Locked Up In Louisiana: Inside America’s Bloodiest Prison
From ‘Gruesome Gertie,’ the electric chair, to the warden who lashed inmates with a leather strap, Louisiana State Penitentiary celebrates its hellish past in a museum.
Photo Illustration by Emil Lendof/The Daily Beast
The Louisiana State Penitentiary boasts such pleasant nicknames as “Alcatraz of the South” and “The Bloodiest Prison in America,” but when pulled up on Google maps, it has a 4.4 star rating. “Was the loveliest place on earth. Loved it!” one reviewer writes. “[S]uch a fun time!” another gushes.
These, of course, are not written by inmates from inside the prison’s infamous walls, but by visitors to the Angola Museum, a low white building that draws travelers down miles of back roads north from Baton Rouge and dumps them off at an unlikely attraction: the looming gates of the country’s largest maximum security facility.
Right before the grounds of the 18,000-acre, 135-year-old prison, the museum awaits on the right, chock full of the unsavory history of one of the country’s most notorious prisons. And despite its macabre collections, prison aficionados are loving it: the museum boasts a 91 percent rating on Trip Advisor.