Let me start by saying that Eastern State Penitentiary is the one and only place so far, that I actually had my own possibly paranormal experience to share with you all( hopefully the first of many, haha!) Pretty much everywhere else I’ve explored left me at most, with weird vibes, but nothing concrete to report back.
If you ever visit Philly, I highly recommend you come take a tour. Even if you don’t care about ghost hunting, the history here is just phenomenal, and how can you say no to exploring a giant menacing castle plopped in the middle of the city right across the street from some hipster coffee shops. In my opinion, you just can’t. They have a self guided audio tour available and you are welcome to wander around on your own clock if you prefer. They also have tour guides that will take you through some of the “closed to the public” blocks if you time it right.
What I love so much about this place, is that although it’s technically a tourist attraction, it is still very much abandoned in feeling. But in a good way. While they’ve put a lot into making a huge chunk of this place structurally safe enough for visitors, and a great job on the educational aspect- they’ve left it alone enough for people to really feel how the decay of such a huge piece of social history works.
So above are some photos of the medical/hospital wing that was opened up by a friendly tour guide for us to walk through. Here’s my little creepy experience…in the last room we got to peek in, which was some kind of recovery room (i’ll include the photo of that below), we literally(the two other ladies that were on tour and myself), and I shit you not, caught a brief whiff of hospital disinfectant. The first lady who looked in there was like, um did any of y’all just spray some hand sanitizer or anything? None of us had, and I trust it wasn’t the tour guide messing with us. Although they welcome the paranormal side of things, it isn’t something they really talk about. They care mostly about sharing the factual history and story of the structure and the prisoners who lived there. So yeah, that’s my story. There is absolutely no reason for any of us to have smelled that hospital-ly smell in there as you will see from the picture below. So maybe it’s not the most exciting or spooky experience anyone’s had there, but it definitely happened and I can’t explain it. Here’s the room:
So I’ll close by saying this place is amazing and I’ll definitely go back once they reopen (after all this COVID-19 quarantine let’s up) with my camera to get some better quality photos to share.
Madame Monster 