Ohio State Reformatory

If you’ve seen The Shawshank Redemption, you’ve seen it. The towering stone castle at the end of a long approach road; the turrets and gables and arched windows; the vast cell block where Andy Dufresne and Red spent decades of their lives.

It’s not a movie set. It’s the Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, Ohio, and for ninety-four years it was a real prison. More than 150,000 men passed through its gates. Some never came out.

Built to Reform

The Reformatory was conceived in the 1880s as something hopeful: an “intermediate” prison for young, first-time offenders — men too old for juvenile institutions but not yet hardened criminals. The idea was that they could be reformed through work, education, religion and discipline, rather than simply punished.

The architect, Levi Scofield of Cleveland, designed a building meant to inspire men to change their lives. He combined Victorian Gothic, Romanesque and Queen Anne styles into a dramatic, almost fairytale castle, with a central administration block flanked by two enormous cell blocks. The construction began in 1886. The first 150 inmates arrived in September 1896 — and, according to the prison’s history, helped build the walls that would hold them.

The East Cell Block, finished later, is still believed to be the largest free-standing steel cell block in the world: six tiers of cells, stacked one on top of the other, rising almost to the roof. On a busy day, the sounds of hundreds of men echoed off the steel and stone.

Overcrowded

Like many prisons, the Reformatory filled up far beyond what it was built for. By the middle of the twentieth century, cells meant for one man held two. Ventilation was poor, plumbing was bad, and violence was common. Inmates were held in solitary confinement in a section known as “the Hole,” where conditions were especially harsh.

According to the prison’s own records and local history, around two hundred people died at the Reformatory during its years of operation. Some died of disease, some of old age, some in fights and attacks, and some by their own hand. There is a small prison cemetery near the grounds, with more than two hundred graves. Many of the stones bear only numbers.

The Warden’s Wife

The most famous ghost story at the Reformatory involves not an inmate but a woman who lived inside its walls.

Arthur L. Glattke became superintendent of the Reformatory in 1935, and he lived with his family in quarters inside the administration building. His wife, Helen, was well-liked by staff and inmates; she was known for her kindness.

In November 1950, Helen Glattke was reaching up to a high shelf in a closet in the family’s quarters when a loaded pistol that was kept there fell. It went off. The bullet struck her. She died days later, of complications.

Her death was ruled an accident, though rumors about it circulated among inmates and staff for years. Nine years later, in 1959, Arthur Glattke suffered a heart attack in his office in the administration building and died there.

Since then, staff and visitors have reported smelling a woman’s perfume — often described as rose — in the warden’s quarters. Some describe hearing the rustle of a dress, or seeing a woman’s figure in a doorway. People say they feel watched in the superintendent’s office, as if Arthur Glattke is still keeping an eye on his prison.

The Murders of 1948

Not all the darkness connected to the Reformatory stayed inside its walls.

In the summer of 1948, two former inmates who had served time at the Reformatory, Robert Daniels and John West, went on a crime spree across Ohio. They became known in the newspapers as the “Mad Dog Killers.” That July, they broke into the home of John Niebel, who ran the Reformatory’s farm, and kidnapped him along with his wife, Nolena, and their twenty-year-old daughter, Phyllis. They drove the family into a cornfield and murdered all three.

West was killed in a shootout with police days later. Daniels was captured, convicted and executed in the electric chair in 1949.

The Niebel murders horrified the Mansfield community, which saw the Reformatory as part of its identity. They are a reminder that the men who passed through the prison carried their violence in and out of its gates.

Closing

By the 1970s, conditions at the Reformatory had deteriorated so badly that inmates sued the state, arguing that the overcrowded, crumbling prison amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. A federal judge eventually ordered the prison closed. The last inmates left in December 1990, and a modern prison was built nearby.

The old castle was nearly demolished. Parts of it were. Then Hollywood came.

In 1993, the producers of The Shawshank Redemption chose the Reformatory as the main location for their film, based on a novella by Stephen King. They filmed the warden’s office, the cell blocks, the administration building and other spaces. The movie was not a box office hit when it came out in 1994, but it became one of the most beloved films of all time. Fans began making pilgrimages to Mansfield. The Reformatory was saved.

It also appeared in Air Force One, Tango & Cash, and music videos. And it began attracting a different kind of visitor.

The Hole

The ghost hunters came next. The Reformatory has been featured on many paranormal television shows, and it hosts overnight ghost hunts regularly.

People who spend the night there report hearing voices calling out from empty cells, footsteps on the upper tiers of the cell blocks, and the clang of doors that no one has touched. Some visitors say they have been touched, pushed, or had their hair pulled.

The most frightening reports come from the Hole, the solitary confinement area in the basement. According to prison lore, two young inmates were once locked into a single solitary cell overnight. In the morning, only one came out alive. I have not been able to confirm that specific story in the records, and versions of it vary. But visitors report a heavy, oppressive feeling in the Hole, and some refuse to go in at all.

In the chapel, staff report seeing the figure of a man. In the library, they describe the smell of pipe tobacco. And in the infirmary, people say they hear coughing and moaning from the beds where sick inmates once lay.

Shawshank

There’s a line in The Shawshank Redemption that I think about whenever I read about the Reformatory. Red, the narrator, says of the prison walls: first you hate them, then you get used to them, and after enough time, you depend on them. He calls it being “institutionalized.”

For many of the men who spent years in Mansfield, the Reformatory became the only world they knew. They lived and worked and grew old there. Some died there and were buried a few hundred yards from their cells, under stones marked with numbers.

Maybe that’s what people sense on those long, echoing tiers. Not the ghosts of monsters. The ghosts of men who never learned how to leave.