Australia’s Most Haunted Prisons
Does the devil stalk the Isle of the Dead near the Port Arthur Prison? And what supernatural force keeps people out of cell 17 at Old Melbourne Gaol?
TW: References to child death
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SOURCES
General:
https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/convict-transportation-peaks
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20120126-travelwise-australias-penal-colony-roots
https://www.amw.org.au/sites/default/files/memory_of_the_world/index/crime-and-punishment.html
Port Arthur:
https://stowawaymag.byu.edu/prison-life
https://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_history/P/Port%20Arthur.htm
https://tasmaniantimes.com/2020/05/separate-prison-port-arthur/
https://www.bne.com.au/blog/escapes/haunting-encounter-at-port-arthur
https://www.ytravelblog.com/port-arthur-ghost-tour/
https://connectparanormal.net/2024/11/20/haunted-history-port-arthurs-ghostly-legends/
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01426397.2020.1808957#abstract
https://www.beaumontcvb.com/blog/stories/post/the-five-most-historically-haunted-locations-in-setx/
https://archive.org/stream/tgopa/GhostsOfPortArthur_djvu.txt
https://abcnews.go.com/Travel/story?id=118765&page=1
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-08-03/inside-port-arthurs-notorious-separate-prison/11293564
Old Melbourne Gaol:
The Inside Story - Old Melbourne Gaol by Trevor Poultney (primary source)
https://www.oldmelbournegaol.com.au/history/
https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/30/oa_edited_volume/chapter/1144901
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/59869629
https://www.nationaltrust.org.au/places/old-melbourne-gaol/
TRANSCRIPT
On a warm day on the southern tip of Tasmania, a blogger named Leonie meandered down a path towards the crumbling remains of an abandoned prison. Her young son held her hand in his, and he kept squeezing it. Leonie could tell he was a little scared, but this was an important part of history, she told him. This was Port Arthur
what’s that then? Her son asked and pointed out into the distance.
A tiny black dot sat just beyond the coastline. It was a small island, and the sight of it was enough to elicit a shudder. Crooked, lichen covered gravestones poked out of the earth. Beneath its soil, hundreds of corpses were buried. It was what was known as “The Isle of the dead”
See. Port Arthur wasn’t just some bucolic, historic town, like Leonie had told her son. It was the site of one of the darkest prisons in Australian history, and had once been home to thousands of exiled prisoners. And today, it was said to be haunted, but she didn’t want to tell her young son that, he was already scared enough.
Well, Leonie watched as he wandered around beside her, exploring the old buildings. But something changed in him when they got to a house on the grounds, called the parsonage.
See, the parsonage was An orange, residential home that used to house the settlement’s reverend back in the 1800’s. Leonie didn’t get a chance to see the inside, though. Her son stopped right at the entrance, and refused to go any further.
It was weird, but he was a kid. Kids can be fickle. Except…something changed in him after that moment. His eyes filled with tears and he kept his fists clenched at his side as they continued their tour. He wouldn’t go inside any of the other buildings, either. And when Leonie asked what was wrong, all he could say was that he felt angry.
The thing was – Her son wasn’t an angry kid. The thought crossed Leonie’s mind that it seemed as if something had inhabited her son, taken him over. But, no, that’s a silly thought, and she shook it off.
the two kept going. Until they got to a circular shaped structure. The building was strikingly elegant and symmetrical, with a core central hall and a few wings branching off of that.
A sign told visitors this was the Separate Prison. A wretched place, where prisoners would be kept in almost complete isolation and often were deprived of light and sound as a form of psychological punishment.
As Leonie approached, she heard A low, guttural growl coming from behind her. It was…her son.
He was pacing outside the prison. Growling with a frenetic energy that caught the attention of other tourists. What was going on with him, this was so unlike him. Through clenched teeth, he explained – he was trying to keep the mad in.
Yeah. It was time to go, Leonie decided. She didn’t know what was happening to her son but something was wrong. Right when they left the grounds, something even more unsettling happened – he completely relaxed. The tension left his body, and he exhaled with relief. According to him, the anger was all gone.
And that brings me to todays episode, because Leonie’s son is not the only person whose body became inhabited by something when they crossed the threshhold into the abandoned prison of Port Arthur. Some even say it’s where the devil lives. It’s common knowledge that the place has a tragic past. And today, I want to share that dark past with you, but I also want to tell you all about the ghosts that remain there.
This is heart starts pounding, and I’m your host, Kaelyn Moore.
I have a really ghosty episode for you guys today. I want to tell you about about two relics of Australia’s brutal prison system – the Port Arthur penal colony, and Old Melbourne Gaol. I just want to say upfront that some parts of this episode are tough. We’re going to discuss confined spaces, sensory deprivation, infanticide, and execution.
So thats why it might be nice to start on a lighter note, and shout out one of you guys. Remember, you guys can always send me your morbid and macabre facts about yourself, like if you work in a haunted building or if John Wayne Gayce performed at your 3rd birthday party. I prefer if you send them to me telepathically, but if you have to you can leave them in comments and reviews. Today, I’m going to shoult out one of our listeners, who wants to go by the name Beetlejuice, let me know that they’re the little victorian child that used to own Gordie, my monkey doll
Thank you for letting me know that, I’m sure Gordie is thrilled to hear from you. Or not, it’s so hard to tell what he’s thinking through that cold dead stare. But I can only hope he’s excited.
So Port Arthur was a penal colony on a peninsula at the southern tip of Tasmania, an island off the coast of Australia. The area is surrounded by sea and massive cliffs. So it’s stunning. The kind of place you’d take a vacation. And It was so gorgeous in the 1800s, that Britain decided it was going to fill it with prisons.
A little history on The Australian prison system but it began around 1788. At the time, penitentiaries across Britain had this big overcrowding problem. To fix it, they came up with the bright idea to just ship their prisoners to Australia, which was one of their colonies at the time. Around 160,000 convicts were exiled during this period, and most were sentenced to hard labor to build infrastructure in the developing area.
A lot of prisoners stayed in Australia after their sentences were over, which had a big influence on the country’s population. Something like 20% of all modern Australians are descended from convicts, and if you are, please let me know that’s a really fun fact.
But at the time, Port Arthur was a perfect place to put a prison because of those cliffs. They made it really hard for any of the prisoners to leave. What is an escaped convict going to do? Climb down the cliff and swim to Hawaii? And thus Port Arthur was created.
So the first boat of convicts arrived in 1830, they were basically there to increase timber output to build ships and houses. upon arrival they were usually put in chains that they had to wear around the clock. Even while they worked.
But here’s the thing about Port Arthur, and prisons in Australia in general that made them really disturbing.
Because it was so isolated, Port Arthur was able to run human experiments.
British officials wanted to figure out the best way to rehabilitate prisoners, and they were willing to try all sorts of dark and twisted methods to do so.
That’s why, at Port Arthur, a building called the “Separate Prison” was built. The part of the prison where Leonie’s son started growling and trying to “keep the mad in” yea, there’s a reason for that.
The design of this “separate prison” was modeled after a place called Pentonville, an experimental penitentiary in England that was built a few years prior. Pentonville was designed to rehabilitate prisoners through “isolation and moral growth”. Essentially, they believed that if prisoners spent enough time alone, and had limited access to other sensory input like sunlight and even noise, they would be forced to reflect on their crimes, and that would rehabilitate them.
What did this look like? Well prisoners were kept alone all day every day, and guards worked hard to limit other sensory input. the few times they could leave their cells, they had to wear these thick hoods over their faces so they couldn’t talk to or even see the other prisoners. Mats were laid down on the floors so that not even the sound of footsteps could be heard. They thought this would heal prisoners, but the level of sensory deprivation was actually just psychological torture, and it was driving all of the prisoners slowly mad.
And we know this because of a man named Mark Kelly.
Mark was incarcerated for burglary at another penal colony, but was then sent to Port Arthur. He was the kind of guy that disliked authority and got antsy when he was hungry. Shortly after his arrival, he got into a fight with some guards over his food rations, and was tossed in the Separate Prison.
In the separate prison, Mark was kept in an isolated cell, a small concrete box reminiscent of being walled alive. Inside was a hammock, a Bible, and a toilet bucket. A small window let some light in, but it was too high to see out of.
strict silence was enforced, which meant prisoners weren’t allowed to talk to one another, but also, that they couldn’t make any noises, whatsoever. No humming to yourself, no screaming. He knew he was surrounded by other cells, with people inside of them. But no one made a sound. It was forbidden. And breaking the rules got you thrown into solitary.
Those cells were even worse. They were padded and windowless, robbing prisoners of both sound and light. Depending on what you’d done, your time in those black pits could last anywhere from hours to months.
When Mark would sit alone in his cell, he’d hear silence so deafening it was almost as if he could hear his own blood circulating in his body.
Mark was given a number to use instead of his name. and For 23 hours a day, he languished in his cell. For the 60 minutes he was allowed to spend outside of it, a hood was thrown over his head and he was led through the corridor to the chapel. Through the fibers, he could make out the other men around him, but not enough to see what they actually looked like. He noticed the light change as he was led into the chapel. But mostly, all he could do was feel the hard bench of the pew under him, and listen to the drone of the settlement’s reverend at the pulpit. It was the only time he ever heard another human being make any noise
And this was a typical experience for prisoners in the separate prison.
But what does that do to a persons psyche? To live in sensory deprivation for so long?
Well, mark started being prone to violent outbursts. One time he brutally attacked the doctor who tended to him.
So he was banished to grave digging duty over at the Isle of the dead, the island filled with the bodies of prisoners who died at Port arthur. He spent all day alone, digging graves for the men he had never even seen the faces of. Most of the people buried on the isle of the dead were prisoners that died of disease in Port Arthur, but one single grave was for an aboriginal tasmanian woman who died in 1833. In some ways, she was the only reminder that people had lived here once. It was a beautiful community before the british built their prisons.
One day, Mark chased down one of the guards at the prison. He broke the rule of silence to tell them he had seen the Devil lurking in the graveyard, and he begged them to let him leave the settlement, but they forced him to go back to the isle, where his mental health continued to deteriorate.
No one knows for sure what Mark saw in the cemetery. Could it have been the months of isolation that broke his mental psyche, or could it be that the devil really did stalk the grounds of a place as horrid as Port Arthur.
Well, it seemed like the officials at the prison thought it was his deteriorating mental state. It was so common for prisoners to go mad at Port Arthur, that an asylum was built next door in 1867. Prisoners with depression or who were otherwise deemed mentally unwell were sent there.
And this story really harkens back to Leonie and her son. Was her son being overcome with the mad that overtook so many prisoners at Port ARthur.
Some have suggested that Mark didn’t go mad, that he really did see the devil out on the isle of the dead, and that a malevolent force is still on the grounds today. Perhaps THAT’S what overtook Leonies son
Port Arthur closed 1877. Britain stopped shipping off their convicts years earlier, and the decrease in population put a damper on the settlement’s work production. Eventually, it couldn’t sustain itself any longer. After its closure, the area was broken up and sold off in pieces, and the town there was renamed Carnarvon. Today, Port arthur is open for tourists.
From forced labor to psychological torture, there are few corners of the site that haven’t seen some kind of bloodshed. And there are plenty of rumors that some of those who endured captivity or death at Port Arthur, well their spiritsnever left.
And perhaps, they say, that’s why the ghost stories that come out of Port Arthur are so horrifying.
Today, Port Arthur is also open for ghost tours, and if you go visit, expect to have a paranormal experience. Most people who go say they hear things like footsteps or disembodied cries from the depths of some of the abandoned buildings. You can walk down the halls of Separate prison, down the cement corridor. Past the individual cell blocks, where you may hear the faint sound of footsteps pacing back and forth. You may even hear a scream coming from the other side of the hall, reminiscent of a prisoner who just hit their breaking point and was about to be carted off to the insane asylum next door.
But it’s not the sounds that most people are afraid of, sometimes it’s what they see that keeps them up at night.
There was one Reddit user who snapped a photo of the prison entrance in the dead of night. The photo is dark, you can kind of see the front window, and there’s a little bit of light from an alleyway that illuminates the side of the building. But its really hard to tell what you’re even looking at.
It wasn’t until the user decided to brighten the photo that they really saw what was lurking there.
Once the photo was brightened, the building came into full view, but theres still areas of total darkness in the corners. And in one of those areas, off to the side, coming out of the shadow next to the building was a haunting, pale face. And it is unmistakable, you can see the outline of a nose and lips, and clearly see a wide eye staring straight at the camera, the other eye hidden in darkness. I
It’s honestly one of the eeriest photos from someone claiming to have proof of the supernatural I’ve ever seen. And that’s just the entrance of the building.
Inside of Port Arthur, two areas tend to be the most haunted. The first, of course, is Separate Prison.
One night, a World War II veteran was taking a tour through the separate prison. . He walked through the dark corridors, listening to the guide wax poetic about footsteps and shadowy figures and whatnot. When all of a sudden, the vet split off from the rest of the group.
Alone, He drifted towards a cell. It was shockingly small, hard to believe anyone could live there for a night, let alone weeks and months on end.
To get a better look, the veteran stepped inside. As soon as he did, a jolt of despair shot through him, making his vision swim. He swayed, on the verge of passing out. His legs went weak, and he crumpled to the ground, frozen in place as horror ripped through his bones.
All he could do was pull his knees to his chest, and wait for help to arrive. The guide later found him that way.
Once again, it was like his spirit was overtaken by something, like the madness that Leonies son was trying to keep away was overpowers him.
And that, to me, is what is so scary about Port Arthur. Yes it’s creepy to hear footsteps coming down a corridor or to see a figure out of the corner of your eye, but it’s the amount of people who feel like they’ve been hijacked by something evil or mad that really scares me. It’s one thing if the haunting is happening outside of you, but what happens when it’s going on INSIDE?
And that brings me to the second most haunted area of Port Arthur, The Parsonage.
The parsonage was where the reverend lived, and remember, Leonis son couldn’t even go inside. He just stayed outside pacing. That leads me to believe that whatever is happening inside of the Parsonage is evil.
During restoration efforts in the 1980s, a building team of three were staying at the parsonage.
During their stay, they mentioned they would hear banging noises coming from the roof, but couldn’t figure out what was making the sound.
One night, one of the workers headed to his room after a long day, probably excited to flop onto his bed and rest. But…someone was already in there.
It was a woman. The man looked straight at her, but the edges of her were blurred, like someone had run over her outline with an eraser. She had a gaunt pale face that was obscured by a shadow, honestly she sounds a lot like the image the redditor caught on camera. Before he could scream, the air in the room turned ice cold and the curtains flew up. After that, it seemed, she was gone…
Then one night, another builder was asleep when a bad feeling woke him up. Something was pressing on his chest so hard, he couldn’t breathe. His eyes shot open as he felt a pair of invisible hands wrap around his throat…and squeeze. He thrashed, trying to get the unseen thing off of him.
He must have managed to scream, because his coworkers ran into the room to find him flailing around. They tried to help, but they couldn’t see what was hurting him. He couldn’t either. All he knew was that it was squeezing the life out of him, second by second. Until…it let go.
People have long speculated who the woman inside of Port Arthur is, but no one is for sure. Some have suggested she’s the ghost of the long aboriginal woman buried on the Isle of the dead, refusing to leave though she and her people were forced out 200 years ago. I’m not sure that’s the case, but it’s an interesting thought.
To me, whatever is there feels too evil to be human. Maybe it is the devil, like Mark saw on the island, well, are you brave enough to go find out for yourself?
BREAK 2
Story 2: OLD MELBOURNE
Next, I want to take you up to Melbourne, to the Old Melbourne Gaol, also said to be one of the most haunted places in all of Australia. To start, let me tell you a story.
It was near the end of a long shift for one of the guides at the museum inside of Old Melbourne Gaol. You know, that part of the day when the finish line is close, but there’s still far too much time left. So the minutes feel like they’re ticking by at a snail’s pace.
The guide was hovering by the entrance when a woman approached. She was interested in the gaol. Or…morbidly intrigued is probably a better way to say it. She thought the place was creepy. Maybe because she was extra sensitive to old places – she was a psychic.
Right. So, the gaol was over a hundred years old, and there was no shortage of supernatural stories about the place. It definitely attracted a lot of people like this woman. Maybe on another afternoon, this statement would’ve generated an eye roll. But today, it gave the guide an idea.
He was bored, so he told her to follow him, and the two headed into the gaol, down a long, stone corridor with metal walkways running its length, just above their heads. The corridor was lined with death masks, which were moulds of the dead faces of the prisoners that were executed on the grounds.
They plodded over the cold, thick slabs of stone until they reached the end of the corridor, which hit up against a network of other hallways to create a grand central hall. This heptagon-shaped cone extended up three floors, to a skylight above. An opening that once allowed the guards of the gaol’s heyday an expansive view of the prisoners below.
The guide led the woman to a flight of stairs. Beneath the metal steps, was a large, wooden door. It was nondescript, other than some scuff marks on one side. Mostly it looked like a piece of castoff debris, gathering dust.
The guide took the woman’s hand, and laid it on top of the scuff marks. He wanted to know if she picked anything up. He figured she’d say something wrong, like this was the cell where so and so died, and s on.
That’s not what happened.
As soon as she touched the wood, her head shot back, and her mouth fell open in horror as a scream ripped from her throat – “People falling!” she wailed, over and over.
The guide was shaken to his core. Because those scuff marks? Those were made by the feet of desperate people, kicking rapidly to save themselves in their last seconds of life.
That piece of wood was the trapdoor of the old gallows.
Old Melbourne Gaol opened in 1845, to welcome criminals from all walks of life – men, women and sometimes children. It didn’t seem to take a lot to end up there. There were certainly a fair amount of violent offenders, like famous gangsters and brutal murderers.
But a lot of its occupants were arrested for being poor. And I mean that literally. At the time, a term called vagrancy was used as a catch-all offense that made it illegal to be unhoused or unemployed. Unmarried women, or those who were orphaned, disabled or deemed the now-offensive term “lunatics” often found themselves unable to find work and trapped in a cycle of poverty – that would inevitably lead them to the gaol.
But if you were to walk down a corridor of the prison, you would see a long hall with locked doors on either side, just like in Port Arthur, but Old Melbourne jail had multiple floors.
The floors that prisoners were housed on determined just how severe their rehabilitation program would be. Those who were in for lesser infractions or who were nearing the end of their sentences, were on the upper levels of the gaol’s blocks.
There, the cells were bigger and housed multiple prisoners. Many of these inmates would work for the prison, making uniforms, doing laundry, or breaking stones for roads. Some were even paid for their work.
The lower the levels, the rougher the conditions. The ground floor being the worst of all. Those cells were for prisoners who’d committed more serious crimes, and their accommodations were designed to keep them contained and isolated. The walls were two feet thick, with immovable hinges on the doors, which were offset from the walls so prisoners couldn’t see into each other’s cells. Some inmates were given a thin mattress and a blanket, while others slept on boards on the floor. The rooms did have a window. But it was so high on the wall, it was impossible to see out of.
And Like Port Arthur, Old Melbourne Gaol was modeled after Pentonville Prison, and used its Silent System method to reform its prisoners. But whereas Port Arthur just had the Separate prison dedicated to this…
Melbourne’s entire prison followed these principles. No one was allowed to speak, no matter what floor they were on
Inmates were kept in their cells for 23 hours a day, under the watchful eye of the guards. They even ate their meals in there. For a single hour, they were either taken to the exercise yard, church services, or their weekly bath – but they had to wear a canvas mask so they couldn’t communicate with their fellow prisoners.
But unlike Port arthur, Old Melbourne wasn’t just using experimental prisoner reform methods, they were also using experimental medicine.
So, a decent amount of incoming prisoners would go through alcohol withdrawal upon being admitted. They would often cry out and break the very strict “no noise” rule. But the jail thought they had a cure for this. prisoners would first get doused with cold water, then sewn into a blanket, they would be brought outside with the hood over their face and left in the blistering sun, then the would be forced to vomit to get everything out of their system, and they would be covered in leeches to get the toxins out of their blood. It was excruciating for prisoners, and Some didn’t survive the supposed cure
So if you were in this prison, you would sit in your cell alone, all day. Nothing but your thoughts to keep you company, maybe sometimes you’d hear the wail of someone detoxing. But there was one sound you could count on hearing. outside of the small window at the top of your cell, you'd hear something (SFX) it was the sound of a trapdoor opening, the same time each day. It was the gallows.
Throughout its operation, the gaol hung 133 people, far more executions than ever occurred at Port Arthur. One of the worst people executed was a convicted murderer named Frances Knorr.
Australian society was tough on women in the 1800s. But unmarried mothers had it the worst of all. Having a so-called illegitimate child was basically a death sentence. Women would be banished by society, unable to work with no support system. In answer to this, a practice called baby minding, or baby farming, sprang up. Basically, single, pregnant women would pay someone else to raise their babies until they were older. Then the child could go back to the mother under the guise of being a niece or nephew.
It was a fix for those who could afford it, but it could also be dangerous. Children separated from their mothers were at risk of malnutrition and sadly, many were mistreated or neglected by those supposed to care for them.
That’s where Frances Knorr came in. She was a baby minder, but she had her own idea what should happen to these babies. The mothers weren’t aware of this when they were handing their children over to Frances for safe keeping, but she was killing some of the babies she was paid to look after, and it eventually earned her a death sentence at the goal.
On the day of Frances’s execution, prisoners heard the bang of the gallows door echoe through the prison, as did the whoosh of Frances’s body plunging through the air. After that – silence. One moment she was there. Then, she was gone.
But then, a shriek pierced through the cells. This had never happened before, where the prisoners heard screaming after the hanging, and many assumed it was Frances herself. Now an undead ghoul, filled with fury and grief over her death.
It was said that The ghost of frances then haunted the prison, and inmates swore they could hear her wailing at night, screaming at the sight of her crumpled body at the bottom of the gallows.
Now, in reality, the screaming sound the prisoners heard was the prisons matron, who was disturbed at the sight of a woman being hanged, something that didn’t happen often, but this set off the long tradition of ghost stories coming out of the jail.
At some point, after the jail closed in 1924, a university moved into some of its old buildings. At night, some employees walked around the grounds to make sure everything was on the up and up.
On especially chilly nights, a staff member would meander around outside, drifting through the dark shadows of the historic pathways. If they went near the spot where the gaol’s old hospital yard used to be, they often felt something strange. Like a gentle shiver, hair-raising on their arms, or a feeling of dread. Some kind of unseen presence that told them…they weren’t alone.
Then they’d watch the mist that covered the yard float around, like gentle cloud cover. There was a distinct chill in the air. One that got worse, when something appeared in the shadows.
There, across the old hospital yard, was an ethereal figure. It looked like a man with a gaunt, sad face, reminiscent of a death mask. He was hovering above the grounds.
More than one person saw this specter over the years, but no one knew who it was or what it wanted, until 2002. That year, excavators were taking an archeological survey of the area when they found a body. This one was in the hospital yard, where the overflow of hanging victims were buried once the original yard filled up.
But these remains were far away from the others, and positioned oddly. The body was parallel to the wall that surrounded the groundsof the hospital , while all the others were at a right angle. Which begs so many questions, like – what was he doing there? Why was his body different than the others? And, of course, who was he?
That last one got an answer. After doing some research, it was concluded that it was Arthur Oldring. A convict executed at Melbourne Gaol after murdering a woman and her daughter.
After he was found, Arthur’s body was reburied in another cemetery. Once he was moved…no one saw that mysterious, misty figure again.
Maybe Arthur found some kind of peace by being reburied. But his removal didn’t mean that the gaol was cleared of its restless spirits. Not even close.
On a typical day at the gaol’s museum, a visitor arrived, excited to dig into its history. He walked all over the cell block, reading every plaque. Soaking it in. He’d been there for hours when he got to cell 17.
It was on the gaol’s middle level, far back in a corner at the end of a walkway. It had a thick door and an even thicker entryway.
The man peered inside. Noting the window high on the wall, the cracked yellow paint that exposed the stone and cement mixture beneath it. He was about to step in for another look, when he realized…he couldn’t. Something was stopping him. Like two hands had pressed against his chest, barring his entry. He tried two, three, four times… but couldn’t get in.
Something wasn’t letting him.
This comes up a lot with cell 17. Reports from visitors and guides range from changes in temperatures and strange smells to invisible hands physically pushing them out of the cell. That usually only happens with men, while women are allowed in and sometimes attacked by an unseen force.
Some have seen an apparition lingering in front of its door, while one student claimed the cell was crowded with people – when in reality it was empty. In 2003, a group of ghost hunters claimed they recorded a woman’s voice saying, “Help.” Then “Get out.”
No one knows what happened in that cell that might’ve caused this anguish. But the gaol has been closed for a hundred years, and cell 17’s spirit doesn't seem to be going anywhere.
It’s resilient. Just like the prisoners of the goal were. You had to be, to spend hours and months and years, locked up in a dark, quiet space with only your thoughts to keep you company.
Come to think of it, maybe the ghosts of the gaol appear to us for a different reason than bitterness or retribution. Maybe, after being deprived of human connection in life, they’re just grateful to share a moment with another soul.
And so, I ask you this, are you brave enough to go and keep them company?
Well, that’s all I have for you today for this one. Join us next week for a tale of a serial killer dentist. If you’re already scared of going to the dentist, you just wait… I’ll catch you here next time, and until then, stay curious OoooOOOOooo