Part 2 of 5 in A Love Letter to Fairmount

Eastern State Penitentiary at Halloween sells out, especially on weekend nights. Tickets go on sale weeks ahead, you pick a time slot, and they let a group in every ten minutes. There is no meaningful line to get in. That is part of why it works — you are inside the cellblocks within minutes of your slot, and the experience starts almost immediately.

For people who have not been, here is what you are paying for. Eastern State Penitentiary opens for Halloween and turns itself into five separate haunted houses. Five. You pay once at the door and you get all five. They run through the cellblocks, around the yard, into corners of the building most visitors never see. There are also bars between the houses, people dressed up as zombies and monsters walking around, and in some years a dance competition in the yard. It is more expensive than a movie. It is also, by a wide margin, the best thing I do in October.

I love being scared — the adrenaline jump. I have been chasing it since I was a kid. I still remember watching The Ring — both the English version and the Japanese original — when I was fourteen. I am, to this day, occasionally scared of taking a shower when I am home alone because of that movie. I love it. My wife normally hates horror. She has never watched a full horror movie with me, end to end. Eastern State at Halloween is one of the few scary things she has actually done — and she liked it.

Before you go in, you take a glowstick or you don't. The glowstick means the actors can touch you. Without it, they leave you alone. It is a clean rule.

We both took the glowsticks the first time we went, without really knowing what they meant.

One of the houses that year was themed as an abandoned medical lab. We were in one of the rooms when a demonic dentist took my wife by the arm and guided her, gently, into a chair.

The chair looked like something out of A Clockwork Orange — worn, rusted, the leather peeling, the kind of thing you'd see in old asylum movies. He strapped her in. He held a drill up to her mouth. She didn't scream.

She didn't make a sound. When they let her go, she came out and said she had been terrified the entire time, even knowing it was an act. The next year she didn't wear the glowstick. I did.

I also got pulled into the theatre of it all one year. One of the haunted houses is industrial themed. We were there with friends, walking down a long hallway. And from behind me, someone grabs me and shoves me into a false door and I pass through. It was poorly lit, with some glow in the dark wallpaper to guide you through the passage. It was a secret parallel passage, so I had to walk through it, entirely separated from my wife and my group. I wasn't scared in the least (minus the initial shock of being grabbed). It was awesome.

I'm fortunate to have what I think is one of the world's best haunted houses literally across the street from me!