Mansfield Reformatory is bigger than I had imagined.
In fact, it’s fucking huge. It is more than a quarter million square feet, divided into two main wings, each containing cell blocks six stories high. Prisons like Mansfield were designed to dehumanize and humble their residents with imposing scale and grandness. Mansfield’s size, plus its towering Romanesque façade, makes it a pretty stunning place. You’ve probably seen Mansfield Reformatory before, as it’s regularly used as a movie set. The Shawshank Redemption was filmed here, as were parts of Air Force One and Tango & Cash, as well as music videos for everyone from Lil Wayne to Marilyn Manson.
I’ve known about Mansfield for most of my life, though I’ve never been here before. It’s about an hour west of Canton. Far enough away that curiosity about the place, as intense as it was, still wasn’t enough to get me to venture over here.
Mansfield, also known as the Ohio State Reformatory, was Ohio’s primary prison from the 1890s until the 1970s, when it was slowly put out of use. More than two hundred people died here—from execution, murder, and suicide—while it was a functioning correctional facility. It was such a terrible, inhumane place that calls for its closure started as early as 1930. Since the last prisoner was moved out in 1990, the place has been pretty much abandoned. Today Mansfield is something between a historic ruin and an EPA Superfund site in the making. Lead paint peels off every surface that isn’t corroded; walls and ceilings are falling apart or completely missing; and asbestos and plaster dust are everywhere. Then there’s the broken rusty metal, missing guardrails, exposed wiring, doors off their hinges, loose stairs, and so on.
I’m walking through the deserted prison in the bright light of a sunny afternoon. Seeing it by day, I just can’t imagine that you could take in all the grandness of the place exploring alone in the pitch blackness with a three-watt flashlight. But that’s exactly what I intend to do in a few hours.
What makes Mansfield truly notorious is its reputation for the paranormal. The place is rumored to be filled to its sizeable brim with very serious bad mojo. Unlike other haunted sites, where people feel cold breezes or light touches, or see a floating head or something, Mansfield hosts interactions with the dead that are on a different level. The living are grabbed, punched, shoved, and pushed. Things are thrown and slammed.
A bald, muscular, and mildly intimidating man, Scott Sukel, is showing me around. In something between bureaucratic malfeasance and sheer stupidity, they actually allow people to come in here. Since 1995, a preservation group has maintained the site and conducts tours.
“Yeah, the worst thing I’ve ever experienced here was about two years ago,” Scott says. “I was taking a few people through the administration building and I got punched in the left kidney, which left a bruise for three days. I was standing here and everything was pretty quiet and normal, then I got this ‘Oh, shit’ feeling—you know, like something bad is going to happen—then bam. I ended up on my knees on the floor. That’s when I realized that I needed to stop being a tour guide and start trying to figure out how to get these people out of here safely, without them panicking.”
That incident happened during one of Scott’s ghost hunts in the prison. Even crazier than letting people inside Mansfield Reformatory during the day is that several times a year Scott and his crew escort people into the building at night. Everyone meets on the front steps at 8 P.M. Then all have to sign one of the most complete and comprehensive liability waivers you’ll ever see in your life. Then Scott’s crew gives folks a quick orientation tour to help get everyone adjusted. Then they turn off the lights. Then it slowly gets dark. Then the group is free to roam the entire prison structure, almost completely unrestricted, until dawn.
Of all the haunted places I’ve read about or encountered, Mansfield is by far the place that people are least skeptical about. Given all the horrible things that have happened here and all the terrible people who have passed in and out of its gates, I think people are just willing to accept that fucked-up paranormalness would naturally happen here, if anywhere. In fact, I don’t ever recall encountering anyone who has stepped forward and said there isn’t some kind of lingering presence here.
If there are ghosts anywhere, this seems like the place to find one.
At this moment, Mansfield isn’t feeling as foreboding as it rightly should be. I’m distracted by another presence. Mansfield is less than an hour away from Canton. The place that holds clues to so many of my unanswered questions. Clues that could turn into answers if I could just muster the courage to go there and seek them out.
My family doesn’t live in Canton anymore. They live about halfway between here and Canton, yet I didn’t even tell them I was making the seven-hour drive to visit the reformatory. Laura’s family still resides there, or so I’ve heard from some people I’ve spoken to. I’d never been able to figure out how to approach them about Laura, what became of her after she left for college, and to start filling in the voids of my understanding about what happened and why. I’d also heard that Laura’s mother was sick with cancer and did not have long to live, so I knew not only that I had to be in touch with them but that it had to be soon.
While I seem to have found the courage to go traipsing around the country scaring myself looking for ghosts, I had a far harder time forcing myself to go to my hometown, to look up a phone number in the phone book, to call, to reach out in any way.
To me, the grand towers of Mansfield are like giant compass needles pointing toward the ghosts I really need to be chasing, inviting me to clear away the fear between me and what I really need to confront but couldn’t or wouldn’t.
Since I began this journey, I’ve started to feel less like a writer and more like a detective: searching for clues, following leads, and ferreting out details among a mass of twisted and confused memories. Throughout my experience as a journalist, I’ve had to root out truth, uncover facts, and sort through contradictions. I never thought that my most evasive subject would be myself.
It’s a weird feeling, contacting people from your past, asking for their help to remember things—often very uncomfortable or unpleasant things—about, well, about you. Whenever I first spoke to someone, I’d almost feel compelled to let them know, subtly, that I wasn’t crazy. I’d talk about my interests or my job—you know, things that normal people talk about. Once that was established, I’d pretty much lay out my quest, all the nonsense I’d believed back then, and the fact that everyone involved was either dead, couldn’t remember it, or didn’t want to. Then I’d weakly smile and hope they still thought I wasn’t crazy.
At one point I even tried to find Dr. Blumfield, but to no avail. From the hospital records, I learned his first name: Haywood. You’d think with a name like that—especially for someone who hangs a shingle as a therapist—he’d be easy to find. But outside of those hospital records, I could find no references to him, then or now. Even looking back to the directories from those years, I couldn’t find a telephone listing.
But reaching out to the Pattersons had always seemed absolutely necessary, yet absolutely impossible.
Walking through the decrepit hallways of Mansfield Reformatory provides a distraction, or at least a delay. A spooky, frightening, and kind of fucked-up delay.
“Yeah, you spend enough time in here, you’ll see it all,” Scott says as we make our way through the west cell block. “On any given night we’ll see a full-body apparition, hear voices screaming ‘Get out’ or ‘Stay with us,’ cell doors slam open and shut, and sometimes you’ll get smells, like roses.”
Apparently one of the former wardens’ wives—a wife who was accidentally killed here when a loaded revolver fell off a closet shelf—loved flowers. She’s supposedly a regular presence in the residential areas. Sometimes she is seen, sometimes she is heard singing, sometimes visitors just smell floral perfume or roses.
“Yeah … we’ll make sure you get to have an experience tonight,” he adds. “And who knows, we might be able to keep you from getting raped.”
Despite my mixed feelings about being in Mansfield, being raped was definitely not on my to-do list for the evening.
As nighttime approaches and the rest of the prison explorers assemble on the front steps, Scott and I discuss my plans for the evening. I came alone and plan to explore the prison on my own or tagging along with others. If it gets late in the night and I haven’t had a satisfactory “experience,” then he’ll send out some of his crew to, as he puts it, “stir some stuff up.”
As the orientation tours wrap up, Scott takes a long look out the windows lining the back of the building. The sun is setting.
“Looks like it’s time,” he says as he starts to head down the hallway to kill all the lights. “Here’s hoping you have a very interesting night tonight.”
A few weeks before coming to Mansfield, I finally worked up the courage to do something else completely scary and uncertain: Write a letter.
“Dear Mr. and Mrs. Patterson,” I wrote. “I’m sure my name is one you haven’t heard or thought of in quite some time. I was good friends with your daughter Laura before she passed away.”
Approaching the Pattersons to try to understand more about their deceased daughter troubled me greatly. During her life, I had very little exposure to her family, mostly by her choice. I once asked Laura what her family thought of her taking off several nights a week with someone they hardly knew.
“I think they’re just happy that I have a friend” was her reply.
After learning that someone named Patterson still lived at her old house east of Canton—and had the same phone number I used to call two decades ago to speak with Laura—I talked myself into thinking that writing a letter would be a better approach. It was definitely a better approach for me, but I rationalized it would be better for them, too. That is, if they answered it.
Several of my friends cautioned me against approaching the Pattersons via letter.
“Letters are too easy to ignore,” my friend David offered. “They’ll get it, read it, think about calling you, and then never do it. Could you blame them?”
David’s advice, along with that of several others I talked to about this: Call. Just pick up the phone and call them. That seemed crazy to me. Imagine sitting at home one night watching TV when the phone rings and some stranger from your dead daughter’s past is on the other end, full of questions. Even if I just called to reintroduce myself to them, it still felt like I’d be showing up out of nowhere to pull a scab off an old and deep wound. Laura’s death wasn’t the only tragedy the Pattersons had experienced, as Laura’s younger brother had shot himself several years after she died. I just couldn’t imagine I would be a welcome complication to a long and twisted series of painful events.
Writing the Pattersons felt strange for a bunch of other reasons, too. Like the fact that I’d never contacted them after Laura’s death. Having learned about Laura’s death in such an awkward manner—and two months after the fact—made talking to anyone about it difficult. At first I’d thought about visiting. Then I thought it was too late to visit and that I should call. Then I thought it was too late to call and I should write a letter. Then twenty years seemed to slip in between my good intentions.
I kept thinking about what their reaction would be to receiving a letter from me now. So I sat down one evening, banged out the letter in ten minutes, and walked it down to the mailbox before I had a chance to change my mind. I figured it would take a few days to reach them, a few days for them to process it, a few days to decide how to respond, and then we’d see what happened. If I don’t hear anything in a few weeks, I’ll follow up with a phone call, I told myself. “Give it some time” was my latest excuse for doing nothing.
But tonight I don’t have to worry about any of this, I reason. There are other ghosts to chase.
From my informal tally of fellow expeditioners I run across in the hallways during my first few hours in the reformatory, there is one report of footsteps followed by human growling coming from a far room in the east wing’s infirmary, one butt-grabbing on a staircase in the warden’s residence, one sighting of a phantom guard sitting in Central Processing (which turned out to be a napping member of Scott’s crew), and one incident of an explorer smelling garbage, which may have been actual garbage (as compared with paranormal garbage). Other than those, not much beyond a few heebie-jeebies. Nothing is happening in my presence that can’t be easily explained.
Most people are exploring the prison with the groups they’d come in with. A group will wander through a section of the building, someone will think that he hears/feels/sees something and point it out to the rest of the group, then everyone else in the group investigates the area for a few moments before losing interest and moving along. With the exception of a pizza break around 11 P.M., the groups pretty much repeat this process over and over again for the first five hours.
Scott is unimpressed with my lack of interactions with Mansfield’s spirit population, so he tells me to follow him. Seven flights of stairs later we’re in the attic above the west cell block retrieving a digital recorder that Scott placed hoping to capture some EVPs.
“So I left this here on the voice-activation setting using this prototype mike I got last week,” Scott says. “No one was up here, yet it recorded … thirty minutes of … something. Let me show you why I like to record up here.” He uses his flashlight to lead me through a small hallway off to the side of the staircase where he placed the EVP recording. “There used to be three more stories up here. You can see the marks on the wall there that show each level. Right? Now, walk through here.”
We walk through a small opening into a large area that I could tell, even in the dark, goes up much higher than the room we just left. Scott stands still and points his flashlight straight toward the ceiling.
“Now look up,” he says.
I shine my flashlight up to meet my gaze. I see three nooses hanging from the rafters directly above us. We’re standing at the bottom of the old prison gallows. Three old, slowly rotting pieces of rope, moving slightly in the air we kicked up by opening the doors. We just stand there for a few moments, watching them sway.
It’s weird and it’s chilling, but it still doesn’t explain the fact that the EVP recorder captured thirty minutes of clanking noises. Could they have been made by a ghost? Sure. They also could have been made by a raccoon or the building roof cooling off after a warm day or someone who snuck up here to mess with the recording.
As I stand there watching the nooses sway in the light of our flashlights, my mind drifts to Canton again. I can just go over there in the morning, I tell myself. I can just leave here, sleep for a few hours, and then go. I’m not entirely sure what I plan to do once I get there—show up at the Pattersons’ front door, march up to the edge of Lake O’Dea. As compelled as I feel to do it, it seems like a dramatic and ridiculous thing to do. Arguably, spending the night in Mansfield Reformatory is equally ridiculous, but still. The more time I spend in Mansfield not seeing any ghosts, the more I feel compelled to bring this journey to a close. I wrote a letter, I say to myself. Just give it a bit more time.
Scott drops me with the “three ladies,” as he keeps referring to them—his best ghost provokers.
Cheryl is kind of the “hype man” of the crew, trying to work up both the spirits and those trying to communicate with them in order to facilitate some kind of something. She’s accompanied by Tiffini, who is carrying around a set of dowsing rods and a combo digital EMF meter/thermometer, and Amy, who has a rigged portable radio known as a “Radio Shack hack” that she’s using to try to capture live EVPs. Amy’s radio has been altered so that it constantly scans frequencies on the AM band. It pauses for half a second on a frequency before jumping ahead to the next. Whenever it briefly stops on a frequency, you hear a short burst of noise. Sometimes it’s static, sometimes it’s the audio of a radio station, and sometimes, the crew believes, you can make out the voice of a nearby ghost.
We head to the first-floor staircase in the administration building. The four of us sit on two benches lining the hallway, with the grand staircase rising up at the end of the hall. Supposedly if you sit in this hallway in the pitch dark, you will see full-body apparitions walk down the stairs from the floor above.
Before turning on any of the equipment, we decide to just hang out on the benches for a bit and watch the stairs. It’s amazing how easily pitch black plays tricks on your eyes. Once or twice a minute, my mind places a swirl of pale motion at the top of the stairs, momentarily convincing me that I’m seeing something materialize and come toward us.
Amy leans against the wall and turns the EVP radio up to its loudest setting. We all gather around her in a circle, straining to hear the tinny bursts of static and noise.
“Zero-point-zero,” Tiffini calls out. This is her way of saying that the EMF meter is picking up exactly nothing. No electromagnetic anything, spiritual or otherwise.
“Okay, are you listening to me? I want you to answer me, now!” Cheryl commands. She’s trying to “get tough” with the ghosts, figuring that some orders barked by a woman will get them worked up. We’d moved up a floor in the administration building, at the end of a windowless hallway connecting the administration building to the prison cell blocks behind them. We came here because the One Who Answers in Threes told us to.
The location is very familiar in a weird way. In The Shawshank Redemption, there’s a scene where Tim Robbins’s character locks himself into an office and plays an opera record over the prison PA. The guards have to break a window in order to get in and stop him. As we stand in the dark trying to insult a ghost into communicating with us, we’re standing in the room where that scene was filmed.
Amy asks if there is someone here whom the spirits want to talk to.
Suddenly, we start hearing a lot of loud sounds emitting from the radio.
Fft-fft-fft-fft-hmmmm-fft-fft-fft-heeaam-fft-fft-fft-fft-hhmmmm-fft-fft-fft-fft-hyyyyymm.
“It said ‘him,’ ” Amy says, raising her eyes to me, the only male (okay, living male) anywhere in the administration wing. “It wants to talk to you.”
Tiffini busts out her dowsing rods. Almost as soon as she has them in position, the left one starts to shake and tremble.
“Show me what ‘yes’ looks like?” she says.
Almost immediately, the dowsing rods swing across each other, forming an X, then go back to their normal position, pointing perpendicular from Tiffini’s chest.
“Okay, very good,” Tiffini says. “Now, can you show me what ‘no’ looks like?”
Again, almost immediately, the rods swing outward, both pointing as far away from each other as possible.
Tiffini asks if it would like to communicate with us, if it would like us to move to another area of the building, and if the second floor would be a better location. After each question, the dowsing rods cross themselves, then return to their normal position, meaning yes.
“Are you the warden?” Tiffini asks.
The rods cross and then straighten once, twice, and a third time.
This perks Tiffini up considerably.
“Are you Warden Glattke?” she asks.
Again, the rods cross and straighten, three times.
“Uh-oh,” Tiffini says. “I think it’s him again. He answered three times.”
After a momentary pause where I realize that the women all know what Tiffini is talking about, I bite.
“Umm, who is he?” I ask. “The ‘three’ thing.”
“Oh, he is a mischievous one who likes to play around and lie a lot,” Tiffini replies. Whenever they ask this spirit questions, he answers three times. So they call him the One Who Answers in Threes.
This seems reasonable.
So, at his request, we came upstairs. Once there, the One Who Answers in Threes tells us he was the warden, and that he was the warden’s wife, and that he was murdered here, and that he was a prisoner, and a bunch of other things. Basically, the One Who Answers in Threes answers yes to everything. Well, almost everything.
I ask if I can try. Tiffini tries to mute my expectations, as I am untrained in how to use the dowsing rods. Plus, who knows if I have the ability to summon spirits?
After I’m given a brief tutorial on how to hold them, the rods are completely still. My hands are out in front of me, positioned almost like I am about to throw a punch but with my fingers loose and relaxed. The rods are resting on the outside of my index fingers.
“Do you want us to leave?” Tiffini scolds the One Who Answers in Threes. “Because if you keep playing around, we’ll walk right out of here.”
The dowsing rods quickly whip outward and back three times.
“No.”
I didn’t move at all. I didn’t move the rods. My eyes dart around, looking to see if there is something that would make a breeze to move them. But if there was a breeze, wouldn’t I feel it against my hand too?
My skepticism melts away. I feel my stomach fill with adrenaline. At the very first sign of something I can’t easily explain, I’m back at square one. I notice the rods beginning to shake. Except this time I know what’s causing it.
I am beginning to tremble.
“Oh! I think we’ve got something here,” Tiffini says, bringing her EMF meter up to her face. “Zero-point-four … zero-point-five.”
Cheryl starts to bark out commands to the One Who Answers in Threes, indicating that the answers should be sent through Amy’s EVP radio. Amy squats against the wall in almost a fetal position to concentrate. She turns her headphones up so loud we can easily hear them throughout the hallway.
Fft-fft-fft-fft-fft-fft.
“Now you are going to answer me,” Cheryl calls out. “Is your spirit bound here, or did you come here recently?”
Fft-fft-neeer-fft-fft-fft-fft.
“New!” Amy shouts out.
“Does that mean he’s … oh, zero-point-seven, zero-point-eight.”
The three ladies seem to get quite excited. I stand next to them, now clenching the dowsing rods tight so that they can no longer move. Even in the dark, Tiffini notices my grip on them, shakes her head, takes them from my hands, and places them in the front pocket of her hoodie.
“Tell me when you came here,” Cheryl says sternly.
Fft-fft-fft-fft-fred-fft-fft.
“Friday?” Amy offers.
“When did you arrive in town?” Cheryl asks me.
“Yesterday,” I answer. “Friday.”
Fft-fft-fft-fft-fft-fft-fft-heeaam-fft-fft-fft-fft.
“It said ‘him’ again,” calls Amy, quickly looking up at me before returning her concentration to the radio noise. “You should have him ask the questions.”
It still doesn’t sound like anything consistent, just random syllables from a scanning radio. Still, my mouth is completely dry.
“One-point-two … One-point-three!” Tiffini exclaims. “Temperature is still going way down. Sixty-two-point-six … sixty-one-point-seven!”
The hallway feels noticeably cooler. Cheryl looks at me. “You ask questions,” she says. “And don’t be afraid to provoke him.”
“Okay,” I answer.
We all stand still for a few moments.
I feel something new and unexpected.
I suddenly want to believe this is real.
I want to accept that we are talking to a ghost.
I want to let go of every bit of skepticism I have.
I am completely terrified and I want to believe.
I have no idea what to ask.
“Okay,” I yell out. “So … I’m here. I’m listening. If you have anything to say, I’m all ears.”
“One-point-three,” Tiffini yells.
Fft-fft-see-fft-fft-fft-hee-tuu-fft-fft-fft-ur-mmm-fft-fft-fft.
I take a step back from the others.
“One-point-seven. Temperature sixty degrees,” Tiffini calls out.
Fft-fft-fft-fft-fft-fft.
“One-point-eight.”
“Do you know anything about a Little Girl?” I ask.
I feel completely foolish saying this out loud. The ladies have no idea what I’m talking about, and I immediately cringe, thinking of what must be going through their minds.
Come on, I think. Just tell me something so I can end this.
Fft-fft-fft-fft-fft-fft.
“A Little Girl in a Blue Dress. Do you have anything to tell me? Was She real?” I call out.
At that moment I wonder: What if I actually get a response? I mean, I’ve been struggling to make any sense out of this for more than twenty years. Of course, I’ve never given this any consideration or thought at all before this point, but what do I plan to do with my answer?
Fft-fft-fft-unnn-fft-fft-ger-fft.
“Anger,” Amy calls out.
“Is that supposed to be an answer?” I call out.
“One-point-two … zero-point-nine,” Tiffini says.
The three of them look at one another.
Fft-fft-fft-fft-fft-fft.
“Zero-point-four,” Tiffini reports, moving the meter around the air trying to get a different reading.
Fft-fft-fft-fft-fft-fft.
“Zero-point-zero.”
Fft-fft-fft-fft-fft-fft-fft-fft-fft-fft-fft-fft-fft-fft-fft-fft-fft-fft.
After a few moments of listening to the burst of static from the radio, Cheryl steps toward me. “I think he’s gone,” she says.
I pause and step back from the others. Everyone is quiet.
I’m feeling something else now, that feeling you get when you realize you’ve been cheated. That epiphany of being scammed or robbed. I don’t blame the three of them.
I blame myself.
The ghost isn’t gone. He was never there.
I know this, but still, I was right there. I felt foolish. No one pushed me into believing. Even after all I’d thought and experienced, I went there so willingly.
The ladies begin to pack up their gear. It’s 4 A.M. You can start to see an outline of color on the horizon. The evening is almost over. I am completely exhausted and still have a seven-hour drive home in front of me.
Instead of bringing me to any conclusion, my night in Mansfield Reformatory has just left me more uncertain. I know I need to come back to Ohio soon. It’s time to face some real ghosts.