ESP: Eastern State Penintentiary

Beauty in the breakdown. Sometimes it is hard to find the beauty when things fall into decay. Other times the beauty of how nature takes it course smacks you upside the head and forces you to pay attention. It forces you to understand that time marches on and that the horrors of the past may never be completely erased, but they can fade over time.  There is always beauty that can be found in broken places. 

Eastern State Penitentiary  (ESP) was much more than I had ever excepted or anticipated. It was one of those places that sounded interesting and even if the trip was a total bust, I could say that I had been there. I didn’t have high hopes for the trip, even if it was my idea to begin with. I will admit that when it comes to planning things to do, I am not very inventive.  The idea to visit the ruins came from looking at a website about haunted attractions in Philadelphia. I thought it would be fun to feed my paranormal addiction and this looked like a good compromise with my husband, who believes the paranormal is all a bunch of malarky.  If anything ESP would give us an experience to remember. 

The ruins are rich with history and you could tell that the audio tour with Steve Buscemi was something that he had wanted to do. There was a vibe of energy that poured out of the narration and highlighted the voices from the past. The richness of the history seeps through your bones as the dust motes floated in the air. Around every turn was something more to see and something more to discover. I felt like I was transported into another time and the grasps of reality around me was just an illusion.  It made me wish I had brought a better camera than relying on my cell phone. It made me wish to go off an explore the dark and scary parts of life, because even in those dark shadows there is always a bit of beauty that could be found.  It made me want to come back and take another tour, and take more pictures just to make sure that it wasn’t all a trick of light. 

It made me realize that some of the most normal things can be the most startling.  There is nothing quite like rounding a corner and wondering if what you are seeing is really real and if every one else that sees it is getting those same sort of goosebumps crawling along their spine. I don’t know if Eastern State Penitentiary is truly haunted, but I do know that the icy grip of time standing still is strong there. I do know that I would never want to be there in the dark and that even if it is not haunted the corners of my mind would gang up on my and convince me that ever sound I heard was something more than it really was. I think that that constant pause and questioning is what makes ESP beautiful in its controlled decay. There is always be found in broken places, you just have to know how to look.