Paso Del Norte Paranormal Society Investigates Eastern State Pen in Philadelphia,PA, hometown of our own, "Irish" Chris Yost.

It took the Society more than thirty years to convince the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to build the kind of prison it suggested: a revolutionary new building on farmland outside Philadelphia.

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 one of the most expensive American buildings 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.

Eastern's seven earliest cellblocks may represent the first modern building in the United States. The concept plan, by the British-born architect John Haviland, reveals the purity of the vision. Seven cellblocks radiate from a central surveillance rotunda. Haviland’s ambitious mechanical innovations placed each prisoner had his or her own private cell, centrally heated, with running water, a flush toilet, and a skylight. Adjacent to the cell was a private outdoor exercise yard contained by a ten-foot wall. This was in an age when the White House, with its new occupant Andrew Jackson, had no running water and was heated with coal-burning stoves.

In the vaulted, skylit cell, the prisoner had only the light from heaven, the word of God (the Bible) and honest work (shoemaking, weaving, and the like) to lead to penitence. In striking contrast to the Gothic exterior, Haviland used the grand architectural vocabulary of churches on the interior. He employed 30-foot, barrel vaulted hallways, tall arched windows, and skylights throughout. He wrote of the Penitentiary as a forced monastery, a machine for reform. But he added an impressive touch: a menacing, medieval facade, built to intimidate, that ironically implied that physical punishment took place behind those grim walls.

Virtually all prisons designed in the nineteenth century, world wide, were based on one of two systems: New York State's Auburn System, and the Pennsylvania System embodied in the Eastern State Penitentiary. During the century following Eastern's construction, more than 300 prisons in South America, Europe, Russia, China, Japan, and across the British Empire were based on its plan.

Delegations came directly to Philadelphia to study the Pennsylvania System and its architecture. For many nations, Eastern's distinctive geometric form and its regimen of isolation became a symbol of progressive."

Also we will try to make contact with Eastern State Pens' most infamous resident, "Scarface" Al Capone. Al Capone was sentenced and sent to Philadelphia,PA to serve a prison term in Eastern State Pen in the early 1900s. It is rumored that he was haunted by victims of his infamous "Valentine's Day Masacre" in Chicago,Ill. It is said that from time to time you can hear the screams of Capone and him arguing with his tormented spirits. We will even try to get into D-Block, or "Death Row" and see what may happen from there. So stay tuned and check back frequently for updates and evidence.