Tourists behind bars: Old prisons cater to the curious

1 of 13. A visitor photographs a jail cell during a tour of the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City September 12, 2013 .

Credit: Reuters/Sarah Conard

By Kevin Murphy

JEFFERSON CITY, Missouri | Sat Sep 21, 2013 3:59pm EDT

JEFFERSON CITY, Missouri (Reuters) - Halfway through a tour of the bleak, deserted Missouri State Penitentiary - notorious in its day for assaults, murders and gas chamber executions - nurse Donna Springer tried to explain why she wanted to visit such a place.

"Well, it's like ... 'This could have happened to me,'" said Springer. "You have a fascination with it in some way."

Former prisons, complete with gift shops and paranormal components, have become increasingly popular tourist destinations in America and abroad. Playing to the public curiosity about life behind bars, more than 100 former prisons and jails have tours or museums, according to a list posted on the website of the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia.

Some, such as Eastern State and the Missouri prison, report steadily rising visitor numbers.

The 177-year-old Missouri penitentiary in Jefferson City is the biggest tourist draw in town, aside from the State Capitol building a few blocks away, tourism officials said.

"People are intrigued about what is behind those walls." said Diane Gillespie, executive director of the Jefferson City Convention & Visitors Bureau.

The Missouri penitentiary had more than 19,000 visitors last year, up 10 percent from the previous year. Visitors pay $12 for a two-hour tour and $25 for a three-hour, in-depth look that includes additional areas of the compound, once the largest in the United States. From 2009, the tours have provided a new use for the prison, which had an uncertain future when it closed in 2004.

Some other prisons in the U.S. also report a booming tourism business. Eastern State Penitentiary, with a "nighttime haunted house," draws about 160,000 people, up an average of 20 percent annually in recent years. The Old Idaho Penitentiary in Boise drew about 42,000 visitors last year, up from 28,000 four years earlier, officials said.

At Alcatraz - the most famous prison open for tours - the number of visitors to the island 1.5 miles offshore from San Francisco are capped at 1.4 to 1.5 million annually, said Howard Levitt, director of communications for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

"The demand far exceeds the availability of the tours," Levitt said. Alcatraz has offered tours since 1973 - 11 years longer than the 1934-1963 period when it was an active prison.

Prison tours cater to travelers interested in seeing the unusual, said Amber Beierle, visitor services coordinator for the Old Idaho Penitentiary.

"It's a place most of us would never in our lifetime see from personal experience," she said.

Some tours at the Missouri prison are given by former guards, who waste no time in calling attention to the brutal history of the place.

"Welcome to the bloodiest 47 acres in North America," said tour guide and former guard Bill Green, 65, his long gray hair flowing out from under a scruffy ball cap. "Men died within these walls by the hundreds - and not the low hundreds."

Time Magazine in the mid-1960s dubbed the prison the "bloodiest 47 acres" because of the number of inmates who killed or assaulted each other.

The prison housed the state's worst of offenders in crowded conditions. More than 5,000 inmates were crammed into the facility in the early 1930s, Green said. In 1954, prisoners rioted, burning down several buildings, killing four inmates and injuring guards and many other inmates.

Famous inmates at the Missouri penitentiary included gangster Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd, heavyweight champ Sonny Liston - who learned to box while incarcerated - and James Earl Ray, who escaped in a bakery truck in 1967 and the following year assassinated civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

Visitors can tour the oldest standing prison cell block, built in 1868, a four-story structure where cells are furnished with musty bunks and rusting toilets and sinks. A stop along the way is "the dungeon" - where inmates who broke rules were locked up in pitch dark, dirty conditions.

On Green's tour, his assistant Aloha Gerbes offers visitors a sobering directive: "Follow Bill. He will put you in one of the cells now."

The grounds of the prison include a former gas chamber, housed in a small limestone structure built by inmates in the early 1930s. Thirty-eight men and one woman were put to death there before the state changed its execution method in 1989 to lethal injection.

In the gas chamber, Green said, capital offenders suffered a "terrible death" by cyanide gas. "You don't just fall asleep," he told the tour group. "The cyanide rips out your sinuses, it tears out your esophagus."

Tourists can go inside the gas chamber and sit on the steel chair where prisoners were executed.

The goal of most prison tours is not solely to shock people but to show how the penal system has changed over the years. The Missouri tour also delves into work detail, where prisoners performed tasks such as making clothing, school furniture, license plates and many other items.

A big boost in prison visits has come from an interest in ghost or "paranormal" tours, officials said. Prisons are thought to be ghostly because they are cavernous, empty and have been the site of executions and other violent deaths, said Beierle at the Idaho prison.

But real prison stories are frightening enough to people such as Jim Rhiver, a retired minister who was on Green's recent tour.

"You can see how some people went in there for a very short time and still came out hardened," Rhiver said. "It was a terrible place to be."

(Reporting By Kevin Murphy; Editing by Greg McCune and Gunna Dickson)

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Russian tourists help Hungary spa town flourish amid crisis

1 of 6. A woman enjoys the sun at the thermal water spa in Hungarian town of Heviz, 194 km (120 miles) west of Budapest, April 20, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Bernadett Szabo

By Krisztina Than

HEVIZ, Hungary | Tue Apr 30, 2013 10:03am EDT

HEVIZ, Hungary (Reuters) - A former Soviet military airport in western Hungary where MIG fighter jets landed for decades when Hungary was under Soviet rule is now receiving a different type of Russian visitor - tourists arriving in charter flights.

Locals have welcomed the new Russian "invasion" of tourists who fly into Sarmellek to head to the spa town Heviz, saying they have brought money, new jobs, and even boosted the moribund real estate market during a deep, economic downturn.

While some former eastern bloc countries still resent the former overlord of ex-communist eastern Europe, residents of Heviz say the ill feelings towards Russia are long gone.

"How could we have a problem? We welcome all foreigners ... I once learned Russian but unfortunately I have forgotten most of it," said Eva Virt, who works in a clothes shop in the town.

Alongside regular flights from Germany, every Sunday two charter flights come from Moscow to Sarmellek where the derelict Soviet air base has been converted into a small commercial airport.

The huge concrete buildings that once housed Soviet troops are empty and overgrown with weeds, with only a few Russian school books scattered in the former school reminiscent of a past era. Russian troops left Hungary in 1991.

Tourist Lyudmilla Ilyina, who used to live in Hungary under the communist regime, said she had come to try the lake in Heviz, Europe's largest thermal lake whose waters are known for healing powers and attract German, Dutch and Austrian tourists.

"A long time ago, in my youth, I lived in Hungary for three years and it is very nice to fly back to see what's changed," she said after stepping off the plane.

Gabor Papp, the mayor of Heviz, said the surge in Russian visitors had helped boost tourism revenue despite the economic crisis. The municipality is the official operator of the airport which it wants to develop.

"In that period, 20 to 30 to 35 years ago, this airport had a different function and we lived in a different world. Since then the world has changed ... and our goal is to make this airport serve the western region of Hungary," he said.

THE RETURN OF THE RUSSIANS

The influx of Russian tourists to Heviz got a boost in 2010 when the 'Arab Spring' protests scared tourists away from destinations such as Egypt, said Laszlo Konnyid, manager of a four-star hotel, which operates with room occupancy rates at 75 percent all year around, well above the national average.

"We like the Russians for many reasons but why we value them especially is that they cherish the traditional medical treatment ... in Heviz that was developed after 1769 by local doctors," he said.

The spa town, with a population of 5,000, recorded more than one million guest nights last year which made it the second most visited destination in Hungary after the capital Budapest.

Nikolai Azorsky, 50, from Kharkiv in Ukraine, has returned to Heviz for a second time after a visit in October which he said helped to heal his shoulders and knees.

"The lake is very unique, the water is warm and it has some kind of magic," he said.

In ex-communist eastern Europe, Russian tourists have also rediscovered Bulgaria with the number of visitors there rising 31 percent last year to almost 600,000.

In the last quarter of 2012, the number of Russian tourists to the Czech Republic jumped by 24 percent to 173,000 and they are now the second biggest group behind the Germans.

Heviz businesses have welcomed Russians, many of whom are willing and able to spend big, with the town now home to some luxury shops.

"It has happened many times that we dressed up (a lady) and we wanted to put beautiful ... jewelry on her neck and she said she would only wear diamonds," said Agnes Kanizsai, who opened a clothes shop last year and plans to sell diamonds as well.

(Reporting by Krisztina Than, Editing by Belinda Goldsmith)

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