The Ohio State Reformatory rises from flat Ohio farmland outside Mansfield with the gravity of a building that knows what it has held—six stories of sandstone, Romanesque arches, and turrets, with a central tower reaching upward like a church that lost its faith. Construction began in 1886; the first inmates arrived in 1896, while work was still ongoing. More than 154,000 men passed through over ninety-four years. At least 200 didn’t leave.
The most documented death here is not an inmate’s. On November 5, 1950, Helen Glattke—wife of superintendent Arthur Glattke—was preparing for Sunday Mass in the family quarters on the third floor of the administration building. Reaching for a jewelry box on a closet shelf, she dislodged a .32-caliber handgun. It struck the floor and discharged. The bullet entered her left lung. She survived three days before dying of pneumonia. She was forty-one. Arthur Glattke remained, running the institution from the same building, until February 10, 1959, when he suffered a heart attack at his desk and died at Mansfield General Hospital.
The reformatory closed in 1990 after a federal court found conditions unconstitutional. A preservation society took ownership, restored the building, and opened it to the public; it was also filmed as the prison in The Shawshank Redemption. Today it receives tens of thousands of visitors annually. The warden’s office is described as watchful—a heaviness several accounts have called specifically masculine. On the cell block’s upper tiers, footsteps move across catwalks where no one stands. In the solitary confinement area, cold spots gather near specific cells. In the basement, voices have been recorded with no traceable source.
Story Source: www.mrps.org
Address: 100 Reformatory Road, Mansfield, OH 44905
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