Eastern State Penitentiary

The first prisoner walked through the gates of Eastern State Penitentiary on October 25, 1829, with a hood over his head.

His name was Charles Williams. He was eighteen, a farmer by trade, sentenced to two years for stealing a gold watch, a gold seal and a gold key. Guards led him through the massive stone gatehouse — built to look like a medieval fortress, to frighten anyone who passed — and down a long vaulted corridor. Only when he was inside his cell did they lift the hood from his face.

He was not supposed to see another prisoner’s face for the next two years. He was not supposed to hear another prisoner’s voice. That was the whole idea.

The Experiment

In the early nineteenth century, prisons in America were filthy, crowded pens where men, women and children were thrown together, and where the young learned crime from the old. A group of reformers in Philadelphia — among them Benjamin Rush, the physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence — believed there was a better way.

Their answer was solitude. If a criminal was locked alone in a clean cell, with nothing but a Bible, his work and his own conscience, he would reflect on his crimes and be filled with genuine regret. He would become, in the language of the time, penitent. The building designed to make that happen would be called a penitentiary.

The architect, John Haviland, designed something no one had seen before: a central hub with long cellblocks radiating outward like the spokes of a wheel. From the center, a single guard could look down every corridor. Each cell had its own skylight, called the “Eye of God,” a heating pipe, running water and a flush toilet — luxuries the President of the United States did not have in the White House at the time. Each cell opened onto its own small walled exercise yard, so that a prisoner could take air without ever seeing another human being.

It was the largest and most expensive public building in America when it opened. It became famous around the world. Some three hundred prisons on several continents were built on its radial plan.

The Silence

Inside, the rules were absolute. Prisoners were known by numbers, not names. When they were moved, they wore hoods. They were forbidden to talk, sing, whistle or communicate in any way. Guards wore socks over their shoes so their footsteps wouldn’t echo. Meals were passed through a small slot. Prisoners worked alone in their cells — weaving, shoemaking, making chairs — and saw no one but the guards, the warden and an occasional chaplain or official visitor.

In 1842, the English novelist Charles Dickens toured America. He made a point of visiting Eastern State. He spent hours there, talking with inmates in their cells. What he saw horrified him.

He wrote afterward that he believed very few men were capable of estimating the immense torture and agony that this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon its sufferers. He described men who stared at the walls, who wept, who flinched at the sound of a voice. He called the system a slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, and wrote that it was worse than any torture of the body.

Over the decades, the critics turned out to be right. Prisoners went mad in solitude. Some tried to tap messages through the pipes. Some whispered through the vents. And despite all the ideals, punishments for breaking the rules could be brutal. In an 1830s investigation, officials heard testimony about prisoners strapped into restraint chairs for days, doused with icy water in winter until their skin froze, and fitted with an iron gag clamped to the tongue — a device that, in at least one case, was accused of contributing to a man’s death.

Al Capone’s Cell

By the late nineteenth century, the solitary system had collapsed under its own weight. The prison was overcrowded, and new cellblocks were added — first single-story, then two stories, then built into the spaces between the original spokes until the wheel became a maze. Prisoners were doubled and tripled up in cells meant for one. The silence was officially abandoned in 1913.

Eastern State held some of the most notorious criminals in America. The bank robber “Slick Willie” Sutton was there, and in 1945 he was part of a group that tunneled out under the wall. (He was caught within minutes.) And in 1929, a Chicago gangster named Alphonse Capone spent about eight months there after being arrested in Philadelphia for carrying a concealed weapon.

Capone’s cell, according to newspaper reports of the time, was furnished with rugs, a desk, lamps and a radio — more like a hotel room than a prison cell. Visitors today can see it, recreated to match those descriptions.

They say Capone didn’t sleep well there. According to the stories told by other inmates and guards, he could be heard at night screaming at someone to leave him alone. The person he was screaming at, they said, was James Clark — a man believed to have been killed in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, which Capone was widely suspected of ordering earlier that year.

Capone, so the story goes, believed Clark’s ghost had followed him to Philadelphia.

Abandoned

The state closed Eastern State Penitentiary in 1971. For years afterward, the building sat empty in the middle of the Fairmount neighborhood, its walls thirty feet high, its cellblocks slowly giving way to the trees. Roofs collapsed. Skylights shattered. Plants grew through the floors of the cells. A colony of stray cats lived inside. The city considered tearing it down and selling the land for a shopping center.

Instead, a group of preservationists fought to save it, and in 1994 it reopened to the public — not restored, but stabilized in a state the curators call “preserved ruin.” Paint hangs from the ceilings in long curls. Chairs sit where they were left. Cell doors stand half open on rooms full of rubble and light.

It is one of the most atmospheric places I know of in America, and one of the most haunted, if you listen to the people who work there.

Cellblock Twelve

The stories told by staff, guides and visitors began almost as soon as the building was open to the public again.

In Cellblock 12, people report hearing voices and laughter echoing from empty cells. In Cellblock 4, visitors have described faces appearing on the walls of cells, then fading. In Cellblock 6, figures are seen darting along the corridor. Guards who once patrolled the prison have told of shadows moving on the catwalks. A locksmith working on a restoration project in the 1990s reportedly said that, while he was removing an old lock in Cellblock 4, he felt an overwhelming force pulling him into the cell and saw tormented faces emerging from the walls.

And then there is the guard tower over the main gate, where several people have reported seeing a dark figure standing watch — as if still on duty, still looking down at a prison that no longer holds anyone at all.

Skeptics point out that Eastern State is a place built entirely of echoes. Its long stone corridors carry the smallest sounds for hundreds of feet. Its broken skylights throw moving shadows. And its history is so heavy that it would be strange not to feel something walking its halls.

But I think about Charles Williams, the first prisoner, eighteen years old, with a hood over his face. I think about the men who spent years without hearing a human voice. If a building can absorb anything, it seems fitting that this one would absorb silence — and that, after a century and a half, the silence would finally begin to speak.