Eastern State Penitentiary
As you may or may not know, Tonya from GHOULI and I were sent by The Learning Channel in June of 2003 to Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia for one of the biggest organized ghost hunts ever. We met three other teams there from around the country and conducted a group investigation. AGHOST from Seattle was there for the technical aspect, Seven from North Carolina was there with Abe, the ghost sniffing dog, Troy Taylor, author and founder of the American Ghost Society was there and acted as tour guide, and Tonya and I were there to collect EVP.
This brief excerpt is from the Eastern State Penn website that gives a bit of the history:
"Eastern State Penitentiary broke sharply with the prisons of its day, abandoning corporal punishment and ill treatment. This massive new structure, opened in 1829, became the most expensive American building of its day and soon the most famous prison in the world. The Penitentiary would not simply punish, but move the criminal toward spiritual reflection and change. The method was a Quaker-inspired system of isolation from other prisoners, with labor. The early system was strict. To prevent distraction, knowledge of the building, and even mild interaction with guards, inmates were hooded whenever they were outside their cells. But the proponents of the system believed strongly that the criminals, exposed, in silence, to thoughts of their behavior and the ugliness of their crimes, would become genuinely penitent. Thus the new word, penitentiary." You can read more about the history here.
We arrived at the prison late on a Saturday evening and met everyone and took a tour of the prison. It was very big and quite intimidating at first, but once we got inside, it wasn't as "scary" as I thought it would be. After the initial tour, each team was allowed to wander the grounds freely for the entire night to conduct their investigations. It was a bit difficult for us because it was noisy and there were camera people around constantly, so there was more noise than we would have liked, but we forged ahead. We caught this EVP during the tour and we have watched the video and cannot come up with any other explanation - it was not anyone in the group that said this:
We wandered around the prison and the grounds outside taking several pictures and recording. We decided to spend some time on Death Row. We finally got the camera people to leave us alone up there and we conducted an EVP session. It didn't seem that the place was very "active" to either one of us and we were sitting up there alone and all of the sudden and at the exact same time we both got that "we need to get out of here NOW" feeling. We didn't collect anything up there but we sure as heck weren't going to hang around long. I would like to add that this prison was also on one of MTV's episodes of "Fear" and people were mislead into thinking that there executions conducted at this prison, which is not true - there aren't even any kind of execution facilities on the premises. The convicts on death row were sent elsewhere to be executed.
We spent the better part of the night wandering the long dark halls and the area outside. We came upon a door that was standing a bit open and Tonya made a comment about how we couldn't be scared because we didn't want the cameras getting us acting like scared little girls and we got this EVP:
We came across "The Hole" which was outside the main prison buildings. We didn't think much was going on out there, but we got this EVP:
We had both of these EVP analyzed by outside audio experts and they all contend that there is a third voice on the tape that is not Tonya or I and they thought it sounded like the first one said, "Yes you are" or "Yeah, sure" and that the second one said, "See ya". We were completely alone when this took place and we were outside where there was absolutely no kind of noise to interfere.
It seemed that the evening was going to be fairly uneventful as far as we could tell, because, of course, EVP is not found until the data is analyzed after the investigation. It turned out to be more successful than we thought.
After we had seen everything but the watch tower, we decided to go up there. There were several stairs up and we could see the entire prison campus from up there. When we were coming down the stairs, I did a double take because I thought I saw someone sitting on the bottom step on the other side of the room. Tonya did the same thing and we talked about it amongst ourselves but didn't mention it to anyone else. At the end of the investigation early the next morning, we all gathered to compare findings. We found out that the other teams had also had some strange things happen to them in the watch tower. It is always a pretty good validation of paranormal activity when more than one person has something happen in the same area. After we all shared, Troy Taylor had a story to tell us. He had told us on the way to the prison that when the MTV crew was there, one of them had claimed to have been pushed down some stairs. Then after we all told of our experiences, he let us know that the stairs this guy was pushed on were the ones where we all witnessed something in the watch tower. AND that when the prison had been opened, an inmate had escaped and attacked a guard on those steps, killing the guard and then himself. So all these years later, several of us had experiences in that same spot without knowing the history of it. Coincidence? Or haunting?