For as long as there
have been laws to break, there have been prisons to
hold the people who break them. And while prisons come and go,
the most notorious facilities continue to haunt
the pages of history. So today we're going to
take a look inside some of the scariest
prisons ever built. But before we get started,
be sure to subscribe to the Weird History channel. After that, leave
a comment and let us know what other terrifying
institutions you would like to hear about. OK, time to throw away the key. We'll kick this little
tour off in ancient Rome at the Mamertine, where
violence wasn't just brutal, it was Biblical. The Mamertine was a
dank underground jail which played host to two
of Christianity's most famous characters-- Saint Peter and Saint Paul-- both of whom spent time locked
up in the prison's dungeons at the request of Roman
Emperor Nero himself-- who was not a man known
for his restraint. 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 many prisoners succumbed
to the torturous treatment and lack of food, guards
disposed of their bodies in the Cloaca Maxima, which
is a fancy way of saying they dumped them in the sewers. Pitesti was a communist
prison built in Romania, famous for its intense
and brutal brainwashing experiments. Operating from
1949 through 1951, the Pitesti experiment
attempted to re-educate wealthy
intellectuals, bourgeois landowners,
religious rebels, and political dissidents. Historically
speaking, reeducation is a phrase that
can't be trusted. Prisoners at Pitesti
were malnourished and regularly subjected to
intentionally humiliating punishments. Perhaps worst of all
were the various attempts to get prisoners to
turn on one another by making them torment each
other with methods so extreme we can't even discuss them. But trust us, it was bad. When explorer Roy Chapman
Andrews, the future director of the American Museum
of Natural History, arrived at the prison in
Urga, Mongolia, in 1918, he couldn't believe his eyes. The accommodations for
prisoners in Urga's town jail were worse than any he had
ever seen or studied before. How bad were they? The prisoners essentially
lived in coffins. Yeah. Inmates were 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. That is, 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. If a prisoner lived
long enough, they would typically see their limbs
atrophy from lack of movement. But that was a pretty big if. 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. Statistically
speaking, you'd have a better chance of surviving
a fall from a seven story building. An isolated island off
the coast of French Guiana in the Atlantic Ocean,
Napoleon III of the French chose the island in
1852 because it was nearly impossible to escape. By day, prisoners were
worked to the bone, building unending roads to
nowhere and clearing trees. By night, they were
shackled and left in the dark to be bitten
by vampire bats that waited in the rafters. And not the cool kind of vampire
bats that give you powers. They were the regular
kind that give you rabies. The island's two most
well known residents were Alfred Dreyfus, a French
captain falsely convicted of treason, and Henri
Charriere, an inmate who escaped the island and wrote
a memoir about his time there. His book, Papillon, was adapted
into a famous 1973 movie starring Steve McQueen
and Dustin Hoffman. When talking about
terror on the high seas, few things could be more terror
inducing than the HMS Hell. The boat's actual name
was the HMS Jersey, but it was nicknamed
Hell for reasons that will soon become obvious. It 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,
the HMS Jersey and other ships like it held prisoners
from 1776 to 1783 in appalling conditions. Packed below deck,
prisoners simultaneously had to contend with diseased
rats, inhumane guards, a lack of food, and extreme weather. By the time the British burned
the ship at the end of the war, the HMS Jersey had claimed
the lives of 11,000 prisoners. Constructed in 1895,
Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, was the setting for events that
wouldn't feel out of place in the most
tangled 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 flexibility, the US government instituted
federal regulations with regard to medical studies
and prisons in 1978. When you hear the
name Galapagos, you probably think about
Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution or your obnoxious
cousin's destination wedding. But there is a much
darker side to the place. The Galapagos Islands were also
once used as a penal colony by Ecuador, and it
was the kind of prison where 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 the guards
forced the prisoners to build for absolutely no reason. Inmates spent years
stacking rocks to construct a wall that
went nowhere and did nothing other than keep them working. The prison was active
for roughly 20 years in the mid-19th century and
again from 1946 to 1959. If the disease, starvation
and workload didn't get you, the overwhelming
hopelessness probably did. Opened in 1829 in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Eastern State Penitentiary was
the world's first penitentiary. Technically speaking,
a penitentiary is a prison with the
aim of encouraging penitence as opposed
to just locking men up and throwing away the key. During its early years,
Eastern State Penitentiary attempted to accomplish its goal
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 were forced
to live a monastic existence and were required to be
inside their own heads at all times,
attempting to reconcile with their wrongdoings. Eastern State Penitentiary's
new approach was so influential, countries around the
world adopted it. However, as time
wore on, people began to question the efficacy of
such solitary confinement. After a visit to the prison,
author 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." And Dickens knew a thing
or two about prisons. Have you read his books? Carlisle Castle once imprisoned
Mary, Queen of Scots. But the English castle's
most famous resident isn't what makes it one of
history's worst prisons. 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 in squalid
conditions for centuries. For instance, during
the Jacobite Rebellion, Jacobite prisoners were crowded
into tiny cells in the dungeon and were given so
little sustenance that they were forced to lick
the stone walls of the cells and hope of finding the
tiniest bit of water that may have collected on the walls. You can actually see
the licking stones during tours of the castle if
you're into that sort of thing. In Alexandre Dumas' The
Count of Monte Cristo, protagonist Edmund Dante spent
14 years at the Chateau d'If before making a daring
escape to freedom-- an act that forever
immortalized the castle fortress in literature. Despite this being perhaps the
most famous fictional prison break in history,
in reality, no one ever escaped the
isolated French island. They made damn sure of that. Opened in the 16th century under
the reign of King Francois I, the prison spent
300 years serving as a home for political
prisoners and common criminals. Treatment of the
prisoners varied widely, where the richest able to live
in comfort and the poorest housed in dungeons and subjected
to beatings and forced labor. It looks like some
things don't change. If you're going
to be a prisoner, it pays to be a rich prisoner. The beauty of the architecture
at Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin, Ireland, belies a
much uglier history. 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. At that time, Ireland was being
plagued by the Great Famine and experienced a rise in crime
which was at least partially attributable to
starving Dubliners purposefully committing
crimes to get put in jail where they were assured at
least a little bit of food. The jail was also
being used as a holding facility for prisoners
being sent to Australia, which led to
massive overcrowding and a severe lack of resources. The jail imprisoned men,
women, and children alike, all living together,
often five to a cell, sometimes forced to
sleep in hallways. According to one jail
inspector, "numbers of these wretched creatures
are obliged to lie on straw in the passages
and day rooms of the prison without a possibility of washing
or exchanging their own filthy rags for proper apparel." Consequently, disease
and starvation ran rampant through the prison. The prison's bloodiest period
took place in May of 1916 when officers eliminated
more than a dozen Irish nationalist
leaders of the Easter Uprising via firing squad. One of the men, Joseph
Connolly, was too injured to stand in front of
the line of rifles, so they carried him
in on a stretcher and tied him to a chair. That was thoughtful of them. Infamous for being one
of the prisons that held 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. It's been a political prison,
whaling station, World War II military outpost,
and an insane asylum. According to Mandela's
autobiography, he and the 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, which was not unusual for South
Africa during apartheid. Upon Mandela's arrival,
the prison guards welcomed him by saying "this is
the island, here you will die." In the end, however, the
guards turned out to be wrong. Mandela was released
from prison in 1990 and achieved the distinction
of being the first president of South Africa to be elected
in a fully representative democratic election. The prison shut down
shortly thereafter and is now a World
Heritage Site. You can even take a tour and
visit Nelson Mandela's cell. Though you probably wouldn't
want to stay very long. So what do you think? Could you have survived
inside any of these prisons? Let us in the comments below. And while you're at it, check
out some of these other videos from our Weird History.
