Doug Alan Bailey is walking through the pitch-black tunnels of Terror Behind the Walls, the haunted house that possesses Eastern State Penitentiary each fall. It is insufficiently terrifying.

Windows that should drop down to unleash horrific beasts open slowly to reveal shy twentysomethings. Sirens that should blare as Doug walks by go off 15 feet behind him. Nineteen-year-old Nicole Parisi, stationed behind a grate, should be wailing, moaning and generally creeping people out. Instead, she says, "I don't have anything yet."

Doug himself is highly unfrightening. A 27-year-old freelance photographer who wears shell-top sneakers and a baseball cap tilted slightly to the side, he is the manager for "Tunnel Escape," the final leg of a guest's journey through the haunted house. The theme of his section is "like Willie Sutton [the famous bank robber who escaped from Eastern State] or Shawshank Redemption," he explains: Guests should feel they've been trapped in a twisted prison and are now escaping through the perilous tunnels below.

But today, on the second (and final) day of rehearsal, the tunnels feel like a perfectly pleasant way to escape.

Eastern State Penitentiary, which played host to Al Capone in 1929, already provides some scariness on its own. The vast halls have been preserved in a state of careful disrepair, so as to keep close the memory of the suffering that transpired here; and something — a "female entity," according to multiple ghost watchers — is said to inhabit cell block 12. But it is the fake ghouls who keep the museum up and running. According to Sean Kelley, the prison's program director, about 85 percent of Eastern State's yearly operating budget comes from Terror Behind the Walls, as people from throughout the region descend upon what AOL Digital City calls the sixth-best haunted house in the nation.

Kelley has said before that he wishes the museum didn't have to sell out in this manner. Still, Terror Behind the Walls is more than crass commercialization. It's an annual event in the young, creative community, for which over a hundred Philadelphians, many of them artists and actors, come together and pool their skills on a single project. To some extent, they're looking to make a quick $8 to $10 an hour. But they're also working toward a clear goal: to make their haunted house as scary as freakin' possible.

It starts with a severed head. When you arrive for your audition, a judge tosses you the plasticky prop, and tells you to look at it and scream as loud as you can. After the screaming comes a brief improvisation, in which you portray both an inmate and a guard — but without cursing or making sexual reference. You have to be "wholesomely disgusting," as one judge put it. Over three weeks, hundreds of students, interns, artists and actors come and perform these rituals, and, judges say, about 60 percent of them are invited to join the ranks of the monsters in the haunted house.

Some bring with them a preternatural talent for freakiness. During Doug's walk-through of "Tunnel Escape," the one ray of hope was Kent Boersma, a small, blond 22-year-old, whom Doug found in an overhead pipe, twitching, writhing, making reptilian shrieks and muttering in a gremlin voice. It was very uncomfortable to watch.

Kent would later explain that the role comes naturally to him because "this is what I like to do with my other job."

That job? "Ice cream store manager."

But in general, it takes time to become scary. Veterans suggest that lights and costumes will raise the energy level, but more importantly, they say, the newbie monsters need to start scaring people. Once they do, they won't be able to stop.

The adrenaline rush is "addictive," they say over and over. The hard part is getting them that initial taste of blood.

One of the scariest monsters in the prison is Bryan Glass, a novelist whose modern day horror fantasy, Quixote, is about to be published. Out of costume, Glass is round, bushy-haired and wears a knee brace. In costume, he's made his name playing a monster in the "medical ward" of Eastern State. Gripping a table and twisting his face, he would shout, "No, I'm not a doctor. I just ate one on TV!"

Glass says it's important to understand that different things scare different people.

"Some people will laugh if you give them a boo scare," he explains, "but if you stalk them in an inhuman fashion they get creeped out. … I prefer the atmospheric scare."

Kristen Phillips, 26, the costume and makeup designer for the haunted house, says that she considers "distortions of the human form," like really long fingers or humped backs, to be effectively frightening.

As for Doug, when he gathers his crew after the shaky run-through, his message seems to be: Make the guests feel that they're not supposed to be here. This advice may be gleaned from personal experience. Doug doesn't know if the penitentiary is haunted, he says, but he's been there at 3 in the morning, and in particular cell blocks, he's felt the hair stand up on the back of his neck.

"I feel I shouldn't be there at that particular time," he says.

Doug tells Nicole that she "dug this tunnel," but somehow ended up back in a cell — so she should be yelling at the guests that they are "in her tunnel"; He tells Jabbar Wright, whose job is to leap out of a closet and scream at people, that he should play an alpha-male inmate who isn't happy to see strangers on his turf. Basically, Doug wants the guests running away, thereby stumbling into the "boo scares" that lay ahead of them.

"Always scare forward," he says.

Though the design of the haunted house has been in the works for months, the actors only have a couple of days to absorb all of this advice. After that, they leave it up to trial and error.

The crowd is relatively thin outside the penitentiary on the first Saturday night of the season. Things will pick up closer to Halloween, but for now, this means visitors make their way through the prison alone.

Bryan Glass creates an "atmospheric scare" near the entrance. Wild-haired, in a jumpsuit, and with his head leaning on his neck, he shrieks and laughs in what is indeed an "inhuman fashion." If you make the mistake of calling this "typical novelist" behavior, the shrieking grows in volume.

Through the prison, you encounter mean-spirited guards and monstrous inmates. Some are discomfiting, others funny.

At the entrance to "Tunnel Escape," Nicole begs you to let her out. "Please," she says, smiling wanly and pointing urgently toward a latch. You hurry by. A few yards later, you hear a commotion, and happen upon Kent, dangling down, speaking in gibberish, and definitely being creepy.

As you exit, a door swings open and Jabbar jumps out.

"This is my tunnel!" he shouts, his heavily made-up face bearing down on yours. "I've got this on lockdown!" As soon as you walk out the doorway into the cool fall night, he scurries back into his closet to do it again.