by L.S. Watts

Created on: March 10, 2011   Last Updated: March 14, 2011

The Mansfield Reformatory, also known as the Ohio Reformatory, is considered by many people to be one of many haunted prisons in the United States. With the history of the Mansfield Reformatory, it isn’t any surprise that this location would be haunted.

Originally the location was used to train over 4,000 soldiers during the Civil War in 1861. It wasn’t until 1884 that it was approved by the state of Ohio to build a reformatory. They starting building the Mansfield Reformatory in 1886, but it was not completed until 1910. Even though the building’s construction wasn’t completed, they transferred 150 inmates in 1896 to help finish building this massive castle-like structure.

The Mansfield Reformatory is considered to be home to the tallest free-standing cell blocks, standing at six tiers high. Twenty years after the completion of this building, the prison became very overcrowded and in much need of an update. Due to the lack of updates and overcrowding, the Mansfield Reformatory was deemed unfit to be used as prison in the 1980s. The state of Ohio finally closed the doors of Mansfield Reformatory in 1990.

In the years in operation, it housed over 154,000 inmates. Like most prisons it housed some of the most violent offenders. Many prisoners didn’t make it out of Mansfield Reformatory alive. Inmates were not the only ones meeting violent ends. Aside from fighting, one of the most common accounts of inmates killing inmates is by pushing them over the railing to meet their death upon impacting the concrete floor below.

Many of the inmates couldn’t take life at Mansfield Reformatory and ultimately took their own lives. According to one of the current tour guides, one inmate couldn’t handle Mansfield anymore. This inmate took his sheets and hung himself over the railing. Several accounts by paranormal investigators and tour guides say they have seen an apparition of a man hanging from the railing.

Another inmate by the name of Lockhart sprayed himself with spray paint and set himself on fire. By the time they could get to him, he had died. As they dragged his body to the morgue, chunks of flesh peeled off on the walkway. The prison system contacted his family, but they wanted nothing to do with him. Therefore Lockhart’s body was buried at the cemetery on site.

This cemetery has headstones but instead of names they have their prisoner numbers instead. In fact, there are a total of 218 marked graves on the grounds of

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