Is Eastern State Penitentiary worth the hype? Here's what we found.
As Halloween quickly approaches and fall festivities are on everyone's minds, we have set out to strategically test out some of the most notorious spooky spots near Delaware.
Last year, I joined fellow Delaware Online/The News Journal reporters Hannah Edelman and Krys'tal Griffin to Frightland in Middletown. To the enjoyment of everybody but me, our experience was painstakingly recorded in Krys’tal’s story last year and on our TikTok page.
This year, we decided to try another semi-local spot: Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia.
Less than an hour from Wilmington, Eastern State has garnered a name for itself as one of the best haunted or Halloween attractions in the area. Once the world’s most famous prison, it now also doubles as a museum and nonprofit organization for criminal justice and prison reform.
Here is our experience at one of the world's most famous haunted attractions.
Entering the prison
Halloween Nights at Eastern State are open select nights through October until Nov. 11. Ticket prices range from $39-$59, and it is highly recommended to purchase tickets online.
Children under the age of seven are not permitted and there are discounts available for groups of 20 people or more. Parking is a little tricky, but there is a lot across from the penitentiary and street parking if luck is on your side. There is also a shuttle that takes passengers from the parking at the Philadelphia Zoo.
Since the penitentiary is nearly 200 years old and in a state of semi-ruin, it is technically not fully Americans with Disabilities Act-compliant, but the staff can help you bypass some of the less accessible areas.
5 haunted houses, your choice of experience
Eastern State has five haunted houses: Delirium, Big Top Terror, Machine Shop, Nightmares and The Crypt. Each has its own theme and backstory, to which the character actors are wholly dedicated.
Guests can choose to "opt-in" to each experience by wearing a complimentary glow stick around their necks, which gives the over 200 performers permission to touch and grab you, and potentially take you to secret sections of the haunted houses.
The first thing to understand about Eastern State is its menacing size. The 10-acre site takes up an entire Philadelphia city block, with its 30-foot stone walls blocking the view of any other life in the city.
Griffin and I took our tour through the haunted attractions at 7 p.m. on a Thursday. When we first arrived the only screams we were hearing were from the enthused Phillies fans at the bars across the street, who were soon about to be very disappointed.
We started our tour with Delirium, which requires a set of 3-D glasses to get the full experience. The word Griffin and I agreed best describes this house is disorienting. The lights, 3-D visuals and sound effects aren’t necessarily there to jump-scare you, but definitely keep you on your toes.
The next horror was Big Top Terror, a carnival-themed haunted house where the performers ‘do anything it takes to carve out their moment in the spotlight.’ The actors were dressed as various freak show acts, some of them wearing roller skates to master the art of sneaking up on their prey. The halls were windy and narrow, strobe-lit and the sounds were constant and terrifying.
The Bizarre Bar area lies just outside of the haunted house’s exit, complete with contortionists, stilt-walkers and circus performers.
Maybe it was the flash photography we were allowed to use that helped me see the threats around me or maybe the Halloween spirit just re-possessed me, but we were ready to kick it up a notch and don the glow sticks.
This is where things took a turn for the worse.
With a false sense of confidence and glow sticks around our necks, we entered the Machine Shop haunted house. The general premise of this attraction is that all of the workers are enslaved by “the machine”, and their only mission in life is to collect more pawns to do the machine’s bidding.
Out of every horror we saw, we both agreed this was the scariest. Griffin was taken away by a worker and told to crawl up a ladder and through a tunnel that looked like it could barely fit a child. This drew an immediate forfeit from Griffin, who ripped off the glow stick and swiftly moved past the menacing shop workers.
Guests around us were being snatched left and right for “dental cleanings” and assembly line shifts while the lights flickered and my sense of reality began to waver. This is when I was apprehended by a worker who went by the name of Joyce, who locked me in his pitch-black cellar and insisted that I surrender to the machine.
By the time I escaped I had completely lost my co-worker and was forced to withstand the rest of the shop alone, feeling humbled at the very least. But just two more to go.
The next horror was called Nightmares, a sleep-paralysis-themed attraction that immerses you in your own nightly terrors. During my extensive research for this assignment, this is the attraction I was most scared of experiencing, and for good reason.
The grim reaper himself followed us around the entire time and a Beetlejuice-esque character also latched himself onto our section of the crowd with the usual requests of blood sacrifice and surrendering to eternal darkness. Griffin and I both had a blast.
Finally, we were led to the final haunted attraction: The Crypt, where vampires find and torture mortals to be converted to one of their own. With our glow-sticks on, Griffin and I were taken to the vampire queen who marked our faces with a bloody letter ‘X’ for the sacrifice ritual that was supposedly coming up.
The Crypt was surprisingly scarier and longer than either of us expected, but we felt rewarded with the exit's transition into the Pumpkin Plaza where a hip-hop dance troupe dressed in monster makeup performs every 30 minutes.
More than Halloween
Eastern State had more than just impressive haunted house attractions. Each section had an adjoining court with food and drink options available, a s'more station where ghost stories could be shared and plenty of educational materials about the site's history.
One of the coolest things the penitentiary offered was in its Fair Chance Beer Garden, which not only offered some creative-sounding drinks, but in its center laid an award-winning sculpture depicting the incarceration rates of different countries. The museum makes a point to employ people not typically given a fair chance in the hiring process, such as people suffering from homelessness or people who were incarcerated.
The final days of the Halloween Nights, dubbed "Remixed nights, are always the spookiest. Erin Davis, general manager of the Halloween Nights section of Eastern State since 2018, let us into some of the tricks they have up their sleeves for the “Remixed” nights of the site’s Halloween festivities.
"We're making the haunted house more intense...You might even say extreme," Davis said. "If you choose to opt-in and get a glow necklace, it's going to get crazy."
Griffin and I decided that while last year’s visit to Frightland may have been scarier, Eastern State was more committed to the Halloween activities, even for the faint of heart.
As our tour guide and marketing specialist for Eastern State Penitentiary Kiani Lozada so eloquently put it, “October is a tourist attraction, Halloween is a lifestyle."
Contact Molly McVety at mmcvety@delawareonline.com. Follow her on Twitter @mollymcvety.
This article originally appeared on Delaware News Journal: What we found after a night at Eastern State Penitentiary
