Here's to doing something different on our vacation. We didn't really know what to expect from a place called Alcatraz East, but I had found some information about it, and we decided to take a shot at it on our way out of town. This "crime museum" is at an area called The Island in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. We parked the car and rode the shuttle to the shopping area.
 |  |
At the very front (We could have parked there.) of the island is the ominous-appearing Alcatraz East.
| Inside, even the queue chains were handcuffs - a nice addition of theming. My wife found a place online that said (for a limited time) teachers could get in free and their children could enter at half-price. We showed our teacher IDs and gathered our discount - a bonus in an area where tourists pay out the nose for anything extra they want to pursue (The Smoky Mountains National Park is about the only thing that doesn't cost money.). I thought this was going to be a children's hands-on museum, where they could conduct watered-down CSI-style experiments (fingerprinting, chromatography, etc.), but Alcatraz East exceeded all expectations, coming short only in not letting me actually touch historical items. Inside the museum are actual artifacts from infamous crime and law enforcement figures in history - things we did not expect to ever see in our lives, assuming they would be locked in evidence storage forever. Additionally, there were some movie props and costumes that were also in theme. |  |
A visitor to this place might expect to get goosebumps looking at items that extended backwards in time as far as pirates, then moving forward in time through the outlaws of colonial times, cowboy times, and organized crime. One cannot look at these items without feeling the imagined presence of Gacy, Dahmer, Bundy, and other serial killers. One cannot help but reflect on those assassinations that stand out in our history - Garfield, Kennedy, Oswald, and more.
The entire museum is chock-full of stories that don't normally float to the top of a general history book. This is the seedy underbelly of our genealogy as a nation (and internationally). I'll share pictures of just some of the items in the next several days.
The entire museum is chock-full of stories that don't normally float to the top of a general history book. This is the seedy underbelly of our genealogy as a nation (and internationally). I'll share pictures of just some of the items in the next several days.
