May the bejezzers be scared out of you tonight

By: Sandy Horvath-Dori

One place I will NOT be visiting this Halloween night is the Eastern State Penitentiary. But I recommend you go if you can. When it was opened in 1829 it was the most expensive prison in the world and it quickly became the most famous. People like Alex de Tocqueville and Charles Dickens travelled from afar to see it. It was a Quaker institution and no expense was spared to help the inmates reflect on their sins and repent their wicked ways.

The inmates had central heating, showers and baths in their private cells. They had flush toilets – this at a time when even the prison governor didn’t have a flush toilet. They lived in complete isolation in their cells receiving their food from the guards through a small feeding hole. They had just a Bible to read, and some work like shoemaking and weaving to pass the time. I gather slowly but surely, quite a few went insane. The pressure on space meant prisoners started sharing cells in 1913, and by the time Al Capone became a one of inmates, prisoners were working together and even playing organized sports.

The place was shut down in 1971 and it’s a museum today. Each Halloween it becomes a living museum where actors don costumes and make up and take on the parts of guards and inmates. You have to sign a waiver saying something like ‘I promise not to sue you if you give me a heart attack’ and the rules are explained at the start. Basically they are ‘no touching’- so they won’t touch you and you can’t touch them, but apart from that anything goes.

It’s terrifying. You’re stumbling around the dimly lit, crumbling 11 acre site, petrified at what waits around every corner. They’ve got the timing down to an art form, so just when your heart palpitations subside they’ve dreamt up a new horror. I jumped out of my skin when an inmate roared at me. ‘Calm down, Vicki’, I thought. ‘He’s behind bars’, but the next second he’d bent the bars and his face was two inches from mine. Hitchcock couldn’t do it better.

I think it was ranked the sixth scariest place in America when we took the Halloween tour a few years ago. I dread to think what the ones deemed more scary were like.

So in our house, we have:

• a pot with a green hand that reaches out and grabs you if you try to take a sweet/candy.
• a device we hide under the doormat that shrieks when you stand on it.
• Frank – a three foot high Frankenstein monster who launches into a growl and rock song when his light sensitive eyes detect your approach.

That’s plenty for me.