Everyone has an opinion. Whether it's politics, religion, popular culture, or brand of coffee, everyone has a preference. For most people, their opinion is set in stone. It's an emotional choice, it's rooted in habit it's safe and comforting. But some opinions are darker. For example, ask anyone you know what their greatest fear is and you'll get a five minute answer. Their pulse will race. Heck, they might even shudder in front of you. No one wants to die and no one likes to feel unsafe, and that means everyone has one big fear. Maybe it's the thought of being buried alive, trapped inside a confining space while hundreds of pounds of dirt are shoveled on top of the only exit. Maybe it's the thought of drowning or being kidnapped. But here's the secret. Most big fears are really just all about the same thing. Nearly all of them are about losing control. There are few places in modern culture that represent the loss of choice, the loss of freedom, and the loss of safety more than prison. It's a setting that fills us with dread and inspires hopelessness, but somehow also remains oddly attractive. Films like Shawshank, Redemption and The Green Mile, and small screen hits like oz or Sixty Days In each stand as a testament to that obsession, and rightly so. Prison too many is a dark collection of pain, despair, guilt, and hatred, and while it might not be the same as physically being buried alive, it never fails to strike fear into even the strongest of hearts. But our modern prison system didn't start out that way. Instead, it was built on hope and opportunity and change, like all good intentions, though those goals have been worn down over time by the worst of human nature. Whatever hope and light they might have tried to bring into the world has been washed away by horrible darkness, and no prison represents that evolution more accurately than Eastern State Penitentiary. I'm Aaron Manky, and this is lore. The idea of prison has been around since the dawn of written language. Early legal codes dating back as far as four thousand years ago listed punishment for illegal behavior. Back then, it was all about retaliation for wrongdoing, but imprisonment was right on the horizon. The ancient Greeks dabbled with the notion of captivity in Athens. The prison there was known as the desmo Aryan, which meant the place of chains. You get the idea. I'm sure it was the Romans, though, who took the concept of prison and turned it into an art form, and trust me, they pulled no punches. The Romans built prisons in the worst places imaginable. If it was unpleasant or nasty, it was perfect for holding criminals. They used basements, abandoned stone quarries, and even metal cages. The infamous Mammertine prison in ancient Rome was literally built into the city's sewer system. Prisoners ate and slept among piles of wet, rancid human waste. With the advent of the castle in Europe, captivity moved inside the fortress, becoming an extension of the crown. It was a display of power in a sense, in order to encourage people to obey and respect the ruler of the land. They were taught to fear the power of those rulers wielded. But even then, prison was only a sort of purgatory awaiting room for the final verdict. It was rarely the end itself. Prison for centuries was where criminals would await their trial, and in that way it is oftentimes the most pleasant bit of the process. After their sentence was handed down, the punishment was intensely harsh. Painful whipping, physical mutilation, branding with hot irons, and even public execution were all waiting for them outside the walls of their cell. But all of that changed in the eighteenth century. The Age of Enlightenment brought with it a new focus on rational thought, which led to public outcry against violent punishment. Instead, people called for a new type of prison, one that would inspire moral reform and help criminals become better people. It sounded good on paper, and so many countries got behind the idea. The British Parliament passed the Penitentiary Act in seventeen seventy nine, introducing the concept of state prisons. Prison populations in England had multiplied following the loss of the Northern American colonies, filling up quickly with traders and rebels. It's ironic when you think about it. Our own declaration of independence led to an increase of captivity and imprisonment back home across the Atlantic. One of the strongest voices for prison reform in the newly formed United States of America was of all people. Benjamin Franklin In seven while the Constitution was being crafted in Philadelphia, Franklin was gathering others in his home nearby to discuss the poor conditions of the local prison, known as Walnut Street Jail. Rather than individual cells, prisoners there were gathered into groups inside large pens. There was no segregation, so men and women, along with young children, were all living in the same space. Inmates ran the spectrum from simple thieves to cold blooded killers. It wasn't safe and it was common for assault and violence to take place unchecked there. Those being held for trial were forced to buy their own food and water. Jailers would even sell heat in the winter. That's how bad it had become. So Franklin and his fellow reformers demanded change. There were immediate effects that changed much of the system there, but the biggest packed wouldn't be seen for another forty years. After decades of campaigning, funding was finally approved for a new prison. But this building will have a different sort of name. Today, when we hear the word penitentiary, we think of it as a generic term for a prison, But in the early eighteen hundreds that carried a specific meaning. The root of the word is penitent, which means to be repentant, to seek change, and that's the attitude that this new prison was meant to embody. A building full of inmates who were no longer awaiting a violent end to their lives, but instead we're improving themselves. On the outside, Eastern State was designed to look like a Gothic castle, intimidating, imposing, and impenetrable. One look at the exterior and most people would throw away their life of crime. At least that was the theory inside, though it was different. When inmate number one entered the building on October eighteen, twenty nine, he was ushered into a state of the art facility. Criminals were housed in private cells with shower, baths and toilets. Central heating pipes ran throughout the building and into each cell, keeping the inmates warm in the winter. The original cell blocks even included skylights, and this was a huge change. President Andrew Jackson, sitting in his office in the White House at the time, didn't even have those luxuries. But the lack of modern amenities was offset by the freedom he enjoyed, which is more than we can say for the inmates at Eastern State, and it was only downhill from there. Central heating and individual toilets sounded like a fantastic idea, but there were problems with them from the start. The plumbing that carried the hot water to each of the cells ran through tunnels that also housed the sewer pipes. As you can imagine, applying heat on a seven basis to pipes that carried human waste is never a good idea. Because of this, the first few cell blocks that were constructed suffered from some offensive odors. Early doorways in the building were tiny, requiring inmates to stoop low to pass through, and those doors didn't even open up into the hall inside the building. Instead, the cell doors opened outward into tiny courtyards where each prisoner was encouraged to be active, to garden, or even to meditate Quietly. Separating each courtyard was a ten foot tall wall meant to discourage communication between the prisoners. All of this complexity was designed to create an atmosphere of isolation. The toilet system was built the way it was because the prison staff needed to be able to remotely flush the toilets twice a week, rather than give the inmates control over that flushing you see, could be used as a method of communication, and for those rare moments when a prisoner was being moved through a cell block and could possibly be seen by other inmates, they did so with a cloth bag over their head, walking in on their first day, being moved from one block to another, even going out into their private yard. Each prisoner wore a cloth bag, sometimes with eye holes cut into it to engender a deep feeling of isolation, and for a while it worked, true to the stereotypes that we've come to expect from prison movies. Over the years, Eastern State Penitentiary was no stranger to attempted breakouts. This became possible in part because of changes to the layout and the flow of the prison itself. Doors were enlarged, access to the internal hallways was opened up, and overcrowding put more than one inmates in each cell. The first escape attempt was by inmate number ninety four, William Hamilton's. He climbed out of a window in the warden's office, but was caught a short time later. In William Bishy, an inmate of fifteen years, escaped with a friend. They managed to push a guard off one of the towers and then gale down the side before making a run for freedom. Bishy was actually pretty bold. He stayed on the run for seven years and eventually got a job in Syracuse, New York. What was that job, you might ask? He worked as a crossing guard for the police department. Like I said, the man had guts. The most famous prison break, though, was Willie Sutton. He was probably the second most famous inmates in Eastern State penitentiaries entire history. I'll get to number one in a bit, but Willie he was a sort of criminal celebrity. He'd been a bank robber before his time in Eastern States. They called him the Babe Ruth of bank robbing, slick Willie, the gentleman bandit. But of course he got caught, didn't he. He checked into Eastern State in nineteen thirty four. During his eleven years stay there, he tried escaping five times, but it was his last attempt that was an affair to remember. Sutton, along with eleven other men, dug a tunnel twelve feet down from cell sixty and then another one feet straight out to breach the wall. They removed the dirt from their excavations just like the Shoshank Redemption showed us hiding it in their pockets and then dropping it in the yard. The tunnels had ventilation and support beams. It was a production like none other. It took them months, but on April third of nine, all twelve men slipped into the tunnel and crawled to freedom. Some of the men actually evaded the authorities for a couple of months. Slick Willie, though, was caught within three minutes. And there's a joke in there somewhere. I think over the century and a half that Eastern State Penitentiary was in operation, more than one hundred prisoners managed to break out. Only one of them managed to never be recaptured. And I think we get it. People want to escape prison. It happens all over the world. Certainly there are prisons with higher escape numbers, even here in the US. But why the rush to leave Eastern State? It turns out was originally designed to house a maximum of three criminals, but that was in the eighteen thirties and society was changing. In the beginning, most of the inmates were horse thieves. By the nineteen twenties, though inmates were being sent in with darker crimes. Things like violence and murder. As a result, numbers swelled to an astounding two thousand that's nearly seven times the original capacity. With the shift in prisoner population came adjustments to the philosophy behind the penitentiary itself. Gone were the notions of hard work, solitude, and meditation in the minds of those who ran the overcrowded prison. Only one corrective method would actually work, torture. Aside from the strait jacket, which was used often as a way of containing unruly prisoners, one of the more frightening methods of punishment was a seat, called affectionately the mad chair. It resembled an old dentist chair, and prisoners would be strapped into it as highly as possible, left for days without food. There were rumors that extended time spent in the chair resulted in amputations. Some inmates found themselves placed in the hole, a small confining cell that had been dug out of the foundation of the building with only a tiny slot for food and air. Prisoners in the hole would share their space with rats and insects for weeks at a time. There was no bathroom, there, no contact with other humans, no light to see by. Then there was the room where inmates were taken during the winter. They would be stripped naked, plunged into a bath of cold water, and then strapped to a wall to freeze throughout the night. Oftentimes the guards would return to find a layer of ice on the skin of the man being punished. None of those methods could hold a candle to what is known as the iron gag to reinforce the no talking policy on the prisoners. This punishment brought the consequences directly to the offender's mouth. It's hard to describe with words, but stick with me and I'll do my best. And in mates wrists would be chained behind their back with crude manacles, and then a short chain would be connected to the wrists. On either end of the chain would be a small iron clamp, and that clamp was fastened to the tongue. Talking movement or struggling would all result in the tongue being torn, and it was said that extreme blood loss even led to death in some cases. But as hard as it is to believe, some prisoners managed to rise above all of that. Some in fact, managed to enjoy a fairly luxurious life inside Eastern States. Inside one of the seven cell blocks that radiated off the central hub was a string of cells known as Park Avenue. The inmates they're enjoyed a bit more freedom, and none took advantage of that more then Al Capone. Today, Capone is remembered as a mob boss of near mythic proportions, and Eastern State was his first experience with prison life. Just months after his men brutally murdered members of a rival gang in an event now referred to as the Saint Valentine's Day massacre, own was picked up in Philadelphia and convicted for carrying a concealed weapon. For the eight months that spanned the summer of nineteen nine to the spring of nineteen thirty, Capone called Park Avenue his home. Here's what in August nineteen nine article in a Philadelphia newspaper had to say. The whole room was suffused in the glow of a desk lamp, which stood on a polished desk. On the once grim walls of the penal chamber hung tasteful paintings, and the strains of a waltz were emitting from a powerful cabinet radio receiver of handsome design and fine finish. Even with his better than average commendations, though Capone still complained. But it wasn't about the food or the room temperature. No Capone, bold and brazen mob boss that he was, appears to have been haunted by ghosts of his past. Literally one night, shortly after arriving at Eastern States, Capone was heard screaming from his cell. It wasn't anger or disobedience that drove him to do it, though Capone was apparently scared. When asked, he told the guards that he just wanted Jimmy to leave him alone and go away. Jimmy was attacking him, it seems, and he wanted him to stop. At first, the guards and other inmates were confused, there was no one else in Capone's cell, no Jimmy on the cell block, But then the dots were connected. Jimmy the guest was really James Clark, one of the men killed by Capone's orders in the St. Valentine's Day massacre. And if that were true, then Capone was screaming because he felt that Jimmy had followed him into the prison just to torment him. Eastern State closed down in nineteen seventy, but was reopened in nine as a museum. Even without the inmates, something dark seems to have remained behind, and many who have stepped inside for a tour have come away with an experience that's hard to forget. The most common sightings occur in one of the guard towers that watches over the building and its perimeter, where a ghostly figure has been seen by many people. Others have reported the sounds of footsteps in the hallway, laughter that echoes down through the cell blocks, soft mournful whales have been heard there as well. In cell block twelve, a shadowy figure has been seen darting from cell to cell, always noticed in the corner of the eye. Some have seen it rush away from a dark corner as a group of tourists passed by, while others have seen it moving up or down a wall like an enormous, shadowy spider. A few years ago, a locksmith was called in to remove the lock on one of the original doors in cell block four after one hundred and forty years. It was understandably stubborn, and this man was brought in to help out. While there, though he experienced something that haunts him to this day. The locksmith said that moments after he unlocked the cell, an unseen force rushed out and pressed him against the wall of the hallway for what felt like an eternity. He was pinned there and couldn't move. Staring into the now open cell, his heart froze the walls inside. He said, we're covered with face is dozens and dozens of faces, their expressions writhing with agony and horror. Once free, the locksmith left, referring to the prison as a giant, haunted house, and he never returned. There's a lot to be debated in the world of prison reform, how inmates deserve to be treated, what role in prisonment should play in the overall realm of consequences and due process. We could explore how motives and methods transform over time, under pressure and through human brokenness. It's a can of worms, and I don't have all the answers. But there's an overwhelming feeling of guilt in all of this too. The prison reform that Eastern State represented, at least originally was born out of a guilt. For early are more barbaric methods, and each inmates, in their own way, was caught in a prison of their own personal guilt. It's easy to see how anyone trapped inside might feel remorse and want desperately to escape. Maybe Eastern State Penitentiary really is haunted. Maybe there are real ghosts that drift through the dark halls and shadows that move at the corner of our vision. Considering all of the horrific things that have taken place there over the years, it seems only natural for there to be some sort of an echo still present. Or maybe it's nothing more than madness. Some think it's crazy to believe that there are spirits roaming the halls of a prison, or any building for that matter. It defies logic. It's unprovable. Jimmy never really haunted al Capone. They say the man was haunted by guilt and nothing more. It's interesting to note that even after his release from Eastern State, Capone still complained of Jimmy's presence back in Chicago and living at the Lexington Hopes Hell. He still screamed for Jimmy to leave him alone. The screams would always bring his bodyguards running, and they would always find the man alone. Even though everyone else thought that he was losing his mind, that his guilt was the only real ghost haunting him. Nights and day Capone looked for help elsewhere. He hired a psychic named Alice Britt to conduct a seance for him, and she begged Jimmy on Capone's behalf to leave the mob boss alone and that, they hoped, was the end of it. One day, a few weeks after that seance, Capone's personal attendant, a man named Haimi Cornish, stepped into Capone's quarters to retrieve something. When he entered the room, he immediately noticed a stranger standing near the window, facing out to look down on the street. He glanced around the room for other visitors. No one was supposed to be in Mr. Capone's room, after all, and the intruder would need to be dealt with. Turning back to the man, Cornish called out for his attention and then stopped The man. Whoever he had been, had disappeared. As I mentioned earlier, cultures throughout history have demonstrated a lot of skill in building prisons that no one wanted to go inside, and as a result that human craving for independence has led many prisoners to try breaking free, which is why it was so easy to track down one last tale of escaping inmates. This one is a doozy too, and if you stick around through this brief sponsor break, I'll tell you all about it. This episode of Laura was made possible by Squarespace. Back in two thousand nineteen, I had an idea I was making more podcast than just lower and had begun to hire people, lease office space, and even build a studio. So I decided to bundle it all together under one big production company, label Grim and Mild Entertainment. But to make an official the company needed a digital home, a place to list all of our amazing researchers and writers, and where folks like you could find and listen to any of the great shows we make. Then for that, I turned to squar space. Why because squares space has everything you need to build the perfect website. Check out the website I built over at Grimm and Mild dot com. That's all Dragon Drop, using squar spaces amazing features to lay out the entire website. And best of all, squarespace has a huge library of beautiful templates to help get you started, powerful e commerce features if you want to sell something, plus free web hosting and award winning seven customer support. Honestly, it's the perfect secret weapon to launching a new business project in style. Do what I did and get started today for free. Just visit squarespace dot com slash lor to start your free trial website, and when you're ready to click the launch button, be sure to use the offer code lore at checkout to save ten percent Score Space build something Beautiful. This episode was also made possible by rocket Money. If your new year's goals are to manage your budget better and save money, you need Rocket Money. Rocket Money, formerly known as true Bill, is a personal finance app that finds and cancels your unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending, and helps you lower your bills all in one place. Over eight percent of people have subscriptions that they've forgotten about, like that streaming service that you bought just to watch one show, or that free trial that you never even used. Rocket Money makes canceling subscriptions as easy as a click of a button. Simply find the subscription that you don't want and press cancel, and rocket money will cancel it for you, no long hold times with customer service or tedious emailing back and forth. Over three million people have used rocket Money, saving an average person up to seven d and twenty dollars a year. For me, it was an annual subscription to an app that I never ended up using and a digital comic book membership. Finding those meant that I was able to save some cash. Stop throwing your money away, cancel unwanted subscriptions, and manage your expenses the easy way by going to rocket money dot com slash Lore. That's rocket money dot com slash Lore, rocket money dot com slash Lore. And finally, this episode was made possible by my good friends over at Stamps. A new year doesn't mean the end of the holiday rush. Right now is a great time to set yourself up for a year of success by saving money and being more efficient. And folks, I love being efficient. With stamps dot com, you can print your own postage right from your home or office within minutes of signing up, and never stress about finding the fastest and cheapest shipping solutions. Stamps dot Com does it for you automatically. For more than twenty years, stamps dot Com has been indispensable for over one million businesses. Get access to the USPS and UPS services you need to run your business right from your computer, anytime, day or night. No lines, no traffic, no waiting. Start the new year by saving serious money on mailing and shipping. Get started with stamps dot com today. Sign up with promo code Lore for a special offer that include a four week trial plus free postage and a digital scale. No long term commitments or contracts. Just go to stamps dot com, click the microphone at the top of the page and enter the code lore that stamps dot Com offer code Lore. Successful prison breaks are rare, and even the people who do make it out are found rather quickly. Of course, some escapes go down in history because of how badly they failed, but one in particular was so hair brained it actually worked. It was concocted by a man with a bit of a reputation around town. He was a womanizer who enjoyed rolling around in the beds of married women, nuns, even his own family members. He was also a party boy, a gambler, a musician, and a playwright. Some might have called him a renaissance man, but everyone knew him because of his name. Giacomo casa Nova, Yes that's Casanova. Of course, because of his uncouth and immoral lifestyle, the church had its eye on him. In fact, officials had a room picked out just for him in Piombi Prison, a set of seven cells on the top floor of the DOJ's palace in Venice. Piombi translates to the lads meant for the led slabs covering the prisons roof. But Piombi wasn't meant for everyone to find yourself in such a placement that you had gotten on someone else's bad side. Prisoners first had to be accused using special boxes called Bouquet de leone or the lions mouths. They were ornate letter boxes made to look like the faces of lions or humans, and embedded in government buildings all over the city. Citizens were encouraged to write out any legal grievances that they held against their neighbors and slip the complaints into the boxes, gaping ma In some cases, all it took was one accusation to land them in Piombi. The complaints were then taken to the Council of Ten of a Natian governing body, that decided whether or not to act on them. Those who were found guilty were often members of a community with higher social standing, as well as defrocked priests. But even though the prison was inside the palace on the top floor. No, less, that didn't mean that people lived inside the lap of luxury. The lead slabs on the roof let in the cold in the winter and collected heat in the summer, making the flea infested cells unbearable in extreme weather. The ceilings were also so low some of the prisoners couldn't stand upright. In seventeen fifty six, Giacomo Casanova got a close look at the facilities when he found himself in the jaws of the lion's mouth than the frigid embrace of Piombi's walls. He was viewed as an affront to the church and had to be stopped, and so he was thrown in jail without so much as an explanation. Why. But such a resourceful man as he could not be confined for long. One day, Casanova was allowed into the garret next to his cell. While his was being cleaned, He stumbled upon an iron rod, possibly a door bolt, and a shard of mar bowl. He snuck both objects back into his cell and used the marble to sharpen the point of the rod, which he used to bore a hole in the floor. Unfortunately, his attempted escape was foiled when the guards came and moved him to a larger, nicer cell elsewhere, and of course, the giant hole in his old cell was discovered in the process, so Cassanova was searched daily for the tool that he had used to make it. The guards never found it, though he had hit it in the seats of his chair in his new cell, but because he was always being watched, he couldn't dig anymore. Sometime later, Cassanova befriended Marino Bellaby, a fallen Friar living in the cell above his Balby had been imprisoned for fathering three children with three different young women and baptizing them all as his own. He and Cassanova were both educated men who happened to have small libraries in their cells. The guards allowed them to exchange books every now and then, which gave Cassanova the opportunity to recruit the accomplice for his next escape. He started including short notes in the backs of the books that he lent to Bellby. In order for the plan to work, though, Belby had to bore two holes in his own cell, one in the floor for Cassanova to climb up through, and another in the wall. That would lead the men to freedom. Cassanova smuggled the pike to Belby by hiding it inside a Bible. The blade was too long, poking out through the edge of the book, so he covered it with a plate of buttered macaroni. He told the guards that it was a gift of thanks for the books that Balbi had lent him. Cassanova believed that the guards would be too busy trying not to spill the butter to check the Bible for contraband, and he was right. He then instructed Bobby to cover his walls with posters of the Saints and begin boring through behind them. Suddenly, days before they were about to escape, Cassanova was hit with another curveball a new cellmate named sa Dachi, and Sadachi was both a Christian and a snitch. To keep him on his side, however, Casanova made up a grand story about a prophetic dream he had had. In it, the Virgin Mary had told him that one of her angels would take the form of a man who would come down from heaven. It said to break open the roof of your prison and set you free within five or six days, and right on schedule, Balby came bursting through the ceiling, fooling Sa Dachi and giving Cassanova the means to get out. In modern terms, they shawshanked their way across the steep, slippery led tiles and should be down to a window using ropes made of bedsheets. Once inside the tower level of the palace, they changed out of their prison attire and into some fancier threads. To the guards, they looked like visiting politicians who had accidentally been locked within the palace, and so they were set free. They fled via gondola, after which Cassanova escaped to Paris, where he went right back to his old ways. Thirty years after his daring escape, Giacomo Casanova wrote a memoir all about how he'd done it, and it's probably safe to assume that he was even more popular with the ladies because of it. This episode of Laura was researched, written and produced by me Aaron Manky, with additional research help from Jenna Rose Nethercat and writing assistance from Harry Marks, and music by Chad Lawson. Laura is much more than just a podcast. There's a book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime Video. Check them both out. If you want more Laura in your life, you can find more information about all of those things and more over at laer podcast dot com and for fans of the visual format, Laura is also on YouTube. Each new episode is released alongside the podcast, but in talking head video formats. Be sure to subscribe so that you don't miss future videos, and you can also follow the show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. To search for Laura Podcast all one word and then click that follow button. And when you do, say hi, I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening. H

Everyone has an opinion. Whether it's politics, religion, popular culture, or brand of coffee, everyone has a preference. For most people, their opinion is set in stone. It's an emotional choice, it's rooted in habit it's safe and comforting. But some opinions are darker. For example, ask anyone you know what their greatest fear is and you'll get a five minute answer. Their pulse will race. Heck, they might even shudder in front of you. No one wants to die and no one likes to feel unsafe, and that means everyone has one big fear. Maybe it's the thought of being buried alive, trapped inside a confining space while hundreds of pounds of dirt are shoveled on top of the only exit. Maybe it's the thought of drowning or being kidnapped. But here's the secret. Most big fears are really just all about the same thing. Nearly all of them are about losing control. There are few places in modern culture that represent the loss of choice, the loss of freedom, and the loss of safety more than prison. It's a setting that fills us with dread and inspires hopelessness, but somehow also remains oddly attractive. Films like Shawshank, Redemption and The Green Mile, and small screen hits like oz or Sixty Days In each stand as a testament to that obsession, and rightly so. Prison too many is a dark collection of pain, despair, guilt, and hatred, and while it might not be the same as physically being buried alive, it never fails to strike fear into even the strongest of hearts. But our modern prison system didn't start out that way. Instead, it was built on hope and opportunity and change, like all good intentions, though those goals have been worn down over time by the worst of human nature. Whatever hope and light they might have tried to bring into the world has been washed away by horrible darkness, and no prison represents that evolution more accurately than Eastern State Penitentiary. I'm Aaron Manky, and this is lore. The idea of prison has been around since the dawn of written language. Early legal codes dating back as far as four thousand years ago listed punishment for illegal behavior. Back then, it was all about retaliation for wrongdoing, but imprisonment was right on the horizon. The ancient Greeks dabbled with the notion of captivity in Athens. The prison there was known as the desmo Aryan, which meant the place of chains. You get the idea. I'm sure it was the Romans, though, who took the concept of prison and turned it into an art form, and trust me, they pulled no punches. The Romans built prisons in the worst places imaginable. If it was unpleasant or nasty, it was perfect for holding criminals. They used basements, abandoned stone quarries, and even metal cages. The infamous Mammertine prison in ancient Rome was literally built into the city's sewer system. Prisoners ate and slept among piles of wet, rancid human waste. With the advent of the castle in Europe, captivity moved inside the fortress, becoming an extension of the crown. It was a display of power in a sense, in order to encourage people to obey and respect the ruler of the land. They were taught to fear the power of those rulers wielded. But even then, prison was only a sort of purgatory awaiting room for the final verdict. It was rarely the end itself. Prison for centuries was where criminals would await their trial, and in that way it is oftentimes the most pleasant bit of the process. After their sentence was handed down, the punishment was intensely harsh. Painful whipping, physical mutilation, branding with hot irons, and even public execution were all waiting for them outside the walls of their cell. But all of that changed in the eighteenth century. The Age of Enlightenment brought with it a new focus on rational thought, which led to public outcry against violent punishment. Instead, people called for a new type of prison, one that would inspire moral reform and help criminals become better people. It sounded good on paper, and so many countries got behind the idea. The British Parliament passed the Penitentiary Act in seventeen seventy nine, introducing the concept of state prisons. Prison populations in England had multiplied following the loss of the Northern American colonies, filling up quickly with traders and rebels. It's ironic when you think about it. Our own declaration of independence led to an increase of captivity and imprisonment back home across the Atlantic. One of the strongest voices for prison reform in the newly formed United States of America was of all people. Benjamin Franklin In seven while the Constitution was being crafted in Philadelphia, Franklin was gathering others in his home nearby to discuss the poor conditions of the local prison, known as Walnut Street Jail. Rather than individual cells, prisoners there were gathered into groups inside large pens. There was no segregation, so men and women, along with young children, were all living in the same space. Inmates ran the spectrum from simple thieves to cold blooded killers. It wasn't safe and it was common for assault and violence to take place unchecked there. Those being held for trial were forced to buy their own food and water. Jailers would even sell heat in the winter. That's how bad it had become. So Franklin and his fellow reformers demanded change. There were immediate effects that changed much of the system there, but the biggest packed wouldn't be seen for another forty years. After decades of campaigning, funding was finally approved for a new prison. But this building will have a different sort of name. Today, when we hear the word penitentiary, we think of it as a generic term for a prison, But in the early eighteen hundreds that carried a specific meaning. The root of the word is penitent, which means to be repentant, to seek change, and that's the attitude that this new prison was meant to embody. A building full of inmates who were no longer awaiting a violent end to their lives, but instead we're improving themselves. On the outside, Eastern State was designed to look like a Gothic castle, intimidating, imposing, and impenetrable. One look at the exterior and most people would throw away their life of crime. At least that was the theory inside, though it was different. When inmate number one entered the building on October eighteen, twenty nine, he was ushered into a state of the art facility. Criminals were housed in private cells with shower, baths and toilets. Central heating pipes ran throughout the building and into each cell, keeping the inmates warm in the winter. The original cell blocks even included skylights, and this was a huge change. President Andrew Jackson, sitting in his office in the White House at the time, didn't even have those luxuries. But the lack of modern amenities was offset by the freedom he enjoyed, which is more than we can say for the inmates at Eastern State, and it was only downhill from there. Central heating and individual toilets sounded like a fantastic idea, but there were problems with them from the start. The plumbing that carried the hot water to each of the cells ran through tunnels that also housed the sewer pipes. As you can imagine, applying heat on a seven basis to pipes that carried human waste is never a good idea. Because of this, the first few cell blocks that were constructed suffered from some offensive odors. Early doorways in the building were tiny, requiring inmates to stoop low to pass through, and those doors didn't even open up into the hall inside the building. Instead, the cell doors opened outward into tiny courtyards where each prisoner was encouraged to be active, to garden, or even to meditate Quietly. Separating each courtyard was a ten foot tall wall meant to discourage communication between the prisoners. All of this complexity was designed to create an atmosphere of isolation. The toilet system was built the way it was because the prison staff needed to be able to remotely flush the toilets twice a week, rather than give the inmates control over that flushing you see, could be used as a method of communication, and for those rare moments when a prisoner was being moved through a cell block and could possibly be seen by other inmates, they did so with a cloth bag over their head, walking in on their first day, being moved from one block to another, even going out into their private yard. Each prisoner wore a cloth bag, sometimes with eye holes cut into it to engender a deep feeling of isolation, and for a while it worked, true to the stereotypes that we've come to expect from prison movies. Over the years, Eastern State Penitentiary was no stranger to attempted breakouts. This became possible in part because of changes to the layout and the flow of the prison itself. Doors were enlarged, access to the internal hallways was opened up, and overcrowding put more than one inmates in each cell. The first escape attempt was by inmate number ninety four, William Hamilton's. He climbed out of a window in the warden's office, but was caught a short time later. In William Bishy, an inmate of fifteen years, escaped with a friend. They managed to push a guard off one of the towers and then gale down the side before making a run for freedom. Bishy was actually pretty bold. He stayed on the run for seven years and eventually got a job in Syracuse, New York. What was that job, you might ask? He worked as a crossing guard for the police department. Like I said, the man had guts. The most famous prison break, though, was Willie Sutton. He was probably the second most famous inmates in Eastern State penitentiaries entire history. I'll get to number one in a bit, but Willie he was a sort of criminal celebrity. He'd been a bank robber before his time in Eastern States. They called him the Babe Ruth of bank robbing, slick Willie, the gentleman bandit. But of course he got caught, didn't he. He checked into Eastern State in nineteen thirty four. During his eleven years stay there, he tried escaping five times, but it was his last attempt that was an affair to remember. Sutton, along with eleven other men, dug a tunnel twelve feet down from cell sixty and then another one feet straight out to breach the wall. They removed the dirt from their excavations just like the Shoshank Redemption showed us hiding it in their pockets and then dropping it in the yard. The tunnels had ventilation and support beams. It was a production like none other. It took them months, but on April third of nine, all twelve men slipped into the tunnel and crawled to freedom. Some of the men actually evaded the authorities for a couple of months. Slick Willie, though, was caught within three minutes. And there's a joke in there somewhere. I think over the century and a half that Eastern State Penitentiary was in operation, more than one hundred prisoners managed to break out. Only one of them managed to never be recaptured. And I think we get it. People want to escape prison. It happens all over the world. Certainly there are prisons with higher escape numbers, even here in the US. But why the rush to leave Eastern State? It turns out was originally designed to house a maximum of three criminals, but that was in the eighteen thirties and society was changing. In the beginning, most of the inmates were horse thieves. By the nineteen twenties, though inmates were being sent in with darker crimes. Things like violence and murder. As a result, numbers swelled to an astounding two thousand that's nearly seven times the original capacity. With the shift in prisoner population came adjustments to the philosophy behind the penitentiary itself. Gone were the notions of hard work, solitude, and meditation in the minds of those who ran the overcrowded prison. Only one corrective method would actually work, torture. Aside from the strait jacket, which was used often as a way of containing unruly prisoners, one of the more frightening methods of punishment was a seat, called affectionately the mad chair. It resembled an old dentist chair, and prisoners would be strapped into it as highly as possible, left for days without food. There were rumors that extended time spent in the chair resulted in amputations. Some inmates found themselves placed in the hole, a small confining cell that had been dug out of the foundation of the building with only a tiny slot for food and air. Prisoners in the hole would share their space with rats and insects for weeks at a time. There was no bathroom, there, no contact with other humans, no light to see by. Then there was the room where inmates were taken during the winter. They would be stripped naked, plunged into a bath of cold water, and then strapped to a wall to freeze throughout the night. Oftentimes the guards would return to find a layer of ice on the skin of the man being punished. None of those methods could hold a candle to what is known as the iron gag to reinforce the no talking policy on the prisoners. This punishment brought the consequences directly to the offender's mouth. It's hard to describe with words, but stick with me and I'll do my best. And in mates wrists would be chained behind their back with crude manacles, and then a short chain would be connected to the wrists. On either end of the chain would be a small iron clamp, and that clamp was fastened to the tongue. Talking movement or struggling would all result in the tongue being torn, and it was said that extreme blood loss even led to death in some cases. But as hard as it is to believe, some prisoners managed to rise above all of that. Some in fact, managed to enjoy a fairly luxurious life inside Eastern States. Inside one of the seven cell blocks that radiated off the central hub was a string of cells known as Park Avenue. The inmates they're enjoyed a bit more freedom, and none took advantage of that more then Al Capone. Today, Capone is remembered as a mob boss of near mythic proportions, and Eastern State was his first experience with prison life. Just months after his men brutally murdered members of a rival gang in an event now referred to as the Saint Valentine's Day massacre, own was picked up in Philadelphia and convicted for carrying a concealed weapon. For the eight months that spanned the summer of nineteen nine to the spring of nineteen thirty, Capone called Park Avenue his home. Here's what in August nineteen nine article in a Philadelphia newspaper had to say. The whole room was suffused in the glow of a desk lamp, which stood on a polished desk. On the once grim walls of the penal chamber hung tasteful paintings, and the strains of a waltz were emitting from a powerful cabinet radio receiver of handsome design and fine finish. Even with his better than average commendations, though Capone still complained. But it wasn't about the food or the room temperature. No Capone, bold and brazen mob boss that he was, appears to have been haunted by ghosts of his past. Literally one night, shortly after arriving at Eastern States, Capone was heard screaming from his cell. It wasn't anger or disobedience that drove him to do it, though Capone was apparently scared. When asked, he told the guards that he just wanted Jimmy to leave him alone and go away. Jimmy was attacking him, it seems, and he wanted him to stop. At first, the guards and other inmates were confused, there was no one else in Capone's cell, no Jimmy on the cell block, But then the dots were connected. Jimmy the guest was really James Clark, one of the men killed by Capone's orders in the St. Valentine's Day massacre. And if that were true, then Capone was screaming because he felt that Jimmy had followed him into the prison just to torment him. Eastern State closed down in nineteen seventy, but was reopened in nine as a museum. Even without the inmates, something dark seems to have remained behind, and many who have stepped inside for a tour have come away with an experience that's hard to forget. The most common sightings occur in one of the guard towers that watches over the building and its perimeter, where a ghostly figure has been seen by many people. Others have reported the sounds of footsteps in the hallway, laughter that echoes down through the cell blocks, soft mournful whales have been heard there as well. In cell block twelve, a shadowy figure has been seen darting from cell to cell, always noticed in the corner of the eye. Some have seen it rush away from a dark corner as a group of tourists passed by, while others have seen it moving up or down a wall like an enormous, shadowy spider. A few years ago, a locksmith was called in to remove the lock on one of the original doors in cell block four after one hundred and forty years. It was understandably stubborn, and this man was brought in to help out. While there, though he experienced something that haunts him to this day. The locksmith said that moments after he unlocked the cell, an unseen force rushed out and pressed him against the wall of the hallway for what felt like an eternity. He was pinned there and couldn't move. Staring into the now open cell, his heart froze the walls inside. He said, we're covered with face is dozens and dozens of faces, their expressions writhing with agony and horror. Once free, the locksmith left, referring to the prison as a giant, haunted house, and he never returned. There's a lot to be debated in the world of prison reform, how inmates deserve to be treated, what role in prisonment should play in the overall realm of consequences and due process. We could explore how motives and methods transform over time, under pressure and through human brokenness. It's a can of worms, and I don't have all the answers. But there's an overwhelming feeling of guilt in all of this too. The prison reform that Eastern State represented, at least originally was born out of a guilt. For early are more barbaric methods, and each inmates, in their own way, was caught in a prison of their own personal guilt. It's easy to see how anyone trapped inside might feel remorse and want desperately to escape. Maybe Eastern State Penitentiary really is haunted. Maybe there are real ghosts that drift through the dark halls and shadows that move at the corner of our vision. Considering all of the horrific things that have taken place there over the years, it seems only natural for there to be some sort of an echo still present. Or maybe it's nothing more than madness. Some think it's crazy to believe that there are spirits roaming the halls of a prison, or any building for that matter. It defies logic. It's unprovable. Jimmy never really haunted al Capone. They say the man was haunted by guilt and nothing more. It's interesting to note that even after his release from Eastern State, Capone still complained of Jimmy's presence back in Chicago and living at the Lexington Hopes Hell. He still screamed for Jimmy to leave him alone. The screams would always bring his bodyguards running, and they would always find the man alone. Even though everyone else thought that he was losing his mind, that his guilt was the only real ghost haunting him. Nights and day Capone looked for help elsewhere. He hired a psychic named Alice Britt to conduct a seance for him, and she begged Jimmy on Capone's behalf to leave the mob boss alone and that, they hoped, was the end of it. One day, a few weeks after that seance, Capone's personal attendant, a man named Haimi Cornish, stepped into Capone's quarters to retrieve something. When he entered the room, he immediately noticed a stranger standing near the window, facing out to look down on the street. He glanced around the room for other visitors. No one was supposed to be in Mr. Capone's room, after all, and the intruder would need to be dealt with. Turning back to the man, Cornish called out for his attention and then stopped The man. Whoever he had been, had disappeared. As I mentioned earlier, cultures throughout history have demonstrated a lot of skill in building prisons that no one wanted to go inside, and as a result that human craving for independence has led many prisoners to try breaking free, which is why it was so easy to track down one last tale of escaping inmates. This one is a doozy too, and if you stick around through this brief sponsor break, I'll tell you all about it. This episode of Laura was made possible by Squarespace. Back in two thousand nineteen, I had an idea I was making more podcast than just lower and had begun to hire people, lease office space, and even build a studio. So I decided to bundle it all together under one big production company, label Grim and Mild Entertainment. But to make an official the company needed a digital home, a place to list all of our amazing researchers and writers, and where folks like you could find and listen to any of the great shows we make. Then for that, I turned to squar space. Why because squares space has everything you need to build the perfect website. Check out the website I built over at Grimm and Mild dot com. That's all Dragon Drop, using squar spaces amazing features to lay out the entire website. And best of all, squarespace has a huge library of beautiful templates to help get you started, powerful e commerce features if you want to sell something, plus free web hosting and award winning seven customer support. Honestly, it's the perfect secret weapon to launching a new business project in style. Do what I did and get started today for free. Just visit squarespace dot com slash lor to start your free trial website, and when you're ready to click the launch button, be sure to use the offer code lore at checkout to save ten percent Score Space build something Beautiful. This episode was also made possible by rocket Money. If your new year's goals are to manage your budget better and save money, you need Rocket Money. Rocket Money, formerly known as true Bill, is a personal finance app that finds and cancels your unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending, and helps you lower your bills all in one place. Over eight percent of people have subscriptions that they've forgotten about, like that streaming service that you bought just to watch one show, or that free trial that you never even used. Rocket Money makes canceling subscriptions as easy as a click of a button. Simply find the subscription that you don't want and press cancel, and rocket money will cancel it for you, no long hold times with customer service or tedious emailing back and forth. Over three million people have used rocket Money, saving an average person up to seven d and twenty dollars a year. For me, it was an annual subscription to an app that I never ended up using and a digital comic book membership. Finding those meant that I was able to save some cash. Stop throwing your money away, cancel unwanted subscriptions, and manage your expenses the easy way by going to rocket money dot com slash Lore. That's rocket money dot com slash Lore, rocket money dot com slash Lore. And finally, this episode was made possible by my good friends over at Stamps. A new year doesn't mean the end of the holiday rush. Right now is a great time to set yourself up for a year of success by saving money and being more efficient. And folks, I love being efficient. With stamps dot com, you can print your own postage right from your home or office within minutes of signing up, and never stress about finding the fastest and cheapest shipping solutions. Stamps dot Com does it for you automatically. For more than twenty years, stamps dot Com has been indispensable for over one million businesses. Get access to the USPS and UPS services you need to run your business right from your computer, anytime, day or night. No lines, no traffic, no waiting. Start the new year by saving serious money on mailing and shipping. Get started with stamps dot com today. Sign up with promo code Lore for a special offer that include a four week trial plus free postage and a digital scale. No long term commitments or contracts. Just go to stamps dot com, click the microphone at the top of the page and enter the code lore that stamps dot Com offer code Lore. Successful prison breaks are rare, and even the people who do make it out are found rather quickly. Of course, some escapes go down in history because of how badly they failed, but one in particular was so hair brained it actually worked. It was concocted by a man with a bit of a reputation around town. He was a womanizer who enjoyed rolling around in the beds of married women, nuns, even his own family members. He was also a party boy, a gambler, a musician, and a playwright. Some might have called him a renaissance man, but everyone knew him because of his name. Giacomo casa Nova, Yes that's Casanova. Of course, because of his uncouth and immoral lifestyle, the church had its eye on him. In fact, officials had a room picked out just for him in Piombi Prison, a set of seven cells on the top floor of the DOJ's palace in Venice. Piombi translates to the lads meant for the led slabs covering the prisons roof. But Piombi wasn't meant for everyone to find yourself in such a placement that you had gotten on someone else's bad side. Prisoners first had to be accused using special boxes called Bouquet de leone or the lions mouths. They were ornate letter boxes made to look like the faces of lions or humans, and embedded in government buildings all over the city. Citizens were encouraged to write out any legal grievances that they held against their neighbors and slip the complaints into the boxes, gaping ma In some cases, all it took was one accusation to land them in Piombi. The complaints were then taken to the Council of Ten of a Natian governing body, that decided whether or not to act on them. Those who were found guilty were often members of a community with higher social standing, as well as defrocked priests. But even though the prison was inside the palace on the top floor. No, less, that didn't mean that people lived inside the lap of luxury. The lead slabs on the roof let in the cold in the winter and collected heat in the summer, making the flea infested cells unbearable in extreme weather. The ceilings were also so low some of the prisoners couldn't stand upright. In seventeen fifty six, Giacomo Casanova got a close look at the facilities when he found himself in the jaws of the lion's mouth than the frigid embrace of Piombi's walls. He was viewed as an affront to the church and had to be stopped, and so he was thrown in jail without so much as an explanation. Why. But such a resourceful man as he could not be confined for long. One day, Casanova was allowed into the garret next to his cell. While his was being cleaned, He stumbled upon an iron rod, possibly a door bolt, and a shard of mar bowl. He snuck both objects back into his cell and used the marble to sharpen the point of the rod, which he used to bore a hole in the floor. Unfortunately, his attempted escape was foiled when the guards came and moved him to a larger, nicer cell elsewhere, and of course, the giant hole in his old cell was discovered in the process, so Cassanova was searched daily for the tool that he had used to make it. The guards never found it, though he had hit it in the seats of his chair in his new cell, but because he was always being watched, he couldn't dig anymore. Sometime later, Cassanova befriended Marino Bellaby, a fallen Friar living in the cell above his Balby had been imprisoned for fathering three children with three different young women and baptizing them all as his own. He and Cassanova were both educated men who happened to have small libraries in their cells. The guards allowed them to exchange books every now and then, which gave Cassanova the opportunity to recruit the accomplice for his next escape. He started including short notes in the backs of the books that he lent to Bellby. In order for the plan to work, though, Belby had to bore two holes in his own cell, one in the floor for Cassanova to climb up through, and another in the wall. That would lead the men to freedom. Cassanova smuggled the pike to Belby by hiding it inside a Bible. The blade was too long, poking out through the edge of the book, so he covered it with a plate of buttered macaroni. He told the guards that it was a gift of thanks for the books that Balbi had lent him. Cassanova believed that the guards would be too busy trying not to spill the butter to check the Bible for contraband, and he was right. He then instructed Bobby to cover his walls with posters of the Saints and begin boring through behind them. Suddenly, days before they were about to escape, Cassanova was hit with another curveball a new cellmate named sa Dachi, and Sadachi was both a Christian and a snitch. To keep him on his side, however, Casanova made up a grand story about a prophetic dream he had had. In it, the Virgin Mary had told him that one of her angels would take the form of a man who would come down from heaven. It said to break open the roof of your prison and set you free within five or six days, and right on schedule, Balby came bursting through the ceiling, fooling Sa Dachi and giving Cassanova the means to get out. In modern terms, they shawshanked their way across the steep, slippery led tiles and should be down to a window using ropes made of bedsheets. Once inside the tower level of the palace, they changed out of their prison attire and into some fancier threads. To the guards, they looked like visiting politicians who had accidentally been locked within the palace, and so they were set free. They fled via gondola, after which Cassanova escaped to Paris, where he went right back to his old ways. Thirty years after his daring escape, Giacomo Casanova wrote a memoir all about how he'd done it, and it's probably safe to assume that he was even more popular with the ladies because of it. This episode of Laura was researched, written and produced by me Aaron Manky, with additional research help from Jenna Rose Nethercat and writing assistance from Harry Marks, and music by Chad Lawson. Laura is much more than just a podcast. There's a book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime Video. Check them both out. If you want more Laura in your life, you can find more information about all of those things and more over at laer podcast dot com and for fans of the visual format, Laura is also on YouTube. Each new episode is released alongside the podcast, but in talking head video formats. Be sure to subscribe so that you don't miss future videos, and you can also follow the show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. To search for Laura Podcast all one word and then click that follow button. And when you do, say hi, I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening. H