Eastern State Penitentiary hosted historian Anne Parsons on July 26, 2011 to speak about the use of abandoned institutions for material gain, especially through marketing efforts that depict those institutions as haunted.
Ms. Parsons compared the 20th century incarceration rates in asylums, psychiatric hospitals and prisons, and weighed the ethical dilemmas facing preservationists and activists each October. The presentation ended with a lively and frank conversation with the audience, addressing Eastern State’s decisions—some controversial—in running a Halloween event on the property.
The presentation opened with a brief history of Eastern State Penitentiary’s Halloween fund raising by Sean Kelley, Senior Vice President, Director of Public Programming and P.R.
