Halloween Haunts: A Night at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia

Halloween Haunts: A Night at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia

by Nicole M. Wolverton

We clustered in groups at the hulking gray-stone entrance of the prison. Twilight deepened, purple to gray. Nothing stirred beyond our nervous laughter. We waited for what came next, shivering in the late October cold.

“Are you sure this is safe?” my then-boyfriend asked.

“I’ve never heard of anyone dying on the tour,” I joked. “The liability waivers and hard hats are probably just for show.”

At that point Eastern State Penitentiary had only been open for limited public tours for a few years, and only recently had it expanded event options—including the candlelight ghost tour for Halloween. The prison had been closed in 1970 after a brutal 140-ish year history, left to rot until the City of Philadelphia finally made a decision to preserve the site.

The rusted front gate swung open, and each of us was awarded a scarred white hard hat by a quiet but friendly woman. Each of us were asked to sign away the right to sue should we trip over a broken cell door or, worse, get lost in the dark of the moldering old prison, never to be seen again—or at least not with sanity intact. I’d heard stories. We all had. It’s what drew us to the prison in the first place. We wanted to be scared.

Being scared for the fun of it is what Halloween is all about, no? Letting yourself be frightened from a place of relative safety, hard hats and liability waivers notwithstanding, is the goal.

But my first inkling that it might not be all that safe of a space came not long after we started the tour. There were ten, perhaps fifteen of us at most, gathered in the central rotunda of the prison. Long, dark cell blocks spun off in every direction. The soft golden candlelight flickered, casting shadows on the stone walls and ceiling. The guide was still soft-spoken, more so than a tour like that called for, but it was as though she was afraid to break the hushed spell of the space. That’s when I felt the first brush of icy fingers against my ankle.

A manufactured experience, I thought. Someone on the prison site staff playing tricks. I’d been to those cheesy jump-scare haunted houses before. I knew how it worked.

We moved through the prison, down one cell block and into another. The stories of the ghosts that people encountered kept coming. A locksmith, a neighborhood kid, a caretaker—all who saw things, heard things. And me, pretending I wasn’t uneasy, refusing to look too closely into the darkest corners. Laughing at myself for daring to believe those stories might be real.

This is where the intersection of horror and humor originates—those moments in which we are truly unnerved but can’t dare to truly admit the unthinkable might exist, and so we choose to laugh it off so that we don’t pee our pants from the sheer horror of a situation. Laughter lets in the light, just a little. They are natural partners, the fear and the funny. Who knows, maybe my affinity for writing in the horror and humor space was born in those moments in Eastern State Penitentiary.

I even laughed at myself after the tour was over, and we’d been set loose in a makeshift museum-slash-bookstore within the prison walls. The candles were snuffed, and the lights were bright. It didn’t make it any less frightening, though, when a frozen wind punched me in the chest hard enough to knock me down. I was still fairly freaked out when that icy sensation pushed through me, front to back, thick and heavy. Yet when I climbed to my feet, I laughed again.

“Oh, I must have tripped,” I said, forcing a smile. “I’m so clumsy.”

The urge to laugh yet again was absent, though, when I was changing into my pajamas later that night at home, and there it was—a bruise on my chest, just where that frigid blast had hit me. I lay in my bed, covers pulled up tight against my ears, eyes clamped shut in case something had followed me home from the prison. The possibility of humor had fled entirely.

Nearly thirty years later, Eastern State Penitentiary hosts fun-house type of haunted houses and has for a long time. I haven’t heard of anyone having an unexplained experience at Eastern State Penitentiary in decades. Maybe the ghosts have gone now that the prison has been preserved. Maybe they never existed to begin with. But I still think about that candlelit tour—especially when Halloween is close at hand, the night is dark and cold, and the impulse to laugh in the face of fear creeps in hard.

Nicole M. Wolverton is a fear enthusiast and Pushcart-nominated writer of (mostly) thrillers and horror fiction for adults and young adults. She is the author of A Misfortune of Lake Monsters (2024, CamCat Books) and The Trajectory of Dreams (2013, Bitingduck Press), as well as nearly 50 published short stories, essays, and creative nonfiction pieces. She served as Editor and curator of the short fiction anthology Bodies Full of Burning (2021, Sliced Up Press), a project that explores horror through the lens of menopause—the first of its kind. She earned a masters degree in horror and storytelling from the University of Pennsylvania and lives in the Philadelphia area. Find out more at www.nicolewolverton.com.

TODAY’S GIVEAWAY: Nicole M. Wolverton is giving away a signed hardcover copy of A Misfortune of Lake Monsters, her debut young adult horror novel. Comment below with the subject title HH Contest Entry for a chance to win.