When people ask me, you know, I spend a lot of time in haunted places and people like,

what place felt the most haunted to you?

I often think of a place called the West Virginia Penitentiary in Moundsville, West Virginia,

because it was built to make you feel bad.

Not only should prison be about, you know,

taking people out of the general population

and making them pay for their crimes through lost time,

but also they should be made to feel existentially bad while they're there.

Architects talking about how to build a prison, one of the things they talk about is how to create

a sense of kind of melancholy contemplation so that the architecture itself would be part of

the punishment, that you would be sort of gazing upon these walls,

these foreboding walls,

almost like a kind of gothic castle

that you knew you were never going to get away from.

So even just like taking a tour there,

you're like, yeah, I get it.

I feel bad here.

A prison on the model of the Arkham Asylum.

Like it actually looks like the drawings from like a Batman comic or something.

Absolutely.

I'm Dylan Thuris, and this is Atlas Obscira, a celebration of the world's strange, unusual, and wondrous places.

Today we are talking to Colin Dickie.

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