Prisons are built to keep people from leaving.

Perhaps that is why stories about those who never left at all seem so appropriate.

Across the United States, abandoned penitentiaries and reformatories have developed reputations for unexplained footsteps, disembodied voices, shadowy figures, sudden cold spots and apparitions glimpsed inside cells that have stood empty for decades.

Some of those stories are undoubtedly products of atmosphere. An abandoned prison is almost engineered to frighten us. Steel doors shift. Pipes groan. Sound travels strangely through enormous cellblocks. Darkness turns architectural features into figures.

But the history behind these places is real.

Thousands of people spent years confined within their walls. Some were murdered. Some committed suicide. Others were executed. Many endured isolation, violence and punishment under conditions almost unimaginable today.

Perhaps that history explains why people feel uneasy inside them.

Or perhaps some prisons are harder to empty than others.

Here are four of America’s most famous allegedly haunted prisons.

Eastern State Penitentiary

When Eastern State Penitentiary opened in Philadelphia in 1829, it represented an extraordinary experiment in criminal justice.

The institution was designed around the idea of penitence. Reformers believed criminals might change if removed from corrupting influences and given sufficient time alone to contemplate their actions.

Each prisoner lived and worked in an individual cell. Exercise took place in private yards, and contact between prisoners was deliberately prevented. The revolutionary system became known as the Pennsylvania System.

What reformers intended as humane treatment could become psychologically devastating.

Charles Dickens visited Eastern State in 1842 and condemned its system of prolonged isolation. Concerns about the psychological consequences of solitary confinement had already emerged during the nineteenth century.

Punishment Behind the Walls

The original version of this story contained several sensational descriptions of punishment at Eastern State. Some deserve more careful treatment.

Punishment records confirm that prisoners could be placed in dark cells on bread and water and subjected to restraints. Eastern State’s own historical material includes an 1833 entry in which the warden ordered a prisoner placed in a straitjacket and gag for repeatedly communicating with other inmates.

Overcrowding eventually made the original system impossible to maintain. Strict separation gradually eroded, and Eastern State formally abandoned the Pennsylvania System in 1913.

The prison finally closed in 1970.

The prisoners departed.

The stories did not.

The Ghosts of Eastern State

Reports of unusual experiences at Eastern State are older than the modern television ghost-hunting era.

The historic site itself acknowledges that officers and prisoners were reporting mysterious experiences and visions by at least the 1940s.

Later visitors described footsteps and shadowy figures moving through empty cellblocks. Others reported voices, unusual sensations and the feeling that someone was nearby when no one could be seen.

One frequently repeated account involves a locksmith working on an old cell door. According to the story preserved in Eastern State’s own audio tour, he encountered what he described as an extraordinarily powerful energy while removing an old lock.

The prison eventually became a favorite location for paranormal television programs.

That popularity creates a problem.

Once millions of people have been told that a particular cellblock is haunted, later experiences become difficult to separate from expectation.

Yet the earlier stories remain.

And inside a place designed specifically around silence and isolation, perhaps it is fitting that the most persistent reports involve people hearing someone who should no longer be there.

West Virginia Penitentiary

The West Virginia Penitentiary at Moundsville presents a very different atmosphere.

Construction began after the state legislature appropriated money for a penitentiary in 1866, and the imposing Gothic structure opened in 1867. Its enormous stone façade stood directly across from the prehistoric Grave Creek Mound.

That proximity eventually helped create stories that the prison itself had been constructed on a Native American burial ground.

That claim needs qualification.

The Grave Creek Mound is real, ancient and extremely significant. But saying that the penitentiary itself was built directly upon an Indigenous burial ground goes beyond what the historical evidence establishes.

The prison did not need that addition to acquire a dark history.

It produced plenty of its own.

Violence and Execution

The penitentiary operated for more than a century.

During that time, inmates died from disease, suicide and violence. Riots and murders occurred within the walls, particularly during some of the institution’s more troubled periods.

The state also carried out executions there.

Condemned prisoners were initially hanged. Beginning in 1951, West Virginia adopted electrocution. Nine prisoners eventually died in the electric chair before the state abolished capital punishment in 1965.

One execution went particularly wrong.

In 1931, murderer Frank Hyer was hanged at the prison. The force of the drop decapitated him.

Those are not legends.

Neither were the prison’s conditions.

By the twentieth century, overcrowding had become severe. In 1986, the West Virginia Supreme Court found that confinement in the tiny cells constituted cruel and unusual punishment. The penitentiary finally closed in 1995.

Something in the Sugar Shack

Moundsville subsequently became famous for paranormal reports.

Visitors and investigators have described unexplained footsteps, voices, shadow figures and apparitions throughout the enormous complex.

One of the locations most frequently associated with activity is the Sugar Shack, a recreation area that acquired an ominous reputation even while the prison was operating.

Other stories involve Death Row, the North Hall and the execution areas.

Some visitors describe the sensation of being watched.

Others claim to hear movement inside empty cells.

The enormous stone corridors naturally create echoes, and an aging prison contains countless sources of unexplained noise.

But the question becomes more interesting when former employees and inmates describe unusual experiences of their own.

They knew what an occupied prison sounded like.

And occasionally, according to the stories, they heard something they couldn’t identify.

Ohio State Reformatory

The enormous Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield looks almost as though someone designed a castle specifically for a ghost story.

The institution opened in 1896 and was originally intended to reform younger offenders rather than simply punish them.

Today, many people recognize it for another reason.

Parts of The Shawshank Redemption were filmed there.

Its paranormal reputation, however, extends far beyond Hollywood.

Helen Glattke

One of the best-known stories concerns Helen Glattke, wife of Superintendent Arthur Glattke.

Unlike many stories attached to haunted buildings, Helen was a real person and her death is documented.

In 1949, she was reaching for a jewelry box on a closet shelf when a handgun fell and discharged. The bullet struck her left lung.

Helen died two days later from complications of the injury.

Rumors naturally developed suggesting that her husband had killed her.

The official account supported an accidental shooting.

But Helen’s story acquired another chapter after her death.

Roses in an Empty Room

Visitors to the administration area have reported smelling rose perfume without discovering an obvious source.

The scent became associated with Helen.

Others have claimed to see the apparition of a woman in the area or experience unusual sensations around the former residential quarters.

Arthur Glattke has acquired ghost stories of his own. Visitors have reported cigar smoke in areas where smoking cannot account for it, traditionally connecting the smell with the former superintendent.

Could expectation explain these experiences?

Certainly.

Someone told that Helen’s ghost smells like roses is much more likely to notice an unusual floral scent.

But the pattern has become part of the building’s folklore.

And Helen is hardly the only supposed presence.

Visitors have reported voices, footsteps, screams and shadowy movement throughout the reformatory.

Some accounts involve former inmates.

Others have never acquired an identity at all.

Those are often the more interesting ones.

Wyoming Frontier Prison

The original article called this the Rawlins Frontier Prison, but its proper modern name is the Wyoming Frontier Prison, located in Rawlins, Wyoming.

Its history reads like something from the darker side of the Old West.

The cornerstone was laid in 1888, but construction delays prevented the prison from opening until 1901. At first, its 104 cells lacked electricity and running water, and heating was inadequate against Wyoming winters.

Approximately 13,500 people would eventually be incarcerated there during its eighty years of operation, including eleven women.

The Punishment Pole

Some of the prison’s notorious disciplinary methods are historically documented.

There was a dungeon.

There were different forms of solitary confinement.

And there really was a punishment pole.

Prisoners could be handcuffed to it and whipped with rubber hoses.

The prison also contained its own Death House.

Nine condemned men were hanged.

Another five were executed in the gas chamber after Wyoming changed its method of execution in 1936.

The prison closed in 1981.

Like the others on this list, however, its reputation continued after the cells were emptied.

The Old Pen

Visitors and paranormal investigators have reported voices, footsteps, sudden temperature changes and the feeling of unseen people moving through the cellblocks.

Stories frequently distinguish between supposed residual activity, in which something appears to repeat without interacting with witnesses, and experiences suggesting awareness of the observer.

Whether such a distinction reflects different kinds of paranormal phenomena is impossible to establish.

It is nevertheless an interesting piece of ghost folklore.

Some apparitions seem to notice us.

Others apparently continue doing whatever they have always done.

Walking the same corridor.

Entering the same cell.

Repeating some forgotten moment.

Again.

And again.

Why Are Prisons So Often Haunted?

There is an obvious explanation for why old prisons generate ghost stories.

They are frightening places.

Even empty, their architecture communicates confinement.

Doors are heavy.

Windows are barred.

Corridors repeat endlessly.

Sound behaves unpredictably inside concrete and stone structures.

Visitors already know that terrible things occurred there.

Expectation does the rest.

That explanation probably accounts for a great many experiences.

But there is another reason prison hauntings remain compelling.

Human emotion was concentrated inside these buildings for decades.

Fear.

Anger.

Despair.

Violence.

Loneliness.

Guilt.

Hope.

People waited years for freedom inside some of these cells.

Others waited for execution.

If one accepts even the possibility that traumatic human experiences can somehow become associated with a place, prisons would seem obvious candidates.

And if one doesn’t accept that possibility, the psychology of these buildings is nearly as fascinating.

Either way, people enter them and sometimes experience things they cannot immediately explain.

The Problem With Haunted-Prison Legends

Old prisons also demonstrate one of the greatest problems in paranormal history.

A building’s real suffering is often exaggerated because somebody decides it isn’t frightening enough.

An accidental death becomes murder.

A prehistoric mound nearby becomes a burial ground underneath the building.

Every disciplinary device becomes an instrument of torture.

Every inmate death acquires a ghost.

Eventually the legend becomes more famous than the institution.

That isn’t necessary.

Eastern State really subjected people to prolonged isolation.

Moundsville really contained executions, murders and riots.

Helen Glattke really died from a gunshot wound at Mansfield.

Wyoming Frontier Prison really had a punishment pole, dungeon and Death House.

The documented history is dark enough.

And correcting the history does not require dismissing the hauntings.

A fabricated murder can be discarded without proving that nobody smelled roses in an empty room.

A false burial-ground story can disappear without explaining footsteps in an abandoned cellblock.

Sometimes removing the legend leaves the paranormal claim standing there by itself.

And that can make it considerably more interesting.

After the Cells Are Empty

There is no scientific evidence establishing that any of these prisons contains ghosts.

There are perfectly ordinary explanations for many of the experiences reported inside them.

But that isn’t quite the same as saying every experience has been explained.

People continue describing footsteps where no one is walking.

Voices inside empty cellblocks.

Figures disappearing around corners.

The smell of perfume in abandoned rooms.

Perhaps old prisons simply encourage the imagination to populate them again.

Perhaps stone walls, strange acoustics and expectation can manufacture extraordinarily convincing experiences.

Or perhaps some people spend so long inside a place that leaving isn’t as simple as opening the door.

The prisoners are gone.

The guards are gone.

The locks no longer matter.

Yet in the quietest parts of these enormous buildings, visitors sometimes still hear someone moving on the other side of the bars.