Lore - REMASTERED – Episode 42: In the Bag

Episode Date: January 9, 2023

Some places on the map are legendary, and Eastern State Penitentiary fits the bill. In this remastered classic episode of Lore, we return to those musty halls and explore the ghosts that still haunt them. Be sure to stick around for the brand new bonus story at the end! Researched, written, and produced by Aaron Mahnke, with music by Chad Lawson, with additional help from GennaRose Nethercott and Harry Marks. ———————— This episode of Lore was sponsored by: Squarespace: Build your own powerful, professional website, with free hosting, zero patches or upgrades, and 24/7 award-winning customer support. Start your free trial website today at Squarespace.com/lore, and when you make your first purchase, use offer code LORE to save 10%. Rocket Money: Stop throwing your money away. Cancel unwanted subscriptions and manage your expenses the easy way, by going to RocketMoney.com/LORE. Stamps.com: Print your own postage and shipping labels from your home or office. Start your 4-week trial today, which includes free postage, a digital scale, and zero commitment. Just visit Stamps.com, click on the microphone in the top-right of the homepage, and type LORE. ©2023 Aaron Mahnke. All rights reserved. Access premium, ad-free content here!

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 are 60 days in, each stand as a testament to that obsession. And rightly so. Prison to 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 Mankey, 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 4,000 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 Desmotereon, 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 Mamertine 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 those rulers wielded. But even then, prison was only a sort of purgatory, a waiting 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 was 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 18th 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 1779, 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 1787, 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 impact wouldn't be seen for another 40 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 1800s, it 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 were 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 25th of 1829, 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 24-7 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 10-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 94, William Hamilton. He climbed out of a window in the warden's office, but was caught a short time later. In 1927, William Bishy, an inmate of 15 years, escaped with a friend. They managed to push a guard off one of the towers and then scale 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 inmate in eastern state penitentiary's 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 state. 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 1934. During his 11 year stay there, he tried escaping five times. But it was his last attempt that was an affair

to remember. Sutton, along with 11 other men, dug a tunnel 12 feet down from cell 68 and then another 100 feet straight out to breach the wall. They removed the dirt from their excavations just like the Shawshank 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 3rd of 1945, all 12 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 100 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 U.S. But why the rush to leave? Eastern state, it turns out, was originally designed to house a maximum of 300 criminals. But that was in the 1830s, and society was changing. In the beginning, most of the inmates were horse thieves. By the 1920s, though, inmates were being sent in with darker crimes, things like violence and murder. As a result, numbers swelled to an astounding 2,000. 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 straitjacket, 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's chair, and prisoners would be strapped into it as tightly 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. An inmate's 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 there enjoyed a bit more freedom, and none took advantage of that more than 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 St. Valentine's Day Massacre, Capone was picked up in Philadelphia and convicted for carrying a concealed weapon. For the eight months that spanned the summer of 1929 to the spring of 1930, Capone called Park Avenue his home. Here's what an August 1929 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 accommodations, 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 state, 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, they guessed, 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 1970, but was reopened in 1991 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 wails have been heard there as well. In cell block 12, 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 pass 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 4. After 140 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, were covered with faces, 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 imprisonment 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 earlier, more barbaric methods, and each inmate, 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 Hotel,

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. That, they hoped, was the end of it. One day, a few weeks after that seance, Capone's personal attendant, a man named Jaime 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 Lore was made possible by Squarespace.

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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 harebrained 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 Casanova. 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 Piambi Prison, a set of seven cells on the top floor of the Doge's Palace in Venice. Piambi translates to the leads, meant for the lead slabs covering the prison's roof. But Piambi 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 Boque de Leone, or the lion's 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 maw. In some cases, all it took was one accusation to land them in Piambi. The complaints were then taken to the Council of Ten, a Venetian 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 led in the cold in the winter and collected heat in the summer,

making the flee-infested cells unbearable in extreme weather. The ceilings were also so low, some of the prisoners couldn't stand upright. In 1756, Giacomo Casanova got a close look at the facilities when he found himself in the jaws of the lion's mouth and the frigid embrace of Piambi'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 doorbolt and a shard of marble. 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 attempt to 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 Casanova was searched daily for the tool that he had used to make it. The guards never found it though. He had hid it in the seat of his chair in his new cell, but because he was always being watched, he couldn't dig anymore. Sometime later, Casanova befriended Marino Balbi, a fallen friar living in the cell above his. Balbi had been imprisoned for fathering three children with three different young women and baptizing them all as his own. He and Casanova 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 Casanova 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 Balbi. In order for the plan to work though, Balbi had to bore two holes in his own cell, one in the floor for Casanova to climb up through and another in the wall that would lead the men to freedom. Casanova smuggled the pike to Balbi 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. Casanova 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 Balbi to cover his walls with posters of the saints and begin boring through behind them. Suddenly, days before they were about to escape, Casanova was hit with another curveball, a new cellmate named Sorodachi. And Sorodachi 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, Balbi came bursting through the ceiling, fooling Sorodachi and giving Casanova the means to get out. In modern terms, they Shawshanked their way across the steep, slippery lead tiles and shibbied 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 Casanova 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 Lore was researched, written, and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with additional research help from Jenna Rose Nethercott and writing assistants from Harry Marks, and music by Chad Lawson. Lore is much more than just a podcast. There is 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 Lore in your life. You can find more information about all of those things and more over at lorpodcast.com. And for fans of the visual format, Lore 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 this show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to search for Lore 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.