Eastern State Penitentiary

A locksmith was pinned by faces in Cell Block 4. Capone spent 1929 screaming Jimmy Clark's name. The hauntings started before the prison closed.

When a locksmith removed a 140-year-old lock in Cell Block 4, he stopped being able to move.

Gary Johnson told that story about his 1990s visit to Eastern State Penitentiary, and it's the one that launched the prison's second life as America's most-investigated haunted site. He described an out-of-body moment, a force pinning him to the cell, and hundreds of pained faces swirling around him. He got the lock off. He left. The story stuck.

Eastern State opened in 1829 as the first true penitentiary in the world, and almost immediately critics noticed something disturbing about the design. Inmates lived in complete solitary confinement. They ate alone, exercised alone, and wore hoods over their heads when they were moved so they couldn't see or be seen. The theory was that total isolation would force repentance. Charles Dickens toured the place in 1842 and called it a form of "slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain," which he considered worse than any physical punishment. By the time the prison closed in 1971, at least one inmate a year, on average, had been driven past the edge.

Every paranormal claim about the penitentiary starts from that architecture.

The specifics cluster in a few blocks. Cell Block 12 gets the shadow figure, a tall dark shape that moves along the upper tier. Cell Block 6 is the one with laughter, cackling and murmuring that staff have recorded on empty nights. Cell Block 4 is the Gary Johnson block. And then there's the Cell Block where Al Capone did his eight months in 1929, which he served in comparative luxury (rugs, an armchair, a cabinet radio) and which, according to guard reports, he spent screaming the name "Jimmy." Jimmy was Jimmy Clark, one of the seven men Capone's crew machine-gunned in a Chicago garage on Valentine's Day. Guards wrote in reports that Capone begged Clark to leave him alone. He kept begging after he got out.

The Sci-Fi Channel's Ghost Hunters filmed here during their second season and came away with footage of what looked like a figure moving through Cell Block 12. Travel Channel's Most Haunted reported objects shifting on their own. MTV, Ghost Adventures, and dozens of paranormal groups have followed. Almost none of them have left disappointed, which is either a strong argument for the haunting or a strong argument for how easy it is to feel watched inside a crumbling cell block where 80,000 people lived in enforced silence.

The Soap Lady is the quieter story. Visitors have reported a woman in white in the last cell of the second floor, which was once the women's cellblock. She doesn't speak. She doesn't move fast. She's just there, and then she isn't.

The prison today runs daytime history tours and nighttime "Terror Behind the Walls" Halloween programming, and the two experiences don't really overlap. The historical tour is a serious walk through one of the more disturbing experiments in American criminal justice. The ghosts, if they're here, are a downstream effect of what the architecture did to the people inside it. The Halloween event is a haunted house attraction with actors. Most visitors come for one or the other. A few come for both and find that the daytime version is harder to shake.

The building itself is reason enough to come: crumbling vaulted ceilings, sunlight falling through a collapsed roof onto a concrete floor, iron doors standing open on empty cells. Whether or not a single claim here holds up, the place did something to the people who spent years inside it, and whatever it did soaked into the walls.

Capone kept calling for Jimmy Clark until the day he died in 1947.