Eastern State Penitentiary · Residual haunting · 31:45
Haunting Histories at Eastern State Penitentiary, Part 1
Eastern State · YouTube
The prison’s own staff and a historian of institutions ask what it means to sell an old prison as a haunted house – a rare, candid look behind the ghost-tour business.
About this video
This is the first part of a public program recorded at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia and posted by the historic site on its own channel in August 2011. It opens with Sean Kelly, the site’s senior vice president and director of public programming, giving an unusually frank history of Terror Behind the Walls, the Halloween attraction staged inside the cellblocks since 1991: how early versions leaned on invented stories of killers hiding in the ruins, why the attraction was later branded separately from the prison’s history, and how much of the organisation’s budget the event pays for.
In the second half, Anne Parsons, then a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago, begins her talk on the use of abandoned prisons and mental hospitals for material gain, especially by marketing them as haunted. She frames places such as Eastern State and Pennhurst as sites of involuntary confinement and starts a three-part history of how Americans locked people away in the twentieth century. Parts 2 and 3 continue on the same channel.
Key moments
- 0:00Sean Kelly welcomes the audience on behalf of Eastern State’s staff and board.
- 3:00Kelly traces Terror Behind the Walls back to its modest start in 1991.
- 5:00Early versions of the attraction were built on made-up stories, such as killers hiding in the abandoned prison.
- 10:00Haunted-house revenue, Kelly explains, paid some $660,000 for fire suppression, exit lighting and code compliance.
- 16:20Kelly introduces Anne Parsons and her research.
- 20:00Parsons argues that involuntary confinement is what gives places like Pennhurst and Eastern State their “fear factor.”
- 21:20She sets out the three parts of her talk, beginning with the long history of confinement in America.
What to look for
Eastern State’s ghost reputation and its finances are tangled together, and this talk is the institution saying so in public. The haunted house is not the historic site’s interpretation of the past – Kelly stresses that it was renamed precisely to keep the two apart – yet its ticket sales keep the building standing. That is worth bearing in mind whenever a tour or TV show presents the prison as one of the most haunted places in America.
Parsons’s point is the sharper one: the people once held in prisons and asylums were real, and the fear these buildings now sell comes from their real loss of liberty. Watch for how she separates the history of confinement from the entertainment layered on top of it – the same distinction historians draw when they question ghost stories built on sensational or invented deaths.
Background: Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site: History of Eastern State · NPR: Is Eastern State Penitentiary Really Haunted? (2013)
