Ohio State Reformatory

Levi T. Scofield of Cleveland was asked to design a building that looked like it could reform someone. Ohio wanted a middle rung between the Boys Industrial School at Lancaster and the penitentiary at Columbus, somewhere to hold young first offenders, and Scofield answered with Richardsonian Romanesque stonework, Queen Anne turrets, and a Victorian Gothic roofline. Construction began in 1886 and ran until 1910, stalling repeatedly while the legislature released money in pieces. The first 150 inmates arrived by train from Columbus on September 15, 1896, into a building still being assembled around them.

Behind that frontage the state put up the East Cell Block: six tiers of steel carrying 600 cells, which at the worst of the crowding held 1,200 men. More than 200 people died on the site across 94 years of operation, two of them guards killed during escape attempts.

Prisoners sued in 1978. Boyd v. Denton set out the overcrowding, the plumbing, the ventilation, and the medical care. Chief Judge Frank J. Battisti of the Northern District of Ohio approved a consent decree on February 1, 1983, permanently enjoining the state from operating the reformatory after December 31, 1987. The replacement institution was not finished on time, so the building kept taking prisoners for three years past the date a federal court had ordered it to stop. The last of them left in 1990.

Ohio then wanted the ground for the new prison next door. The perimeter wall and every outbuilding came down, which is why the remaining block now sits in open grass with a working correctional institution visible behind it. Frank Darabont had filmed The Shawshank Redemption here over the summer of 1993, and the Mansfield Reformatory Preservation Society formed in 1995 and opened general tours the following year. The state handed the building to the City of Mansfield in 2000, and the city sold it to the society for $1.

Arthur Lewis Glattke was superintendent from 1935 to 1959 and lived with his family in an apartment on the third floor of the administration building. Former inmates remember him for piping radio music into the cell blocks.

On November 5, 1950, Helen Glattke was alone in the bedroom of that apartment, dressing to go out. Newspaper coverage at the time, drawing on the attending physician P. A. Stoodt, reported that she reached to a high closet shelf for a jewelry box and moved a .32 caliber pistol out of the way, that the pistol slipped, and that it discharged when it hit the floor. The bullet entered her chest and passed through her left lung. She developed pneumonia and died 3 days later, at 41. Her husband stayed in the same rooms and kept the post. On February 10, 1959, he had a heart attack at his desk and died at Mansfield General Hospital.

Nearly every claim of activity in the building points back to those rooms. Visitors and investigators describe the smell of roses, cold spots, cameras and recorders failing, and a distressed woman in the bedroom, sometimes saying she is not dead. Paranormal television has filmed here repeatedly, and most current reports come out of the paid investigation sessions the preservation society runs.

The deaths are documented and the conditions the court described were real. Neither supports the rest. The rose scent is the load bearing detail in almost every telling, and it arrives pre-attached: people are told whose perfume it was before they reach the third floor. The accounts also cluster after the tours started, not after 1950. For the four decades in between, when the building held thousands of men with every reason to talk about it, there is no comparable body of reports from the people living inside it.

The building is unheated stone and steel with broken glass and no climate control, which produces cold spots, drafts, and dead batteries on its own. The oldest account of anything in that apartment is the physician's, and it describes a pistol falling off a shelf.

Self-guided admission is $30, reduced by $5 for students, seniors, and military, and free for children 6 and under. An audio guide adds $5. Guided tours start at $40, the Walls of Time tour is $55, and the Shawshank bus tour, which leaves the site for the film's other Richland County locations, is $99. Any guided ticket includes the self-guided route, and a second tour on the same day is $20.

Doors are open 11am to 4pm daily from April 1 through October 31, with a 10am start on Saturdays and Sundays between June 1 and September 1. From November 1 through March 31 the hours are 11am to 4pm Thursday through Monday, closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

From late August to mid-November the route is cut back to make room for Blood Prison, the site's own Halloween attraction, which runs its 2026 season from September 25 to November 1. Solitary confinement, the bullpen, and the ground levels of the cell blocks are shut during that stretch, and self-guided tickets are discounted to reflect it. Anyone coming for the cell blocks in particular does better outside that window.

Paranormal programs are booked separately and tend to sell out well ahead. There is no heating and very little restoration, so the temperature inside follows the weather outside and the floors are the original ones. Most visitors give the self-guided route about 2 hours.