This is the creepiest place on E-block. Edgecombe describes:"It was a miserable room without heat and with a metal roof, just like the one on the block to which it was an adjunct. It was cold enough in there to see your breath during the winter, and stifling in the summer." The execution chamber is used between the executions as a storage room. Before the execution all the stuff is removed from there and chairs put up for the wittnesses.
The small room on the left is the place where the electricity is put on. During the executions there are two men. They simply just follow the orders coming from the one in charge of the excution. "Roll on one" meant that the generators were put on, "Roll on two" was the execution order as now a killing amount of electricity was lead to the prisoner. There is also "Roll on three" order giving even a harder electric shock but this order is rarely used. There is also a telephone in the room. You can use it only to get phone calls. The phone is connected to the Governor's office and is used if the execution is cancelled - it had not been used a single time during the time of Edgecombe.
There is a red cross on the ground plan. This is about where the electric chair is situated. It was called "Old Sparky". The prisoners walked to it from the little door found in the upper left corner. Edgecombe describes: " Old Sparky his ownself, sitting up on a plank platform at the southeast corner of the storeroom, stout oak legs, broad oak arms that had absorbed the terrorized sweat of scores of men in the last few minutes of their lives, and the metal cap, usually hung jauntily on the back of the chair, like some robot kid's beanie in a Buck Rogers comic strip. A cord ran from it and through a gasket-circled hole in the cinderblock wall behind the chair. Off to one side was a galvanized tin bucket. If you looked inside it, you would see a circle of sponge, cut just right to fit the metal cap. Before executions, it was soaked in brine to better conduct the charge of direct-current electricity into the condemned man's brain." The picture of the electric chair can be seen below.
The chair has also spread a lot of stories and rumors around the prison: "The inmates made jokes about the chair, the way people always make jokes about things that frighten them but can't be gotten away from. They called it Old Sparky, or the Big Juicy... But for the ones who actually had to sit down in that chair, the humor went out of the situation in a hurry... for most of those men, the truth of what was happening to them finally hit all the way home when their ankles were being clapped to the stout oak of 'Old Sparky's' legs. The realization came then (you would see it rising in their eyes, a kind of cold dismay) that their own legs had finished their careers.
As I already mentioned, during the executions the room was filled with wittnesses. Usually there was about twenty of them - both men and women. In most of the executions the prisoner's victim's families were even present. Also policemen and reporters were found among the crowd. However, the prisoner's family was not allowed to wittness the execution.
