A Death Row With No Executions

Eastern State is open every day from 10am to 5pm, March through November. In January and February it opens Wednesday through Monday, 10am to 5pm. From December 1 to 22 it opens Wednesday through Monday, and from December 23 to 31 it opens every day. It closes on New Year's Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, and Christmas Day, which in 2026 means November 26 and December 24 to 25. The hours page publishes no last entry time.

Adult admission is US$21 online and US$23 at the door. Seniors pay US$19 online and US$21 at the door, and college students and youth aged 7 to 17 pay US$17 online and US$19 at the door. Members and Philadelphia high school students get in free. Holders of Museums for All, ACCESS Card, and SEPTA Key Reduced Fare cards pay US$2 per person for up to four guests, visitors with disabilities pay US$2, and a SEPTA Key Card takes US$2 off an adult ticket bought online. Daytime tickets can be canceled up to 24 hours ahead. These prices are from the visit page, read on September 21, 2026.

Admission includes three kinds of tour. The audio tour, narrated by Steve Buscemi, runs 40 minutes over 10 core stops, with more stops on escapes, sports, sexuality, race, and other subjects. The Guide-Led Tour & Discussion is 45 minutes with an Eastern State educator and is tied to a date and time; it costs the same as online admission, runs at 12pm on weekdays and 11am on weekends with 35 places, and in the ticketing system's own words typically sells out. Mini Tours of 5 to 20 minutes run on topics that change from day to day. There is no guide-led tour on October 3, 2026, the free Firstival day.

Most visitors spend about 2 hours on site. Most of the site is not climate controlled, and Eastern State's own advice is that summers can be quite hot and winters quite chilly. Indoor floors are stone and can be uneven, and outside is concrete, gravel, and grass; sandals and heels are not recommended. The catwalk in Cellblock 7 takes 18 stairs, and restored cells have 8-inch thresholds. Free wheelchairs are lent first come, first served, and there are benches throughout. The accessibility page covers sensory bags, ASL interpretation on request, a monthly ASL guide-led tour, and quiet climate-controlled spaces on request. Service animals are welcome and emotional support animals are not. The daytime visit is not recommended for children under 7.

There are no dining facilities inside the walls and no parking lot of Eastern State's own. Weapons, pepper spray, pocketknives, lighters, flashlights, and alcohol are prohibited. Eastern State's Halloween directions page lists SEPTA bus routes 7, 32, 33, 43, 48, and 49. From October 2 to November 7, 2026, Halloween Nights runs on select evenings under a separate ticket.

John Haviland won the design competition, and a US$100 prize, with a plan Eastern State describes as "seven cellblocks connected by a central hub like the spokes of a wheel." The legislature had appropriated US$250,000 in 1821, and the prison opened on October 25, 1829. The audio tour counts roughly 300 prisons on five continents modeled on it.

The theory depended on silence. Dickens wrote that a black hood was drawn over the head and face of every prisoner who arrived, and the audio tour reads from warden journals of 1833, 1835, and 1840 recording punishments for breaking silence. Beaumont and Tocqueville compared the system with New York's Auburn model, where prisoners worked together in silence by day, and judged Philadelphia's "more charitable in its whole spirit," though harder to apply.

A prison designed for 250 men by Eastern State's history page, or 256 by its audio tour, held about 1,700 by the mid-1920s. The last woman held here, Freda Trost, was transferred to Muncy in 1923. The audio tour points out that intake clerks recorded "maroon eyes" and "wooly" hair for Black prisoners whether or not it was true. The largest riot came on January 8, 1961, in Cellblock 9.

In 1974, Mayor Rizzo floated demolishing the prison for a criminal justice center. The Redevelopment Authority sought commercial reuse in the 1980s, and a 1988 Inquirer piece covered a US$20 million plan to turn the abandoned prison into a shopping center. In the years it stood empty, the site became what Sally Elk, who led Eastern State for nearly 30 years, calls on the audio tour an "urban forest" with a "colony of abandoned cats," and its copper was stripped. In April 1988, the Eastern State Penitentiary Task Force persuaded Mayor Wilson Goode to reject redevelopment. Daily tours opened in 1994, with 10,000 visitors in the first year.

The exhibit Prisons Today: Questions in the Age of Mass Incarceration is part of admission, along with the two stops below.

Pep, prisoner C-2559. A black Labrador arrived in 1924 as a gift from Governor Gifford Pinchot, who had read that Maine's governor gave a dog to that state's prison. The audio tour quotes the letters: Pinchot wrote that it "has motivated me to do the same if it's alright with you," and Warden John Groome replied that he would "very much like to have a dog donated." The date Pep arrived is recorded two ways, August 12, 1924, on the audio tour and August 31, 1924, in the Inquirer and on the archive record for his mugshot. The 2003 audio tour also says his number is skipped in the intake log. The story that he was sentenced for killing a cat is a joke; Eastern State told the Inquirer in 2025 that it has "solid evidence, including letters preserved at the Library of Congress and multiple newspaper articles, that the 'cat murdering' account was a joke." Pep died in 1930.

The iron gag. A committee appointed by the legislature on December 6, 1834, investigated the prison, and Thomas B. McElwee published its proceedings in 1835 as A Concise History of the Eastern Penitentiary of Pennsylvania. The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia dates the death of Mathias Maccumsey under the iron gag to 1833 and describes the device as fitting "over the prisoner's tongue (like the bit of a horse bridle) and attached to his arms pinned behind his back."

When it closed, and who owned it. Eastern State's history page says the state ceased operations in 1970, and so does one stop on the audio tour; three other stops and the Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia say 1971. Wikipedia reconciles the two: closed in 1970, with the city briefly housing inmates there again in 1971. The ownership record splits the same way. A University of Pennsylvania history project says the city acquired the prison in 1971 for US$400,000, and Wikipedia says the city bought it in 1980. The prison was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1965.

On film. The audio tour calls 12 Monkeys a 1997 movie. It was released in 1995, with Eastern State standing in for a futuristic mental hospital. The tour dates Return to Paradise, shot mostly in Cellblock 12 in winter with the prison playing a Malaysian jail, to 1999; WHYY dates it to 1998.

Ghosts. Eastern State does not assert them. On the audio tour, Steve Buscemi asks, "Is this place haunted? Who knows?" and answers with what is known: "enormous suffering occurred behind these walls for over 140 years. Men and women died here." He calls the building "certainly 'haunting' if not haunted." A guide told NPR in 2013: "We at Eastern State do not claim that the prison is haunted. We run a haunted attraction." The best-known story, a locksmith's account of Cellblock 4 in the early 1990s, reaches print in NPR's retelling rather than in his own words. The attraction was Terror Behind the Walls from 1997 until 2021, when it became Halloween Nights. The Halloween Nights FAQ adds: "Paranormal investigations (including the use of mediums and EVP recorders or other pieces of paranormal investigation equipment) are not permitted at Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site."

The physical load is the one Eastern State warns about: uneven stone, the stairs, and heat or cold in a site that is mostly unconditioned. Five indoor areas are climate controlled, including the exhibits and the synagogue, and quiet climate-controlled spaces are available on request.

The heavier material is part of the official interpretation. It includes Death Row, the Hole, Other Absences with its portraits of murder victims, Prisons Today, the race data on The Big Graph, and the audio stops on sexuality, one of which covers a stillbirth after a 1922 rape allegation.

Personal photography is allowed. A tripod, monopod, or easel needs a photo equipment pass, US$10 for non-members and free for members. Commercial and private photo or film shoots are by application only, at least 2 weeks ahead, and reviewed case by case. Halloween Nights prohibits tripods and drones.

Yes, if the reason for going is the building. The audio tour and the guide-led tour are both included in admission, and the audio tour's stops run from Haviland's plan to Death Row to The Big Graph. The ghost reputation belongs to the fall festival, which has its own ticket, and the daytime site makes no claim for it. Guide-led tours typically sell out, which makes the timed slot the one thing worth booking ahead.