Eastern State Penitentiary

Tour guides and visitors at Eastern State Penitentiary describe cackling laughter echoing from empty cellblocks, shifting shadows glimpsed in solitary cells, and a persistent, uneasy sense of being watched — reports concentrated, tellingly, in the oldest and starkest wings of the prison.

When it opened in Philadelphia in 1829, it was built around a genuinely reformist idea: total isolation, the thinking went, would give prisoners space for penitence rather than punishment. The Pennsylvania System it pioneered — solitary cells arranged along radiating cellblocks — was copied by prison architects around the world, even as its psychological toll on inmates became increasingly clear.

The prison held more than 75,000 people over its 142 years of operation, including a young Al Capone and Willie Sutton, whose 1945 tunnel escape remains one of the most famous in American prison history. It closed in 1971 and sat empty and decaying for over two decades before opening as a museum in 1994 — the derelict years doing as much to build its reputation as anything that happened while it was operating.