03-29-2021, 10:22 PM
A Look Inside Some Of History's Most Terrifying Prisons
Danielle Ownbey
Updated January 20, 2021
2.3m views
27 items
Prisons have held lawbreakers for as long as there have been laws to break. Facilities come and go as centuries pass, but the most notoriously scary historical prisons tend to haunt the pages of our history books with tales of unspeakable suffering, violence, and crime. They contributed to war efforts, impacted revolutions, and affected the history of the cities and countries that surrounded them.
The concept of prisons as we know them today is relatively modern. In antiquity, jails served less as places of penitence and more as a purgatory before the final judgment of guilt, which was often punished either by enslavement or execution. Before the mega jails and super-maxes of today, historical prisons took on many forms, from isolated islands to underground dungeons. Excluding any prison that is currently open and also the horrifically depressing sub-genre of concentration camps, this list reveals some of the scariest prisons in history.
Photo: Biruitorul / Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)
Pitești Prison, Romania
Pitesti was a Communist prison built in Romania, most famous for its intense and brutal brainwashing experiments. Operating from 1949-1951, the Pitesti Experiment attempted to "re-educate" wealthy intellectuals, bourgeois landowners, religious rebels, and political dissidents through psychological torture. Prisoners were malnourished and subjected to intentionally humiliating punishments.
In an effort to get prisoners to turn on one another, guards made prisoners torture each other by spitting and urinating in each other's mouths, among other even more disgusting things.
Photo: Rickydavid / flickr / CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0
The Mamertine, Italy
In Ancient Rome, the Mamertine's violence wasn't just brutal – it was biblical. A dank underground jailhouse, the Mamertine played host to two of Christianity's most famous characters. St. Peter and St. Paul; both spent time locked up in the dungeons of Mamertine, imprisoned there by Roman Emperor Nero.
In use since the 8th century BCE, the prison contained two floors of underground cells, one on top of the other, with the lower levels only accessible through holes in the upper levels. After torturous treatment and lack of food led to the deaths of many of the prisoners, guards disposed of their bodies in the Cloaca Maxima, AKA the Roman sewer.
Photo: Stéphane Passet/Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons
Prison At Urga, Mongolia
When explorer Roy Chapman Andrews, future director of the American Museum of Natural History, arrived at the prison in Urga, Mongolia, in 1918, he couldn't believe his eyes. Taken on a tour of the town's jail, he saw that the accommodations for prisoners in Urga were worse than any he had ever seen or studied before – because the prisoners essentially lived in coffins.
Housed in four-foot by three-foot boxes, prisoners could reach through a single six-inch hole to receive their food rations or blankets in the winter, when they got any, which was rare. Guards only cleaned the boxes every few weeks and as such, a prisoner very rarely saw the outside of their "cell." Prisoners' limbs atrophied from lack of movement, although many didn't live long enough to see this happen.
Photo: Cayambe / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0
Devil's Island, French Guiana
Potentially the most feared penal colony in history, Devil's Island saw 60,000 prisoners sail in its direction and only 2,000 make it out alive. An isolated island off the coast of French Army Guiana in the Atlantic ocean, Napoleon III and the French chose the island in 1852 because it was nearly impossible to escape. Guards worked prisoners nearly to death during the day, building unending roads to nowhere and clearing trees. At night, they were shackled and left in the dark to be bitten by vampire bats that waited in the rafters.
Some prisoners were kept in "bear pits" – holes dug into the ground and covered at the top by iron bars. The island's two most well-known residents were Alfred Dreyfus, a French Captain falsely convicted of treason, and Henri Charrière, an inmate who escaped the island and wrote a memoir about his time there. The book, Papillon, was adapted into a movie starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman.
Photo: Christopher Kirk / flickr / CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0
Carandiru Penitentiary, Brazil
Despite its nearly century-long infamous history, Carandiru Penitentiary in São Paulo, Brazil, is most notorious for the events of a single day. During the Carandiru Massacre on October 2, 1992, police took the lives of over 100 inmates in about 30 minutes. The events unfolded when an argument about a football match between two inmates devolved into a fight between rival gangs, which in turn sparked a prison riot.
In the overcrowded prison that held more than twice its inmate capacity, the riot raged on for three hours until police entered the complex and began to fire. According to witnesses, police shot inmates at close range behind locked cell doors and unleashed dogs on the wounded. It took 20 years for any of the police involved to be punished for their brutality against the prisoners.
Photo: gforbes / flickr / CC-BY-NC 2.0
Hỏa Lò Prison, Vietnam
Originally opened by French colonists in 1896 to house Vietnamese rebels, the Hỏa Lò Prison ultimately became famous by a different name: the Hanoi Hilton. During the Vietnam War, Hỏa Lò Prison imprisoned American POWs like Congressman Sam Johnson and Senator John McCain, who tried to commit suicide twice during his stay. The length of the Vietnam War led to long periods of imprisonment for many POWs, some staying at the Hanoi Hilton for eight years or more.
While there, POWs were beaten, tied up by their wrists, hung from meat hooks, forced into extended solitary confinement, and used in propaganda films. They finally made it home after the Paris Peace Accords set them free and the war ended.
Photo: Internet Archive Book Images / flickr / No known copyright restrictions
Camp Sumter, United States
The distinction of being the "deadliest landscape of the Civil War" is quite a notorious achievement. That reward doesn't go to the battlegrounds of Antietam in Maryland or Gettysburg in Pennsylvania, but to Andersonville, GA. At Camp Sumter Military Prison in Andersonville, the Confederate army imprisoned more than 45,000 Union troops during the last year of the Civil War.
Almost 13,000 of those troops lost their lives; most of the deaths were caused by disease and severe overcrowding. After the war ended, conditions at Andersonville so appalled the US government that officials sentenced the head of the prison, Captain Henry Wirz, to death.
Photo: ludi / Pixabay / CC0 1.0
Robben Island, South Africa
Infamous for its most famous resident, Nelson Mandela, Robben Island’s history is as broad as it is scary. The Dutch originally founded the prison in the 17th century during their colonization of South Africa. Since that time, the island has changed hands multiple times and served many different purposes: political prison, whaling station, military outpost during World War II, and insane asylum.
According to Mandela’s autobiography, he and other prisoners worked in a lime quarry, where the constant glare of the sun on the rock caused permanent eye damage. They received little food and clothing and were subjected to racism on a daily basis. Upon Mandela’s arrival, prison guards greeted him with some insight into the island: "This is the Island! Here you will die!" He spent the next 18 years, from 1964 to 1982, fighting the oppression of Apartheid from a six-square-foot cell.
Photo: Alessandra Kocman / flickr / CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0
Tadmor Prison, Syria
Built in the 1930s in Syria by the French, Tadmor's notoriety began 40 years later, during the rule of Hafez al-Assad. During Assad's reign as President of Syria, Tadmor became a dumping ground for political dissidents, summarily subjected to torture and execution.
Here are some of the scariest atrocities reported at Tadmor:
Soldiers killed between 500 and 1,000 prisoners in one day.
Medical treatment was scarce, with guards telling inmates, "Only call us to collect bodies."
Guards held a "reception party" for incoming inmates that involved hitting them up to 400 times.
Guards forced two inmates at a time to hold a third by his arms and legs and throw him across the room. When a man refused, he was beaten so severely that he died soon after.
An inmate described being ordered by guards to remove every pair of slippers, roughly 100, from the dormitory using only his mouth.
Inmates couldn't lift their eyes from the ground and would distinguish nice guards from sadistic ones by the color of their boots.
Despite the prison's closure in 2001, Tadmor made an appearance in the news in 2015 when ISIS took control of the building and demolished it.
Photo: F.O.C. Darley and Edward Bookhout/Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons
HMS Jersey, United States
When talking about terror on the high seas, few things could be more terror-inducing than the HMS "Hell." The HMS Jersey, nicknamed "Hell", was the most notorious of a number of warships that the British used to hold prisoners during the American Revolution. Docked in the New York Harbor (now the Brooklyn Navy Yard), the HMS Jersey and other ships like it held prisoners from 1776 to 1783 in appalling conditions.
Packed below deck, prisoners fought diseased rats, inhumane guards, lack of food, and extreme weather. By the time the British burned the ship at the end of the war, the HMS Jersey had racked up a death toll of 11,000.
Photo: Modus InOperandi / flickr / CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0
Port Arthur, Australia
In the 19th century, what did you do when you had massive amounts of criminals that you didn’t want to deal with anymore? If you were England, and your original dumping ground (the United States) just closed for business, you shipped them off to Australia. More specifically, you shipped them to Port Arthur.
After traveling thousands of miles from home, prisoners lived in harsh conditions, spending their time cutting timber, an exhausting job that was very lucrative for the prison.
Photo: paularps / flickr / CC-BY 2.0
Côn Đảo Prison/Côn Sơn Island, Vietnam
Like the more famous Hanoi Hilton, Côn Sơn Island was a prison in Vietnam first established by French colonists but more famous for its use during the Vietnam War. The penal colony opened in 1862, and the French started a violent precedent, with almost 1,000 prisoners dying during the construction of the island's jetty. When the Vietnam War began, the violence continued.
Prisoners were shackled in "tiger cages," 5-by-9-foot concrete pits with access to the outside through bars at the top. Each cage held multiple prisoners. The prison closed in 1975 after the war ended.
Photo: Melody Kramer / flickr / CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0
Holmesburg Prison, United States
Butting up against Route 95 in Philadelphia, PA, it's shocking that such a seemingly accessible structure could hold such scary stories within its walls. Constructed in 1895, Holmesburg Prison was the setting for events straight out of psychological thrillers and conspiracy theories. Most famously, government agencies and pharmaceutical companies subjected inmates at the prison to dangerous experimental drug testing.
Dermatologist Albert Kligman, inventor of the famous acne drug Retin-A and the treatment for poison ivy, ran "the Kmart of human experimentation" out of Holmesburg. For more than 20 years, from 1951 to 1974, Kligman conducted human testing at Holmesburg, slicing layers of skin off prisoners and infecting them with herpes and athlete's foot. Thanks in part to Kligman's ethical boundary crossing, the US government instituted federal regulations with regard to medical studies in prisons in 1978.
Photo: tpsdave / Pixabay / CC0 1.0
Tower of London, United Kingdom
Not just any old prisoner earned a stay in the Tower of London. Originally built by William the Conqueror in the 11th century as a fortress, the Tower of London’s rooms belonged to those on the receiving end of royal retribution. With 133 executions held in the fortress and on nearby Tower Hill, the grounds laid claim to some of England’s most famous deaths, including Guy Fawkes and two of Henry VIII’s wives.
In 1483, Richard III moved his two young nephews into the Tower after their father’s (the king’s) death. The princes vanished and the discovery of two sets of children’s bones years later indicate that the boys died in the Tower, probably by the order of their uncle. The Tower is also infamous for the use of torture on some of its residents to get them to talk.
Photo: jsouthorn / flickr / CC-BY 2.0
Galápagos Islands
On the Galapagos Islands, once used as a penal colony by Ecuador, the emotional toll of the work assigned to prisoners far surpassed the physical. The island is notorious as the location of the 65-foot tall "Wall of Tears," a structure that guards forced soldiers to build for absolutely no reason. They spent years stacking rocks to construct a wall that went nowhere and did nothing other than keep them working.
Active for roughly 20 years in the mid-19th century and again from 1946-1959, it's no wonder that the island claimed the lives of so many prisoners. If the disease, starvation, and workload didn't get you, the overwhelming hopelessness probably did.
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Photo: SMU Central University Libraries / flickr / No known copyright restrictions
Unit 731, China
Dr. Joseph Mengele and the Nazis weren't the only Axis power during World War II to perform horrific human experiments. Across the globe, Germany's ally Japan conducted terrifying experiments of their own. Unit 731 originally opened in Japan-occupied China in 1938 as a research facility for creating biological weapons. In the market for test subjects, the onset of World War II provided a morbidly unique opportunity for the Japanese.
Experiments on POWs and imprisoned Chinese civilians included infecting POWs with anthrax and the plague, placing them in pressure chambers until their bodies exploded, giving them frostbite, and vivisecting subjects without anesthesia. From 1940 through 1945, more than 3,000 people died as a result of these torturous experiments.
Photo: bmward_2000 / flickr / CC-BY-NC 2.0
Eastern State Penitentiary
Opened in 1829 in Philadelphia, PA, Eastern State Penitentiary (ESP) was the world's first "penitentiary," a prison born out of Enlightenment philosophies with the aim of encouraging penitence rather than merely locking men up and throwing away the key.
During its early years, ESP attempted to accomplish this with strict, crushing isolation. Guards left inmates in their cells by themselves for most of their sentences, with each cell containing a tiny area of outdoor access. When they left their cells, inmates were hooded to prevent them from interacting with guards and familiarizing themselves with the building. Essentially, inmates lived in a forced monastery, required to live inside their own heads at all times in an attempt to reconcile with their wrong-doings.
ESP's new and novel model was so influential countries around the world adopted the Pennsylvania system and built prisons that resembled ESP in methodology and architecture. However, as time wore on, people began to question the efficacy of solitary confinement. After a visit to ESP, Charles Dickens wrote: "I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body..."
Photo: WikiImages / Pixabay / CC0 1.0
Predjama Castle, Slovenia
A fortress built into a cave on the side of a mountain in Slovenia, Predjama Castle took full advantage of its creepy surroundings when it came to imprisonment. Although the castle has been around since at least the 13th century, the castle's most famous resident, 15th-century knight, nobleman, and successful robber baron Erazem Lueger established its infamy.
He tried enemies, criminals, and invading soldiers in secret trials and then literally threw them into their cell: a cave in the depths of the mountain. If the fall didn't do them in, the injuries and malnutrition probably did the trick.
Photo: Internet Archive Book Images / flickr / No known copyright restrictions
Carlisle Castle Dungeons, United Kingdom
Carlisle Castle once imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scots, but it isn't the English castle's most famous resident that makes it one of the scariest. It's the treatment afforded to its lower-born prisoners that earned the castle such an infamous reputation. Built in 1092, the castle's dungeons housed prisoners for hundreds of years in squalid conditions.
During the Jacobite Rebellion, Jacobite prisoners crowded into tiny cells in the dungeon. They were given so little sustenance they were forced to lick the stone walls of the cell in the hopes of drinking the tiniest bit of water that may have collected on the walls. The "licking stones" are still on view during tours of the castle.
Photo: _perSona_ / flickr / CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0
Solovetsky Monastery, Russia
Two words justify Solovetsky Monastery's spot as one of the scariest of all time: gulag prototype. The oldest official prison of the Russian state, it was originally built as a monastery in the 16th century. Throughout the centuries, the government also used the island and its buildings as a place to exile political dissidents.
After the Bolshevik Revolution, the Soviets switched gears, closing down the monastery and turning many of the buildings into the country's first full-fledged forced labor camp. The brutal treatment and terrible conditions at Solovetsky influenced the procedures and organization of later gulags across the USSR.
Photo: Misterio y Sociedad de Aventuras Literarias / flickr / CC-BY 2.0
Newgate Prison, United Kingdom
Newgate Prison is older than many countries (it was commissioned by King Henry II in the 12th century), but it was the London prison's most recent incarnation, rebuilt in the early 1780s, that kicked off its scariest period. Fear and terror reigned on both sides of the high walls of Newgate. On the inside, overcrowding, filthiness, starvation, and corruption ran rampant, with prisoners expected to pay every step of the way for proper bedding, food, clothing, removal of their leg shackles, and even the ability to exit upon their releases.
Just beyond the prison walls sat the gallows, home to public execution spectacles attended by thousands of morbidly eager Londoners. Public executions stopped in 1868, but verdicts continued to be carried out privately until the prison closed down in 1902.
Photo: jackmac34 / Pixabay / CC0 1.0
Chateau D'If, France
In Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo, protagonist Edmond Dantès spends 14 years at the Chateau D'If before making a daring escape to freedom, immortalizing the castle fortress in literature. In reality, no one ever escaped the isolated French island.
Opened in the 16th century under the reign of King Francois I, the prison spent 300 years as a home for political prisoners and common criminals. Treatment within the prison varied largely based on social class, with the richest able to live in comfort and the poorest housed in dungeons, beaten, and relegated to virtual slavery.
Photo: Denis Cappellin / flickr / CC-BY-ND 2.0
The Bastille, France
The Bastille, a French fortress commissioned in the 1370s by Charles V, first made the transition from stronghold to prison in the 17th century. Never the location of large quantities of inmates, the Bastille nonetheless gained a reputation for brutally mistreating those inmates it did house.
One such instrument of mistreatment was the Oubliette, its name derived from the French word for "to forget." It was a small cell designed to confine a prisoner in a tiny, cramped, dark space for long periods of a time, lowered by a rope through its only entrance at the top of the cell. Prisoners left in oubliettes for an extended stay couldn't move very freely, couldn't see, got very little food, and were left for dead.
By the end of Bastille's lifetime, it might have been more dangerous to be on the outside of the bars. During the French Revolution, rebels saw the Bastille as a symbol of the monarchy and stormed the building. 100 rioters died while capturing the Bastille and once the rebels took over, they murdered the military governor of the prison. The storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, served as France's symbolic break from its monarchy, now celebrated every year on Bastille Day.
Photo: Metaweb (FB) / CC-BY-SA-2.0
Kilmainham Gaol, Ireland
The beauty of the architecture at Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin, Ireland, belies a much uglier past for many of its inmates. Originally built in 1796 as a response to the problems plaguing older jails in Ireland, it didn't take long for Kilmainham to be bombarded by those very same problems. Between the rise in crime during the Great Famine (including starving Dubliners who purposefully committed crimes to get put in jail where they were assured at least a little bit of food) and the use of the jail as a holding facility for prisoners being sent to Australia, overcrowding and lack of resources plagued Kilmainham in a major way.
The jail imprisoned men, women, and children alike, all living together, often five to a cell, sometimes forced to sleep in hallways. A jail inspector wrote, "Numbers of these wretched creatures are obliged to lie on straw in the passages and dayrooms of the prison without a possibility of washing or exchanging their own filthy rags for proper apparel..." As such, disease and starvation ran rampant throughout the prison.
The prison's bloodiest period took place in May 1916, when officers executed more than a dozen Irish nationalist leaders of the Easter Uprising via firing squad. One of the men, Joseph Connelly, was too injured to stand in front of the line of rifles. Instead, he was carried in on a stretcher, tied to a chair, and shot.
Photo: Chris "Chrigel" Karrer / flickr / CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0
Coiba Island, Panama
An island off the coast of Panama, the Panamanian government established a penal colony there in 1919. Over the course of two military regimes, those of Omar Torrijos and Manuel Noriega, Coiba Island housed political prisoners critical of the ruling parties. In a deceptively beautiful paradise setting, reports of mistreatment, torture, disease, and murder abounded.
As a ritual for new residents, guards took them out into the jungle, blindfolded them, lined them up, and held a mock execution, pointing guns at them and counting down, "3, 2, 1, fire..." Coiba ceased operations in 2004, but many believe that the island is still haunted by the ghosts of former inmates.
Photo: vgm8383 / flickr / CC-BY-NC 2.0
Pontefract Castle, United Kingdom
Pontefract Castle in Yorkshire, England, has a long and storied history, and its dungeons do too. Built in the 11th century, Pontefract Castle served as the stage for murders, executions, and affairs for numerous kings and members of the nobility. Beneath the grandiose exterior, a terrifying network of dungeons held hundreds of years' worth of prisoners. Prisoners were thrown into the dungeons and left to wander the immense darkened corridors, many scratching their names into the stone walls. During the War of the Roses, hundreds of them met their demise at Pontefract.
The most famous death at the castle, Richard II's murder, was immortalized by Shakespeare himself in the play Richard III: "Pomfret, Pomfret! O thou bloody prison, fatal and ominous to noble peers! Within the guilty closure of thy walls, Richard the second here was hack'd to death..."
Photo: SoheilK / flickr / CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0
Alcatraz, United States
Alcatraz is one of the few prisons in history where the notoriety of the inmates far outweighs the notoriety of the prison itself. As an inmate at Alcatraz, chances are your bunkmate was much scarier than the guard on the other side of the bars. The roster of "talent" at Alcatraz during its years of operation from 1934 to 1963 included Al Capone, "Machine Gun" Kelly, Alvin Karpis, "Doc" Barker, Robert Stroud, "Whitey" Bulger, and Mickey Cohen – some of the most powerful and terrifying villains of the era, or any other era for that matter.
When you add to that the deceptive isolation of an island in the center of the San Francisco bay, Alcatraz definitely made for a bubbling cauldron brimming with conflict, never far from boiling over.
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Danielle Ownbey
Updated January 20, 2021
2.3m views
27 items
Prisons have held lawbreakers for as long as there have been laws to break. Facilities come and go as centuries pass, but the most notoriously scary historical prisons tend to haunt the pages of our history books with tales of unspeakable suffering, violence, and crime. They contributed to war efforts, impacted revolutions, and affected the history of the cities and countries that surrounded them.
The concept of prisons as we know them today is relatively modern. In antiquity, jails served less as places of penitence and more as a purgatory before the final judgment of guilt, which was often punished either by enslavement or execution. Before the mega jails and super-maxes of today, historical prisons took on many forms, from isolated islands to underground dungeons. Excluding any prison that is currently open and also the horrifically depressing sub-genre of concentration camps, this list reveals some of the scariest prisons in history.
Photo: Biruitorul / Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)
Pitești Prison, Romania
Pitesti was a Communist prison built in Romania, most famous for its intense and brutal brainwashing experiments. Operating from 1949-1951, the Pitesti Experiment attempted to "re-educate" wealthy intellectuals, bourgeois landowners, religious rebels, and political dissidents through psychological torture. Prisoners were malnourished and subjected to intentionally humiliating punishments.
In an effort to get prisoners to turn on one another, guards made prisoners torture each other by spitting and urinating in each other's mouths, among other even more disgusting things.
Photo: Rickydavid / flickr / CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0
The Mamertine, Italy
In Ancient Rome, the Mamertine's violence wasn't just brutal – it was biblical. A dank underground jailhouse, the Mamertine played host to two of Christianity's most famous characters. St. Peter and St. Paul; both spent time locked up in the dungeons of Mamertine, imprisoned there by Roman Emperor Nero.
In use since the 8th century BCE, the prison contained two floors of underground cells, one on top of the other, with the lower levels only accessible through holes in the upper levels. After torturous treatment and lack of food led to the deaths of many of the prisoners, guards disposed of their bodies in the Cloaca Maxima, AKA the Roman sewer.
Photo: Stéphane Passet/Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons
Prison At Urga, Mongolia
When explorer Roy Chapman Andrews, future director of the American Museum of Natural History, arrived at the prison in Urga, Mongolia, in 1918, he couldn't believe his eyes. Taken on a tour of the town's jail, he saw that the accommodations for prisoners in Urga were worse than any he had ever seen or studied before – because the prisoners essentially lived in coffins.
Housed in four-foot by three-foot boxes, prisoners could reach through a single six-inch hole to receive their food rations or blankets in the winter, when they got any, which was rare. Guards only cleaned the boxes every few weeks and as such, a prisoner very rarely saw the outside of their "cell." Prisoners' limbs atrophied from lack of movement, although many didn't live long enough to see this happen.
Photo: Cayambe / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0
Devil's Island, French Guiana
Potentially the most feared penal colony in history, Devil's Island saw 60,000 prisoners sail in its direction and only 2,000 make it out alive. An isolated island off the coast of French Army Guiana in the Atlantic ocean, Napoleon III and the French chose the island in 1852 because it was nearly impossible to escape. Guards worked prisoners nearly to death during the day, building unending roads to nowhere and clearing trees. At night, they were shackled and left in the dark to be bitten by vampire bats that waited in the rafters.
Some prisoners were kept in "bear pits" – holes dug into the ground and covered at the top by iron bars. The island's two most well-known residents were Alfred Dreyfus, a French Captain falsely convicted of treason, and Henri Charrière, an inmate who escaped the island and wrote a memoir about his time there. The book, Papillon, was adapted into a movie starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman.
Photo: Christopher Kirk / flickr / CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0
Carandiru Penitentiary, Brazil
Despite its nearly century-long infamous history, Carandiru Penitentiary in São Paulo, Brazil, is most notorious for the events of a single day. During the Carandiru Massacre on October 2, 1992, police took the lives of over 100 inmates in about 30 minutes. The events unfolded when an argument about a football match between two inmates devolved into a fight between rival gangs, which in turn sparked a prison riot.
In the overcrowded prison that held more than twice its inmate capacity, the riot raged on for three hours until police entered the complex and began to fire. According to witnesses, police shot inmates at close range behind locked cell doors and unleashed dogs on the wounded. It took 20 years for any of the police involved to be punished for their brutality against the prisoners.
Photo: gforbes / flickr / CC-BY-NC 2.0
Hỏa Lò Prison, Vietnam
Originally opened by French colonists in 1896 to house Vietnamese rebels, the Hỏa Lò Prison ultimately became famous by a different name: the Hanoi Hilton. During the Vietnam War, Hỏa Lò Prison imprisoned American POWs like Congressman Sam Johnson and Senator John McCain, who tried to commit suicide twice during his stay. The length of the Vietnam War led to long periods of imprisonment for many POWs, some staying at the Hanoi Hilton for eight years or more.
While there, POWs were beaten, tied up by their wrists, hung from meat hooks, forced into extended solitary confinement, and used in propaganda films. They finally made it home after the Paris Peace Accords set them free and the war ended.
Photo: Internet Archive Book Images / flickr / No known copyright restrictions
Camp Sumter, United States
The distinction of being the "deadliest landscape of the Civil War" is quite a notorious achievement. That reward doesn't go to the battlegrounds of Antietam in Maryland or Gettysburg in Pennsylvania, but to Andersonville, GA. At Camp Sumter Military Prison in Andersonville, the Confederate army imprisoned more than 45,000 Union troops during the last year of the Civil War.
Almost 13,000 of those troops lost their lives; most of the deaths were caused by disease and severe overcrowding. After the war ended, conditions at Andersonville so appalled the US government that officials sentenced the head of the prison, Captain Henry Wirz, to death.
Photo: ludi / Pixabay / CC0 1.0
Robben Island, South Africa
Infamous for its most famous resident, Nelson Mandela, Robben Island’s history is as broad as it is scary. The Dutch originally founded the prison in the 17th century during their colonization of South Africa. Since that time, the island has changed hands multiple times and served many different purposes: political prison, whaling station, military outpost during World War II, and insane asylum.
According to Mandela’s autobiography, he and other prisoners worked in a lime quarry, where the constant glare of the sun on the rock caused permanent eye damage. They received little food and clothing and were subjected to racism on a daily basis. Upon Mandela’s arrival, prison guards greeted him with some insight into the island: "This is the Island! Here you will die!" He spent the next 18 years, from 1964 to 1982, fighting the oppression of Apartheid from a six-square-foot cell.
Photo: Alessandra Kocman / flickr / CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0
Tadmor Prison, Syria
Built in the 1930s in Syria by the French, Tadmor's notoriety began 40 years later, during the rule of Hafez al-Assad. During Assad's reign as President of Syria, Tadmor became a dumping ground for political dissidents, summarily subjected to torture and execution.
Here are some of the scariest atrocities reported at Tadmor:
Soldiers killed between 500 and 1,000 prisoners in one day.
Medical treatment was scarce, with guards telling inmates, "Only call us to collect bodies."
Guards held a "reception party" for incoming inmates that involved hitting them up to 400 times.
Guards forced two inmates at a time to hold a third by his arms and legs and throw him across the room. When a man refused, he was beaten so severely that he died soon after.
An inmate described being ordered by guards to remove every pair of slippers, roughly 100, from the dormitory using only his mouth.
Inmates couldn't lift their eyes from the ground and would distinguish nice guards from sadistic ones by the color of their boots.
Despite the prison's closure in 2001, Tadmor made an appearance in the news in 2015 when ISIS took control of the building and demolished it.
Photo: F.O.C. Darley and Edward Bookhout/Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons
HMS Jersey, United States
When talking about terror on the high seas, few things could be more terror-inducing than the HMS "Hell." The HMS Jersey, nicknamed "Hell", was the most notorious of a number of warships that the British used to hold prisoners during the American Revolution. Docked in the New York Harbor (now the Brooklyn Navy Yard), the HMS Jersey and other ships like it held prisoners from 1776 to 1783 in appalling conditions.
Packed below deck, prisoners fought diseased rats, inhumane guards, lack of food, and extreme weather. By the time the British burned the ship at the end of the war, the HMS Jersey had racked up a death toll of 11,000.
Photo: Modus InOperandi / flickr / CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0
Port Arthur, Australia
In the 19th century, what did you do when you had massive amounts of criminals that you didn’t want to deal with anymore? If you were England, and your original dumping ground (the United States) just closed for business, you shipped them off to Australia. More specifically, you shipped them to Port Arthur.
After traveling thousands of miles from home, prisoners lived in harsh conditions, spending their time cutting timber, an exhausting job that was very lucrative for the prison.
Photo: paularps / flickr / CC-BY 2.0
Côn Đảo Prison/Côn Sơn Island, Vietnam
Like the more famous Hanoi Hilton, Côn Sơn Island was a prison in Vietnam first established by French colonists but more famous for its use during the Vietnam War. The penal colony opened in 1862, and the French started a violent precedent, with almost 1,000 prisoners dying during the construction of the island's jetty. When the Vietnam War began, the violence continued.
Prisoners were shackled in "tiger cages," 5-by-9-foot concrete pits with access to the outside through bars at the top. Each cage held multiple prisoners. The prison closed in 1975 after the war ended.
Photo: Melody Kramer / flickr / CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0
Holmesburg Prison, United States
Butting up against Route 95 in Philadelphia, PA, it's shocking that such a seemingly accessible structure could hold such scary stories within its walls. Constructed in 1895, Holmesburg Prison was the setting for events straight out of psychological thrillers and conspiracy theories. Most famously, government agencies and pharmaceutical companies subjected inmates at the prison to dangerous experimental drug testing.
Dermatologist Albert Kligman, inventor of the famous acne drug Retin-A and the treatment for poison ivy, ran "the Kmart of human experimentation" out of Holmesburg. For more than 20 years, from 1951 to 1974, Kligman conducted human testing at Holmesburg, slicing layers of skin off prisoners and infecting them with herpes and athlete's foot. Thanks in part to Kligman's ethical boundary crossing, the US government instituted federal regulations with regard to medical studies in prisons in 1978.
Photo: tpsdave / Pixabay / CC0 1.0
Tower of London, United Kingdom
Not just any old prisoner earned a stay in the Tower of London. Originally built by William the Conqueror in the 11th century as a fortress, the Tower of London’s rooms belonged to those on the receiving end of royal retribution. With 133 executions held in the fortress and on nearby Tower Hill, the grounds laid claim to some of England’s most famous deaths, including Guy Fawkes and two of Henry VIII’s wives.
In 1483, Richard III moved his two young nephews into the Tower after their father’s (the king’s) death. The princes vanished and the discovery of two sets of children’s bones years later indicate that the boys died in the Tower, probably by the order of their uncle. The Tower is also infamous for the use of torture on some of its residents to get them to talk.
Photo: jsouthorn / flickr / CC-BY 2.0
Galápagos Islands
On the Galapagos Islands, once used as a penal colony by Ecuador, the emotional toll of the work assigned to prisoners far surpassed the physical. The island is notorious as the location of the 65-foot tall "Wall of Tears," a structure that guards forced soldiers to build for absolutely no reason. They spent years stacking rocks to construct a wall that went nowhere and did nothing other than keep them working.
Active for roughly 20 years in the mid-19th century and again from 1946-1959, it's no wonder that the island claimed the lives of so many prisoners. If the disease, starvation, and workload didn't get you, the overwhelming hopelessness probably did.
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Photo: SMU Central University Libraries / flickr / No known copyright restrictions
Unit 731, China
Dr. Joseph Mengele and the Nazis weren't the only Axis power during World War II to perform horrific human experiments. Across the globe, Germany's ally Japan conducted terrifying experiments of their own. Unit 731 originally opened in Japan-occupied China in 1938 as a research facility for creating biological weapons. In the market for test subjects, the onset of World War II provided a morbidly unique opportunity for the Japanese.
Experiments on POWs and imprisoned Chinese civilians included infecting POWs with anthrax and the plague, placing them in pressure chambers until their bodies exploded, giving them frostbite, and vivisecting subjects without anesthesia. From 1940 through 1945, more than 3,000 people died as a result of these torturous experiments.
Photo: bmward_2000 / flickr / CC-BY-NC 2.0
Eastern State Penitentiary
Opened in 1829 in Philadelphia, PA, Eastern State Penitentiary (ESP) was the world's first "penitentiary," a prison born out of Enlightenment philosophies with the aim of encouraging penitence rather than merely locking men up and throwing away the key.
During its early years, ESP attempted to accomplish this with strict, crushing isolation. Guards left inmates in their cells by themselves for most of their sentences, with each cell containing a tiny area of outdoor access. When they left their cells, inmates were hooded to prevent them from interacting with guards and familiarizing themselves with the building. Essentially, inmates lived in a forced monastery, required to live inside their own heads at all times in an attempt to reconcile with their wrong-doings.
ESP's new and novel model was so influential countries around the world adopted the Pennsylvania system and built prisons that resembled ESP in methodology and architecture. However, as time wore on, people began to question the efficacy of solitary confinement. After a visit to ESP, Charles Dickens wrote: "I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body..."
Photo: WikiImages / Pixabay / CC0 1.0
Predjama Castle, Slovenia
A fortress built into a cave on the side of a mountain in Slovenia, Predjama Castle took full advantage of its creepy surroundings when it came to imprisonment. Although the castle has been around since at least the 13th century, the castle's most famous resident, 15th-century knight, nobleman, and successful robber baron Erazem Lueger established its infamy.
He tried enemies, criminals, and invading soldiers in secret trials and then literally threw them into their cell: a cave in the depths of the mountain. If the fall didn't do them in, the injuries and malnutrition probably did the trick.
Photo: Internet Archive Book Images / flickr / No known copyright restrictions
Carlisle Castle Dungeons, United Kingdom
Carlisle Castle once imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scots, but it isn't the English castle's most famous resident that makes it one of the scariest. It's the treatment afforded to its lower-born prisoners that earned the castle such an infamous reputation. Built in 1092, the castle's dungeons housed prisoners for hundreds of years in squalid conditions.
During the Jacobite Rebellion, Jacobite prisoners crowded into tiny cells in the dungeon. They were given so little sustenance they were forced to lick the stone walls of the cell in the hopes of drinking the tiniest bit of water that may have collected on the walls. The "licking stones" are still on view during tours of the castle.
Photo: _perSona_ / flickr / CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0
Solovetsky Monastery, Russia
Two words justify Solovetsky Monastery's spot as one of the scariest of all time: gulag prototype. The oldest official prison of the Russian state, it was originally built as a monastery in the 16th century. Throughout the centuries, the government also used the island and its buildings as a place to exile political dissidents.
After the Bolshevik Revolution, the Soviets switched gears, closing down the monastery and turning many of the buildings into the country's first full-fledged forced labor camp. The brutal treatment and terrible conditions at Solovetsky influenced the procedures and organization of later gulags across the USSR.
Photo: Misterio y Sociedad de Aventuras Literarias / flickr / CC-BY 2.0
Newgate Prison, United Kingdom
Newgate Prison is older than many countries (it was commissioned by King Henry II in the 12th century), but it was the London prison's most recent incarnation, rebuilt in the early 1780s, that kicked off its scariest period. Fear and terror reigned on both sides of the high walls of Newgate. On the inside, overcrowding, filthiness, starvation, and corruption ran rampant, with prisoners expected to pay every step of the way for proper bedding, food, clothing, removal of their leg shackles, and even the ability to exit upon their releases.
Just beyond the prison walls sat the gallows, home to public execution spectacles attended by thousands of morbidly eager Londoners. Public executions stopped in 1868, but verdicts continued to be carried out privately until the prison closed down in 1902.
Photo: jackmac34 / Pixabay / CC0 1.0
Chateau D'If, France
In Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo, protagonist Edmond Dantès spends 14 years at the Chateau D'If before making a daring escape to freedom, immortalizing the castle fortress in literature. In reality, no one ever escaped the isolated French island.
Opened in the 16th century under the reign of King Francois I, the prison spent 300 years as a home for political prisoners and common criminals. Treatment within the prison varied largely based on social class, with the richest able to live in comfort and the poorest housed in dungeons, beaten, and relegated to virtual slavery.
Photo: Denis Cappellin / flickr / CC-BY-ND 2.0
The Bastille, France
The Bastille, a French fortress commissioned in the 1370s by Charles V, first made the transition from stronghold to prison in the 17th century. Never the location of large quantities of inmates, the Bastille nonetheless gained a reputation for brutally mistreating those inmates it did house.
One such instrument of mistreatment was the Oubliette, its name derived from the French word for "to forget." It was a small cell designed to confine a prisoner in a tiny, cramped, dark space for long periods of a time, lowered by a rope through its only entrance at the top of the cell. Prisoners left in oubliettes for an extended stay couldn't move very freely, couldn't see, got very little food, and were left for dead.
By the end of Bastille's lifetime, it might have been more dangerous to be on the outside of the bars. During the French Revolution, rebels saw the Bastille as a symbol of the monarchy and stormed the building. 100 rioters died while capturing the Bastille and once the rebels took over, they murdered the military governor of the prison. The storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, served as France's symbolic break from its monarchy, now celebrated every year on Bastille Day.
Photo: Metaweb (FB) / CC-BY-SA-2.0
Kilmainham Gaol, Ireland
The beauty of the architecture at Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin, Ireland, belies a much uglier past for many of its inmates. Originally built in 1796 as a response to the problems plaguing older jails in Ireland, it didn't take long for Kilmainham to be bombarded by those very same problems. Between the rise in crime during the Great Famine (including starving Dubliners who purposefully committed crimes to get put in jail where they were assured at least a little bit of food) and the use of the jail as a holding facility for prisoners being sent to Australia, overcrowding and lack of resources plagued Kilmainham in a major way.
The jail imprisoned men, women, and children alike, all living together, often five to a cell, sometimes forced to sleep in hallways. A jail inspector wrote, "Numbers of these wretched creatures are obliged to lie on straw in the passages and dayrooms of the prison without a possibility of washing or exchanging their own filthy rags for proper apparel..." As such, disease and starvation ran rampant throughout the prison.
The prison's bloodiest period took place in May 1916, when officers executed more than a dozen Irish nationalist leaders of the Easter Uprising via firing squad. One of the men, Joseph Connelly, was too injured to stand in front of the line of rifles. Instead, he was carried in on a stretcher, tied to a chair, and shot.
Photo: Chris "Chrigel" Karrer / flickr / CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0
Coiba Island, Panama
An island off the coast of Panama, the Panamanian government established a penal colony there in 1919. Over the course of two military regimes, those of Omar Torrijos and Manuel Noriega, Coiba Island housed political prisoners critical of the ruling parties. In a deceptively beautiful paradise setting, reports of mistreatment, torture, disease, and murder abounded.
As a ritual for new residents, guards took them out into the jungle, blindfolded them, lined them up, and held a mock execution, pointing guns at them and counting down, "3, 2, 1, fire..." Coiba ceased operations in 2004, but many believe that the island is still haunted by the ghosts of former inmates.
Photo: vgm8383 / flickr / CC-BY-NC 2.0
Pontefract Castle, United Kingdom
Pontefract Castle in Yorkshire, England, has a long and storied history, and its dungeons do too. Built in the 11th century, Pontefract Castle served as the stage for murders, executions, and affairs for numerous kings and members of the nobility. Beneath the grandiose exterior, a terrifying network of dungeons held hundreds of years' worth of prisoners. Prisoners were thrown into the dungeons and left to wander the immense darkened corridors, many scratching their names into the stone walls. During the War of the Roses, hundreds of them met their demise at Pontefract.
The most famous death at the castle, Richard II's murder, was immortalized by Shakespeare himself in the play Richard III: "Pomfret, Pomfret! O thou bloody prison, fatal and ominous to noble peers! Within the guilty closure of thy walls, Richard the second here was hack'd to death..."
Photo: SoheilK / flickr / CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0
Alcatraz, United States
Alcatraz is one of the few prisons in history where the notoriety of the inmates far outweighs the notoriety of the prison itself. As an inmate at Alcatraz, chances are your bunkmate was much scarier than the guard on the other side of the bars. The roster of "talent" at Alcatraz during its years of operation from 1934 to 1963 included Al Capone, "Machine Gun" Kelly, Alvin Karpis, "Doc" Barker, Robert Stroud, "Whitey" Bulger, and Mickey Cohen – some of the most powerful and terrifying villains of the era, or any other era for that matter.
When you add to that the deceptive isolation of an island in the center of the San Francisco bay, Alcatraz definitely made for a bubbling cauldron brimming with conflict, never far from boiling over.
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