in authority ever heard it. The best-documented voices in this story belong to prisoners who found ways to communicate despite the rules.

My Thoughts

I don’t think the building is haunted. I think it is doing what it has always done, which is carrying sound along stone in ways nobody can quite control, and I think the people who hear voices there are hearing real sounds and giving them the shape the place has taught them to expect. That isn’t the part that bothers me. What bothers me is the shape.

Eastern State was built to stop people being heard, and the prisoners beat it anyway. Whatever else went on in that building, those conversations through the walls were the most human thing that happened there, and the institution treated every one of them as a breach.

Now listen to the ghost stories again. A voice comes out of a cell where there should be silence, and the right response, the story tells us, is dread. A murmur behind a wall is a threat. Laughter in a cellblock is something to be afraid of. That is not a new way of hearing that building. It is the oldest one. It is how the guard on the gallery heard it, with the punishment journal open in front of him: a voice from a cell means something has gone wrong. The ghost story takes the one thing the prisoners won from that place, and hands it back to us as a horror.

I am not saying anybody who has felt a chill in Cellblock 12 is a jailer. The building is very good at chills, and it was designed to be. But I notice that the museum seems to have arrived somewhere near the same place. When it shut the door on the recorders, it turned its attention to the people who are being held in silence now. The CLA–Liman survey estimated that 41,000 to 48,000 people were held in prolonged restrictive housing in US prisons in the summer of 2021. That is a dated estimate, but it gives the question a scale no ghost story can match. The institution decided which kind of listening it was prepared to host. That seems to me the most interesting thing Eastern State Penitentiary has done since it closed.

What I keep coming back to is Mathias Maccumsey. Everything we know about him comes from the people who ran the prison and the people who investigated them: his county, his sentence, the date, the instrument, the fact that he was punished for talking. Of all the voices people travel to that building hoping to hear, his is one of the very few that we know, for certain, was really there, really speaking through those walls to the men on the other side. The accounts cited here preserve no words from that conversation.

Two centuries of people have stood in those corridors asking whether a voice was real. Nobody seems to have asked the question his case leaves behind, the one the warden never needed to: what was he saying to them?

Visiting Eastern State Penitentiary

Eastern State Penitentiary stands at 2027 Fairmount Avenue, at the corner of 22nd Street, in the Fairmount neighbourhood of Philadelphia, about five blocks from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It is an easy walk from Center City, and several city bus routes stop nearby. Street parking is limited, especially on Halloween nights.

The historic site is open from 10am to 5pm, with last entry at 4pm. From March to November it opens every day. In January, February and from 1 to 22 December it closes on Tuesdays, and it is closed all day on New Year’s Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

Daytime admission includes the audio tour, The Voices of Eastern State, which mixes the recorded voices of former wardens, guards and prisoners, along with the museum’s exhibits on the history of the prison and on American incarceration today. Check the official opening hours and daytime ticket options before you go. The museum does not recommend a visit for children under seven.

Halloween Nights is a separate, ticketed evening event. In 2026 it runs on select nights from 2 October to 7 November, with timed entry. Prices vary by date and ticket type; check the official Halloween Nights information and book in advance.

Dress for the weather. The building has no climate control, it opens in rain or shine, and floors are uneven in places. Some areas remain closed for safety.

If you are staying overnight, compare Philadelphia hotels on Trip.com (affiliate link). Check the map for the journey to Fairmount Avenue, and compare the total price, cancellation terms and any parking charges before booking.

Paranormal investigation equipment, including EVP recorders, is not permitted on the site. Tens of thousands of people served their sentences in those cells over a hundred and forty years. Go slowly, read what the museum has put on the walls, and spend some time in the exhibits about prisons now, which is where the building most wants you to end up.

Before You Go

This is Location 16 of The Dark Atlas, Season 1: twenty contested haunted places, each with a long-form article and a companion episode. Explore earlier locations and available episodes in The Dark Atlas archive.

Next, Location 17 travels to Čachtice Castle in Slovakia, where Countess Elizabeth Báthory was confined until her death without ever being brought before a court, and where legend and the surviving evidence tell different stories.

Continue with the Pendle witches investigation, another story about whose voices become evidence.

Sources

Books and Archival Research

Teeters, Negley K., and John D. Shearer. The Prison at Philadelphia, Cherry Hill: The Separate System of Penal Discipline, 1829–1913. Columbia University Press for Temple University Publications, 1957.

Lewis, W. David. From Newgate to Dannemora: The Rise of the Penitentiary in New York, 1796–1848. Cornell University Press, 1965. Both histories are listed in the museum’s research bibliography.

McElwee, Thomas B. A Concise History of the Eastern Penitentiary of Pennsylvania, together with a Detailed Statement of the Proceedings of the Committee. 1835. A dissenting account of the legislative investigation, discussed in Kate Duffy Osheim’s historical essay.

Dickens, Charles. American Notes for General Circulation (1842), especially Chapter VII, “Philadelphia, and its Solitary Prison”. Free text at Project Gutenberg.

“Illicit Communication in Auburn and Eastern State Model Prisons”. Across Walls. Includes references for the punishment journal, pipe communication and the trained rat.

American Philosophical Society. Albert Green Jackson and the Elizabeth Velora Elwell correspondence, within the State Penitentiary for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania Records, 1819–1955.

Correctional Leaders Association and Arthur Liman Center, Yale Law School. Time-In-Cell 2021. Published 24 August 2022; figures refer to summer 2021.

Reporting and Interpretation

Dalrymple, Laurel. “Is Eastern State Penitentiary Really Haunted?”. NPR, 24 October 2013; republished by NHPR. Used for reported folklore, not as proof of paranormal activity.

Horesh, Fayge. “Bump in the Night: The Rackety Reason People Think This Prison Is Haunted”. Atlas Obscura, 4 October 2023. Interviews with Trevor Cox and Chris French.

Duffy Osheim, Kate. “The Prison Palimpsest: A Former Tour Guide Looks Back at Eastern State Penitentiary”. The Appendix, 5 March 2014.

Crimmins, Peter. “19th-century love letters between Eastern State inmates document story of resistance”. WHYY, 2018; interview with historian Rebecca Capobianco.

Museum and Institutional Sources

Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site. Hours of operation; visitor information; Halloween Nights FAQ; event-rental policy. Visitor details checked 6 October 2026; schedules, prices and policies may change.

Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site. 2019 audio-tour transcript (including the update on Capone’s cell); audio-tour transcript with the Pep update; gallery guide to the 1945 tunnel escape.

“Eastern State Penitentiary” and “The Iron Gag”. Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. Historical overview and the Library Company of Philadelphia’s illustration of the restraint.

Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site. History overview; historical timeline.

Further Reading

The following book links are affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Johnston, Norman, with Kenneth Finkel and Jeffrey A. Cohen. Eastern State Penitentiary: Crucible of Good Intentions. Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1994. For readers interested in the prison’s architecture and reform ambitions.

Dolan, Francis X. Eastern State Penitentiary (Images of America). Arcadia Publishing, 2007. An illustrated history for readers who want to follow the changing building through photographs.

Dickens, Charles. American Notes, Penguin Classics paperback. For a print edition of his account of the 1842 visit; the free digital text is linked above.