The Most Haunted Eastern State Penitentiary

9/21/2024

By M.P. Pellicer | Stranger Than Fiction Stories
Eastern State Penitentiary was established in 1829, on the outskirts of Philadelphia as the model for penitentiaries worldwide. It now sits surrounded by homes and small businesses, crumbling slowly, a silent witness to human history both inside its echoing hallways and outside its walls as well.

Original design plan for Eastern State Pen which was adopted for other prisons worldwide

Eastern State Penitentiary was built in 1829 of grey granite on 10 acres of elevated land outside Philadelphia on what was known as Cherry Hill. Built in a Quaker-inspired style to emphasize rehabilitation instead of punishment, the designers believed that if subjected to solitude and reflection, criminals could become penitent and this in turn would lead to rehabilitation.

The term of "penitentiary houses" dates back to 1788 when mention is made of reforming prisoners by the punishments of "solitude, silence and labor" so that they would become useful.

Each cell had a vaulted ceiling and was fire proof, and was meant to house only one prisoner. Inmates were served through feed holes in the masonry. The doors weren’t added until the 1850s. Outside each cell, the prisoner had his own area for exercising, but the walls were so high it did not permit communication with other prisoners. They spent 23 hours in their cell, and only two 30 minute breaks outside. Individual cells had running water with a flush toilet, and central heating was provided during the winter months. Each cell had a skylight to represent the ever-seeing "eye of God."

They were allowed to garden and keep pets, however once the prisoner left his his cell, a guard would wrap a hood over his head to prevent identification by the other inmates.

The capacity of its original design was for 500 prisoners. By 1833, of the 97 prisoners, 4 were women convicted of killing other women. Twelve years later the number of prisoners had risen to 340; by 1870 the number was 600.

Women were housed in cellblock two, and in 1923 was the last year they were kept at the prison.

In 1832, William Hamilton (No. 94), who served as the warden's waiter was the first escapee from the prison. He lowered himself from the roof of the front building. He was recaptured, but escaped in the same manner in 1837.

In 1858, over 10,000 tourists from across the world visited Eastern State Penitentiary. Many were impressed with its design, however Charles Dickens who toured it in 1842 wrote: "The System is rigid, strict and hopeless solitary confinement, and I believe it, in its effects, to be cruel and wrong...."

Interior hallway at Eastern State Pen

By 1876, the idea of solitary confinement had gone out the window, since there were 3 prisoners to a cell due to the overcrowded conditions. In 1877, the population housed at Eastern State Pen was 1006; in 1929 it was 2199.

In 1897, an investigation was made into allegations of brutal treatment of the prisoners. It was found that some were burned, bruised and battered and in most cases they were insane. All the prison officials denied the charges.

Throughout the years reports leaked out of punishments meted out in the form of: water baths where inmates were hung from a wall overnight in the winter after being dunked in water; a chair which bound them tightly by hand and foot; an iron gag which shackled the prisoner's wrists to his tongue; and the Klondike, a cavernlike hole dug out in Cell 14 were prisoners were starved.

Eastern State Pen hallway c.1900

In 1911, Frank Brubaker an inmate at Eastern State was found to be insane. He had been convicted of shooting a man in the head in 1904 with a Winchester rifle, which he brought with him when he turned himself in at the mayor's office. His victim's name was Guiseppi Belviso, an Italian laborer, and the man was a stranger to him, and there had been no reason for the murder.

He started to serve his sentence in 1907. Originally he was to be executed, but then it was commuted to life imprisonment. The warden and others thought he was pretending insanity, however they realized he was not in his right mind. He kept insisting that he wanted to be hanged, and that he owned coal mines. According to Brubaker the world was in his power, and his life could be found written in the last chapter of Revelations in the Bible. He said people would in get through the bars and visit him in his cell, where they would take blankets off him while he slept.

Prior to his incarceration he had worked as a timekeeper, and as a brakeman for the Pennsylvania Railroad. He admitted to killing the man without knowing who he was, driven by an "irresistible force" and that God compelled him to commit murder.

He was transferred to a lunatic asylum, however he was not long for this world, since he died in July, 1911 at the age of 29.

No doubt there were many that ended up in prison, who in reality were truly insane.

Hooded prisoner at Eastern State pen c.1890

In 1923, Warden Robert J. McKenty was forced to resign after it was revealed that he had set up a committee of convicts, which included four of the most desperate inmates to run it.

These prisoners were known as "The Four Horsemen" by the other prisoners.

The conditions had become so desperate at the prison that 30 of the worse inmates, including the Horsemen were moved to Western Penitentiary at Pittsburgh in the aftermath of the investigation.

The report came from J. Washington Logue, a member of the board of prison inspectors. He noted in March, 1923 when several prisoners assaulted two guards. This report is what brought him to the prison to begin with. This is when he found that a number of inmates dictated the policy inside the prison.

Eastern State Penitentiary c.1920

It was believed the prisoners were involved in the distribution of narcotic drugs. Other prisoners were in fear of their lives and afraid to leave their cells.

There were reports of small stills found in the cells, and convicts playing dice in the prison yard. Explosives were found in one of the cells.

The cells the Horsemen occupied were so favored they were known as "Ritz Row" and the "Millionaires' Colony."

Warden McKenty was known among prison social workers as being sympathetic, with humanitarian ideas in running the prison. One of his mottos was: "No man can be a man unless you make him believe in himself." His idealism turned out to be disastrous.

Escape from Eastern State Pen using a ladder made in the prison shop c.1923

In July, 1923 Leo Callahan (aka James Malone), prisoner C-566 and five accomplices escaped from Eastern State Penitentiary. All the men were in prison for serious crimes such as murder and attempted murder. The inmates used a ladder they had made in the prison carpenter shop. They overpowered two guards and another convict, then climbed to the top of the wall and lowered themselves to the street with ropes, some of which had been made of their bed sheets and other stolen from the penitentiary supplies. Outside they took a truck and ten blocks away they held up Thomas McAllister an auto salesman, stealing his touring car, and forcing him to be the driver. They abandoned the car in the the woods near Elkton, Maryland and left the man bound and gagged.

A few days later a motorboat docked along Pocomoke Sound, near the entrance to Chesapeake Bay was stolen by 4 men believed to be the convicts.

A young woman well known to the police as "an associate of gunmen, highwaymen and other underworld characters" was sought by the police as the person who gave outside aid to the convicts, since she had visited one of the prisoners several times before the escape.

Callahan was one of four men who escaped Eastern State Pen and was never recaptured. All of his accomplices were eventually apprehended, including one who made it as far as Honolulu, Hawaii.

Callahan was the last one to evade capture forever, but not the first.

In 1838, Bernard Teese was doing a 3-year stretch for horse theft. On August 27, 1838 with one year left to complete his sentence he found a way to open his cell door, and scale the prison wall. He was never recaptured. His father’s will written in 1843, suggested his family members never saw him again.

On November, 1859 Patrick Lafferty was indicted for the murder of John Reed, and found guilty of murder in the second degree. He had stabbed the 60-year-old man seven times, because the man refused to give him a ride in his wagon. He was sentenced to solitary confinement at hard labor for 12 years.

In 1866, Lafferty "... dressed himself in a suit of clothes belonging to a prisoner... going out on expiration of sentence and was permitted by said Officer Caines to pass out." A search throughout the city for the prisoner did not find him, and he was never recaptured.

Timothy Boyle was indicted in the murder of James David Story a saloon keeper in 1873. He was convicted to 12 years in 1875 on a charge of second-degree murder. On New Year's Eve, 1877 with the help of two bakery workers, he hid himself in a hogshead cask filled with garbage loaded on a wagon heading out of the prison. The cask was supposedly emptied at the city trash dump, but by then Boyle was gone.

Patrick Norris (alias Condy Houston, James Curran) who was being sought for the Story murder as well, had escaped until 1880, when he was arrested in Kentucky on a separate charge of assault and battery. He was identified as a fugitive and also a Molly Maguire an Irish secret society, which were active among the coal miners in Pennsylvania. Their activities were often violent.

In March, 1881, there were no witnesses to positively identify Norris as one Condy Houston, who had participated in the murder of David Story, so he was released by the judge.

It was noted that Boyle had not been recaptured and rumor was he had fled to Europe. He was never found.

Pep The Cat-Killing Dog who was sent to Eastern State Pen in 1924 and pardoned in 1929

A mess hall was built in 1924 and for the first time, prisoners ate together. This was the same year Governor Pinchot sentenced Pep, an actual dog to a life sentence at the prison supposedly after the dog killed his wife's cat. Pep was assigned inmate number C2559. Later, some believe the governor donated his own dog to the prison under the pretense of the cat's murder to boost morale. The dog was pardoned in 1929.

Some prisoners kept birds and rats as pets.

In 1924, radios were confiscated after it was found they were used to smuggle narcotics into the prison. A visitor had been repairing a convict's set in a cell, when he received a radio message in code detailing a scheme to bring narcotics into the penitentiary in a rubber ball thrown over the wall.

Investigations showed the message came from a small portable set near the prison. After radios were banned, prisoners constructed ones that were so small they could fit in the palm of the hand. They used bedsprings for aerial connections, with water pipes or steam pipes in the prison for grounds. Prison officials even found one hidden in a Bible. After all the radios were removed, less prisoners showed signs of being under the influence of drugs.

Al Capone spent 8 months at Eastern State Pen starting in 1929, after he was convicted of carrying a concealed .38 caliber revolver outside a movie theater. His cell located on Cellblock 12, Cell 181 was luxuriously furnished, with a desk, chair, oriental carpet, private bathroom and running water.

Despite the ease of his stay at ESP, Capone was said to be tormented by the ghost of James Clark one of the victims of the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre, which he had ordered. Other prisoners would hear him beg Jimmy to leave him alone. It was said that even after he left the prison, the ghost continued to torment him.

By then Capone was suffering from syphilis that eventually would cause his death, so it's not known if this was a true phantom or the product of his illness.

In 1938, a habitual offender who found himself behind bars once again was a certain Joseph "Joe" Buzzard, one of five Buzzard brothers who were known as thieves. He had kept the police "on the jump" since 1895. He was 77 years old when he was convicted of stealing a suitcase containing sample tennis shoes all for the left foot. He got two years for his troubles. His mentor had been his brother Abe, known as the "best hoss thief in the country", who died in 1935 behind bars at Eastern State Penitentiary.

In 1937, Victor "Babe" Andreoli and Horace Bowers were serving their life imprisonment terms for the murder of State Trooper John J. Broski committed during a roadhouse holdup.

In 1940, Andreoli was one of 10 men found trying to tunnel out of the penitentiary. Dirt was taken from two tunnels beginning at Cell 50, Block 8 and carried in the convicts' pockets to the tunnel's entrance where it was dumped into the toilet.

Soon after the discovery by the guards, the body of convict James Wilson, 25, was found hanging in his cell by a sheet. On the floor of the originating cells directly in front of the toilet, concealed underneath a bookcase they found a hole where a slab of cement flooring had been sliced out. Beneath it was an 18-foot drop. Mining techniques were used to board up the tunnel walls.

One of the tunnels originated in Andreoli's cell. But like other prisoners, Andreoli had no plans of spending the rest his life behind bars.

In 1943, he escaped again probably in one of several trucks that brought supplies into the prison, since he was one of the prisoners given yard freedom while they were being unloaded. He appeared at the home of an acquaintance named Anthony Cella, and forced his wife to give him a change of clothing. At this time Mr. Cella arrived home and he coerced the man to drive him around, by holding a 12-inch knife to the throat of his 6-year-old daughter.

After changing clothes he jumped from the car and shouted, "tell the cops I'll never be taken alive. The first cop that lays a hand on me dies."

Cella then went to the home of John Andreoli, the convict's brother who said someone had come into his house, ransacked it and stolen a large sum of money.

On November 6, 1943, a week after he escaped Andreoli was shot in a gunfight in at local eatery known as the Rainbow Grille where he was eating breakfast. The 27-year-old was dropped by four bullets. He fired two shots that missed.

William "Slick Willie" Sutton mugshot from Eastern State Penitentiary

On April 3, 1945 William "Slick Willie" Sutton (1901-1980) staged a 12-man escape attempt. It was discovered he had dug an undiscovered 97-foot tunnel under the prison. Eleven of the twelve prisoners were recaptured, the first being Willie who only enjoyed 3 minutes of freedom before being returned to his cell. This had been his fifth escape attempt at this prison. One of the prisoners was shot 6 times when he went to a girlfriend's house, who was the daughter of a city policeman. He was in serious condition, and it's not known if he died of his injuries.

Once returned to prison they each had 15 to 30 year terms added to their existing sentences. The 97-foot tunnel had originated in the cell of W. Clarence Klinedinst.

However this was not the first time Slick Willie (a.k.a The Actor) tried to get free. In 1936, another escape was being planned through the steam pipe tunnel. Sutton, who was convicted for a bank holdup in 1934 had already escaped from Sing Sing in 1930. Involved in the escape were George H. Wilson who was serving a term for escaping from Eastern State Penitentiary two years before, and George Moore who was serving 10 to 20 for a bank holdup. A guard found that a grate leading to the tunnel had been tampered with. Inside the tunnel they found evidence that a chisel was used to access the prison sewer system, which had allowed the escape of 5 prisoners in 1934.

Guards inspect the tunnel where Slick Willie escaped in 1945

This should have not come as a surprise when during renovations carried out in the 1930s, 30 incomplete inmate-dug tunnels were found.

On February 10, 1947, Sutton and other prisoners dressed as prison guards carried two ladders across the prison yard to the wall after dark. When the prison’s searchlights hit him, Sutton yelled, “It’s okay,” and no one stopped him. He was recaptured in 1952, and released in 1969.

Before his death, Sutton co-authored I, Willie Sutton and Where the Money Was. When asked why he robbed banks, Sutton simply replied, “Because that’s where the money is.” The quote evolved into Sutton's law, which is often invoked to medical students as a metaphor for emphasizing the most likely diagnosis, rather than wasting time and money investigating every conceivable possibility.

Stanley Cohowicz was another life story that played out inside the walls of Eastern State Pen. One of 15 children born to William and Mary Cohowicz, in May, 1945 the 21-year-old who was a suspect in five burglaries surrendered to his parish priest. He had just served 4 years at Huntington Reformatory. He was sentenced to five to ten years at Eastern State for the burglary charges.

However his stay was short-lived, since he was stabbed to death 3 months later. It happened while he was standing in line for breakfast. Eugene McQuiston, 19, stabbed him in the back with an 8-inch scissor blade. McQuiston confessed he had killed Cohowicz because he had snubbed him, and "took a poke at me" while they were standing in the line.

McQuiston died in 1971, and his body was donated to the Kansas City College of Osteopathy-Anatomical Department.

Eastern State Pen c.1980

As the years passed the prison deteriorated. In 1969, prisoners were forbidden to have toothpicks and chewing gum since the locks on the cell doors were so frail they could be opened with these items.

The prison stood abandoned until the late 1980s, where trees were growing out of the cells, and it had become a breeding ground for feral cats. The animals were captured and neutered until the population died out.

The prison opened for tours in 1994 after renovations. It was estimated that 75,000 prisoners had spent time inside its walls since 1829.

Now, the storied facility stands in ruin. Cell blocks, once the only walls the prisoners would see for most of their days incarcerated, are now crumbling and reduced to dusty piles.

Center of Eastern State Penitentiary c.1900

Ironically one of the phantoms said to haunt Eastern State Penitentiary is not a prisoner, but probably a guard, since the shadowy figure is seen in the guard tower.

Disembodied voices, laughter and crying is heard throughout the prison as well as flitting shadow figures, however there are spots were it's more pronounced. One is Cellblock 4 where a locksmith during the 1990s felt a presence staring at him intensely, others on the staff have had a similar experience. It was on the catwalk of Cellblock 4 where the show Ghost Hunters captured a short video of a shadowy figure.

Amy Hollaman creative director at the penitentiary's haunted house attraction for 13 years, had her own paranormal experience during the first season it was open. On Mischief Night (October 30) she was one of two people left on the premises. She described her experience this way:

All of a sudden, in the back area of the room we were in, we started to hear these sounds — like a person was stamping something and then moving a paper over repeatedly. Then we heard the sound of a cup move. These were independent sounds that lasted for 15 seconds. It doesn’t seem like that long of a time but imagine if something is terrifying you — it’s pretty long. I literally learned what the word petrified meant — I was frozen stiff.

Eastern State Pen on Fairmont Ave c.1980

Hollaman had an actor who worked on the site tell her one day, "Amy, I can't work on the top floor of Cellblock 12 anymore. Can you move my spot?" When she asked why, he replied, "There’s a ghost up there. When I was at the edge of the cellblock, it looked like this woman was running towards me screaming and once she got close to me, she turned around and ran back."

She switched his spot, however this would not be the last time she heard about the notorious Cellblock 12. Three years later another actor came to her, with the same story about the second floor of the cellblock. He said, "You’ll never believe this but I think it was a banshee. It was flying down the cellblock towards me screaming, and then turned back."

In 2016, she had a visitor mail back a bolt they had taken from the site. A letter described where they regretted taking it because they had the worse luck since then. The sender who didn't include their name, packaged the item with a bag of sage and asked for it to be placed back exactly where it was found.

Director James Travis also had his own eerie encounters. One night he notice a large steel panel that had been delivered for him at the gatehouse, and he decided to take it to Cellblock 12. This is how he described the incident:

It was close to midnight on a rainy and windy Friday during the fall of the year 2012. There was an event that evening and all of the other guests and staff had left the property. I planned to put it (steel panel) just inside of the gate there. The dolly kept sliding out of the way so I had to use both hands to get the gate unlocked. (He felt someone behind him) I knew that everyone else had left the property, so my first suspicion was that some miscreant had secluded themselves away and were up to no good. I turned around and there was a short man, only about 5’4’’, standing a few feet away from me. I instantly drew back my fist ready to strike, heart pumping. Then I realized he was translucent and dressed in Civil War-era military clothes. Then he disappeared.

Prisoner cell with skylight c.1980

Later Travis was reminded the Eastern State Penitentiary was operating during the Civil War.

Another staff member who had worked for fourteen seasons at the attraction described where his head throbbed, and he felt cold and queasy while standing in three locations: the Warden's Office, the very back section of the Klondike cells and near a pipe closet on the 2nd floor of Death Row.

Who these phantoms are will be possibly never be answered, but in truth it's a cast of thousands.

Source - The Times Leader, The Times Tribune, Carbondale Daily News, Harrisburg Daily Independent, Public Opinion