Castle Prison Finds Redemption as Spine-Tingling Tourist Draw

Paint flakes off the interior walls of the old prison, some of them pockmarked as if they have taken a few rounds of cannon fire. Bathroom fixtures are ripped out of their lodgings. A musty odor hangs in the air.

Curiosity drew Catherine Ramsey here to the former Ohio State Reformatory, an imposing structure she couldn’t help but notice whenever she visited her son at the prison next door.

“I wanted to see the castle,” she said.

The sandstone and limestone prison that had a role in such films as “The Shawshank Redemption” and “Air Force One” has grown in popularity as a tourist destination since it reopened in 1995, five years after it closed.

The Mansfield Reformatory Preservation Society plans to turn the prison into a museum and open it for business meetings, parties and large tour groups. The society purchased it from the state for $1 in 2000.

Its medieval design and rich history are among the draws.

About 37,000 people visited the 106-year-old building last year, compared with 1,600 when the reformatory first welcomed tourists in 1996.

Ramsey took two 30-minute tours, one of which took her down into the damp basement of the structure -- six stories tall at its highest point -- and the individual cells known as “the hole,” where an inmate was held in solitary confinement. The experience left her a little shaken.

When the prison opened in 1896 as a reformatory for first-time offenders, a small cell was hidden behind two huge metal doors that stood parallel to each other, no more than 2 feet apart. An inmate who had broken the rules would stand between the two doors -- because standing was all the narrow space allowed -- for hours at a time, the only air seeping through an opening the size of a mailbox slot on the exterior door.

The inmate would go into the pitch-black, windowless cell to eat and sleep.

“There was a lot of stuff they did in here that was inhumane,” said Ramsey, who drove a little more than an hour from her home in Seven Hills.

The Mansfield Reformatory Preservation Society has raised about $750,000 in a fund-raising campaign begun last year. It is expected to cost about $16 million to fully restore the prison, said John Toney, who writes grants for the society.

Visitors climb stone steps leading to two sweeping verandahs and enter the lobby, where stone arches and columns give way to steel bars.

Ramsey’s second tour took her to cellblocks on the upper levels and the guard tower. At the edge of an open cell, her camera captured the sullen image, and she shuddered before hurrying away down the hallway.

Since renovations began, a new roof was put on half of the building and electrical service was restored. The warden’s quarters is being renovated, and the prison’s 350 windows are being repaired or replaced.

“There’s still a huge amount of work to do, but from where we’ve started, we’ve come a long, long way,” said Dan Seckel, an architect who serves as the society’s president.

The tours have grown to include an annual haunted house in the fall and ghost hunts -- periodic unsupervised overnight stays for those who want to search for paranormal activity. Fees vary for each tour, ranging from $5 for a dungeon tour, tower tour, Hollywood tour or historic tour to $50 for an overnight stay.

Cleveland architect Levi Scofield modeled the prison after the medieval castles of Europe in an attempt to inspire the young male prisoners first housed there. Scofield believed that if inmates lived in a place that looked like greatness, it would help in their reformation and inspire them to be better people.

The prison typically housed as many as 2,400 inmates who were trained in various skills, including landscaping. They designed and maintained a small lake and public picnic area on the grounds.

By the 1970s, the building was deteriorating, and it no longer met the state’s standards for a reformatory. In its final days as a maximum-security prison, the 7-by-9-foot cells housed two men in a space intended for one. The heating systems often failed, and the building’s structure fell into disrepair.

When the building was shuttered in December 1990, its 3,200 prisoners were taken next door to the Mansfield Correctional Institution.

Still, the Ohio State Reformatory has a charm that attracts cinematographers.

It has been a backdrop for a music video by rock band Godsmack in 2000, and the movies “Harry and Walter Go to New York” in 1976 and “Tango & Cash” in 1989.

“It can be set in many, many different ways because of the Old World appearance,” Seckel said.

Remnants of movies, such as a picture of Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin left from “Air Force One,” filmed here in 1996, or a sewage pipe used in an escape by Tim Robbins’ character in 1994’s “The Shawshank Redemption” can be seen on the Hollywood tour.

The prison, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, holds a special place for locals as well.

Tour guide Ike Webb, a former guard here in the 1950s and ‘60s, often shares his favorite stories, including the time that a warden’s wife complained about her laundry, which was cleaned by inmates, only to find her next load starched so stiff that she couldn’t wear it. “She never complained again,” he said.

Webb felt compelled to help save the building that’s been a part of his life since his childhood. He was born less than a mile away and played on the prison grounds when he was young, ice skating on the pond or soliciting help from prisoners to pick wild strawberries, he said. When he learned about the preservation society’s efforts, he decided to join.

Seckel said residents think of the prison as a place that both frightened and intrigued them.

They would recall “driving past the prison with mom or dad, and [their] saying, ‘That’s where the bad guys live, and if you are bad, you will live there too,’ ” he said.