by Randy McNutt
Most visitors feel exactly the way the prison’s architect, Levi T. Scofield of Cleveland, intended young prisoners to feel—momentarily helpless and cut off from the world. Regardless of visitors’ reactions, one thing is certain: the former maximum-security prison can suffocate you with dust, peeling lead paint, and degradation.
Long before the prison held Ohio’s errant young people, a federal Civil War camp trained them to fight and kill at Camp Bartley (later named Camp Mansfield), which turned out 4,000 Union troops from 1861 to 1865. They included 750 members of Ohio’s 32nd Regiment, which fought in various bloody battles throughout the South. Casualties were heavy; only about thirty-five of the original members survived the war.
The camp and the dark war days had long passed when the Ohio State Reformatory opened on the site on September 15, 1896, about sixty-five miles northeast of Columbus. It was touted as the state’s newest intermediate penitentiary, designed for young offenders who weren’t bad enough for the state pen but were too bad for the boys’ industrial school. Initially, 593 cells held 1,200 young prisoners, who during the day helped build the rest of the sprawling prison—two hundred thousand square feet in the only building that still remains on the grounds. In its ninety-four years as a state prison, the reformatory housed an estimated 154,000 prisoners who ranged at different times from youthful offenders to hardened adult convicts.
From the start, Mansfield’s prison was different. Usually, the Victorian prison system simply housed criminals. No more, no less. That’s why the Ohio State Reformatory was considered so progressive. It sought to “rehabilitate young male offenders through hard work and education.” Even its appearance, something like a big church in the front, sought to remind inmates of a higher purpose. Every prisoner worked in the shops or on a prison farm, and, with any luck, left the reformatory with a skill—or at least his life. By the time the state closed the prison on December 31, 1990, however, prison officials had become “enlightened.” Their prisons came equipped with basketball courts, sometimes a campus atmosphere, and law libraries.
Unfortunately, some prisoners and visitors did not leave Mansfield, not even in death. Volunteers who lead tours talk of seeing ghostly forms and unusual balls of light flying through the corridors. Some say they are routinely touched by unseen hands and spoken to through unseen mouths. Other claim they smell the lilac perfume worn by the warden’s wife on the night she was fatally shot in her bathroom.
The Mansfield Reformatory Preservation Society, an independent group, bought the prison from the state for one dollar in 1994 and now operates it as a historical museum. The group has a Web site on which former prisoners can share their memories. Using the pen name “an old-timer,” one former resident wrote (with skull and crossbones beneath his name): “Your thoughts are locked in O.S.R. forever!”
Visitors are invited to check in for haunted house tours and weekend “ghost hunts” around Halloween (pizza is included, if guests can manage to eat anything in that environment). For less hardy visitors like my wife and me, the group offers weekend tours of the reformatory’s inner sanctum.
We drove into the parking lot on a cloudy Sunday afternoon in June. Dark rain clouds stalked the horizon. I could feel moisture in the air and in my aching shoulder. When I first pulled off the main road and looked down the hill and saw the clouds rolling toward the prison, my jaw dropped. I tried to take a photograph, but the building was so long that I couldn’t squeeze it into the 35mm frame. The Victorian Gothic and Romanesque architecture looked imposing in sandstone.
At the front gate, we chose the dungeon tour from among several options. A sign assured us that we would visit “the hole” and see much of the prison. I had already heard of its gruesome reputation. One inmate hung himself in the hole. In the tailor shop, an inmate mistakenly slit the shop supervisor’s throat, thinking he was another prisoner. One inmate killed himself by dousing his clothes with lighter fluid and paint thinner. Another inmate committed suicide by drinking a batch of silage alcohol. Then there was another warden’s wife: In the 1950s, she died when her pistol (or so the official story goes) fell out of a closet and discharged. Later, her husband died of a heart attack in the west wing’s offices.
I didn’t mention these things to Cheryl, who by this time was joking about our trip.
“Some husbands take their wives to the islands on vacation,” she said. “We go to a prison.”
We walked up several steps to what was once a central processing area for prisoners. At this point Ohio’s young convicts once sat and waited. And waited. Looking at the high ceilings and wide lobby area, the prisoners had time to reflect on what they had done and how long they would be incarcerated. When a prisoner was first admitted, he sat on what was called a mourning bench, because he could mourn for being in prison. He could sit for a few minutes or a few hours. Later, he was admitted to a seven-by-nine-foot cell that housed two prisoners.
As we pushed farther into the gloom, our guide explained: “The prison cost $1.3 million to build. Now, we need $360,000 just to replace the roof. The place is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and for all practical purposes on the register of spooky places. If it looks bad, it is. The state just picked up and left it as it was—in rough shape. When they built this place, prison officials wanted it to look something like a cathedral, to help reform young lawbreakers through appearance. The prison once was a fancy place, with beautiful woodwork and attractive stone from a local quarry. Its first residents, 150 young convicts admitted to the west cellblock, were tough kids from across Ohio. Since then, tens of thousands of prisoners have done time here. They’re in a dubious fraternity. Many former convicts go through on these tours. They clue us in on things we don’t know—and things we’d rather not know. We get forty thousand visitors a year who take the historic tour, the Hollywood tour, the dungeon tour, and the tower tour. By the way, lead-based paint is peeling throughout the place. Estimated removal cost is $5 million. So it isn’t going anywhere. Just don’t touch anything.”
One part of the main building has fifty-seven rooms. These days, the main building is all that remains of the original complex of several buildings. The state razed the others after it closed the prison in 1990. (The heat hasn’t been turned on since then, so the place is closed to tourists in winter.) Just as state prison officials were ready to tear down the main prison, the Mansfield volunteers formed their group and asked to buy the building. The group will seek government grants to pay for renovation, which in 1998 was estimated to cost $16 million. In today’s dollars—well, the cost is completely out of the question.
Hollywood discovered the prison in the 1970s and 1980s, when film companies shot Tango and Cash and Harry and Walter Go to New York at the then-occupied reformatory. In the 1990s, after the prison had closed, film crews arrived to shoot Air Force One with Harrison Ford and The Shawshank Redemption with Tim Robbins. Large paintings of Lenin and Stalin, leftovers from Air Force One, still adorn the main room of the prison. I thought I had entered a Soviet relocation camp. A plastic and plaster stone wall from Shawshank and other props, including a cardboard sewer line, are available for public inspection.
As we trudged along, we saw cellblock east—six stories high, steel, and built mostly by prisoners. It remains the largest freestanding cellblock in the world, our guide told us; two thousand prisoners once lived in the two cellblocks. “Prisoners washed the floors and windows daily,” he said. “With two thousand people living in here, disease could go through the men in a hurry. Another five hundred prisoners toiled on an honor farm around the prison. Prisoners wore blue uniforms. If they misbehaved, they were issued gray ones. If they were caught having sex, the warden added one year to the offenders’ sentences and sent letters of explanation to their wives, fathers, and mothers.”
Prisoners learned trades in the school, carpenter shop, broom shop, print shop, lock shop, and other shops. “A locksmith?” a tourist asked. “Doesn’t that seem like an odd trade to teac
h a convict?” Our guide laughed and said, “Yeah, well, the prison also had a barber school. But I wouldn’t want to sit in a barber chair if the barber was living here. One time, a prisoner came in for a shave. He was unlucky because he owed his barber several packs of cigarettes and refused to pay up. So the barber sat him down, spun the chair around, and put a straight razor to the fellow’s neck.”
We walked down two flights of stairs to the dungeon. At the bottom, tour members stood aghast.
“This is it—the hole, solitary, whatever you want to call it,” the guide said. “Solitary. When the prison was first occupied, the hole had double doors. One curved out, one curved in. Prisoners did the eight and eight. They laid on the floor—naked, with no beds—for eight hours, then they stood up for another eight hours. For the first two days, they had nothing but bread and water, then after that they had full meals that were slipped under a hole in the door. That’s where they got their light—with one exception. If a prisoner gave a guard a hard time, the guard would stand in front of the slot to block the light. The temperature in this area was ninety-three to ninety-six degrees. The high temperature was a way of maintaining control. In the 1950s, there was a riot at the prison. All 120 rioters were rounded up and put down here—six guys to a cell, for thirty days. You can imagine what the temperature was like. None of them died, though.”
The hole terrified prisoners who had any sense. They had heard horror stories about practically existing on tomato soup. “When you hear the door to the hole slam shut behind you,” one former prisoner wrote on the group’s Web site, “that’s when you realize: goodbye, freedom, you have hit the lowest of the low.”
“Oh, yes, people have died down here,” the guide explained. “One time, they had to put a couple of guys to a cell. When the guards opened one cell, a guy walked out and his cellmate didn’t. They found him dead, under a bunk. The prisoner who walked out didn’t like his roomy. Maybe he snored. Another time, a prisoner escaped from these cells—nobody knows how—and he bludgeoned to death a guard. Those are the only two circumstances that I know of where people died down here, but there probably were other deaths. This is no motel.”
We stopped in a big, empty room where the prisoners once lined up to take meals—the commissary. “There was no talking, no smoking, no laughing,” the guide said. “The prison maintained strict discipline while feeding two thousand men in an hour. They can’t do that in modern prisons.”
What amazed me was the control that authorities exercised over the inmates. Assistant superintendents lived in the prison with their families. Generations of children grew up inside the Ohio State Reformatory, probably none the worse for their environment.
In 1950, warden Arthur Glattke and his family lived in the prison. One day his wife, Helen, was rummaging through a closet when she knocked a loaded pistol onto the floor. It discharged. The bullet struck her in the chest and killed her. Rumors flew through the prison that she was murdered, but the coroner ruled her death an accident. Monica Reed of the preservation society claimed she visited the warden’s quarters and found it “off the wall with paranormal activity. I got about forty-five minutes of orbs flying right at the camera.”
As we walked past grimy, dark cells, our guide pointed out where a prisoner once scratched the word “welcome” in the cement. “I have no idea what he used to do it with or how he got away with it,” he said. “Right over there, a group of prisoners were moving scaffolding that they used to wash windows with when suddenly something fell and a couple of prisoners were killed and several hurt. This place has known some tragedy. You’re welcome to step inside any of the cells at any time to take a picture, but please don’t close the doors. You might become a part of our display. We have no idea how to unlock them.”
As we stood on a lofty ledge looking down into the black steel canyon, the prison opened before us like a dragon’s mouth. It appeared to go on forever. Nothing stirred—no rats, no mice, no air currents. Somebody said he saw a few pigeons. I tried to imagine being held inside this place on Halloween night, on a ghost hunt about midnight, and seeing nothing but dozens of tiny white beams shooting around from visitors’ flashlights and wondering what else might be out there in the darkness.
On entering the southern end of the building, our guide announced, “Prepare to enter the car wash.” It was a light-colored tile shower room—so long that it resembled a bus station. Sunlight from a rear window illuminated millions of specks of dust. The air was so thick that it reminded me of standing in a snowstorm. I hesitated to breathe; fifteen seconds later, I gave up the idea and inhaled. “The prisoners called this place the car wash because they had five minutes for a shower,” he said. “The guards had too many prisoners, so they ran them through all at one time. They came in the door, hung their clothes on wires, got soaked down fast, and left—on Saturdays only. The rest of the week, they’d stink. If you took a shower only once a week, a bar of soap would last you a year. By Friday, the prisoners were pretty ripe. That’s because they worked all week. When a former prisoner came through here on a tour, he told me that the shower was segregated with blacks on one side, whites on the other. He said it was not unusual to see blood running on this tile floor. Somebody else had been stabbed.”
None of the prison guards carried guns. They had only nightsticks. The guards who did carry weapons worked in six towers that surrounded the prison yard. They reached the towers by climbing metal spiral staircases. Up there, they carried pistols, shotguns, Tommy guns, and rifles. They worked eight-hour shifts, alone. The towers came with their own restrooms, eighty-five feet in the air.
Moving on into the mailroom, we stood where Hollywood actors had worked. Of course, prisoners also had worked there in another time. They sorted mail. About nineteen thousand pieces came into the prison each month; about nine thousand pieces went out. A prisoner could lose his mail privileges for disobeying the rules.
In the basement, the walls looked like corridors in a medieval castle. “Sometime before the prison closed,” the guide said, “somebody brought a seven-foot plastic statue of Jesus and stored it down here in the tunnels. I don’t know why. One night a new guard came down here to work and was wandering around with only a flashlight. You can imagine how dark this place gets. He turned a corner and came face-to-face with Jesus. He got religion real quick.”
No matter how hard they schemed, prisoners could not run away from their destiny. Once they were inside, they rarely left the place on their own.
“The prison used to have a shoe factory,” the guide said. “It shipped shoes all over. Well, one of the prisoners decided he had stayed here long enough; he wanted out. He asked a couple of buddies to help him. He hid inside a crate and his friends placed shoes on top of him and nailed the lid shut. It was moved out of here and onto the shipping dock. Pretty soon it was put on a truck and moved out of the prison. The prisoner didn’t care where he was headed, just so he was leaving. The truck continued and was finally unloaded. The prisoner waited until he heard nothing, then kicked open the top of the crate and sat up. That’s when he got the shock of his life. He was inside the Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus! The warden said that since the guy liked it so much there, he would transfer him and add some time onto his sentence.”
The Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield as it appeared in the mid–twentieth century, before most of the buildings were demolished.
Not every incident ended so humorously. On a steamy July night in Columbus in 1948, former Mansfield prisoners Robert M. Daniels, twenty-four, and John C. West, twenty-two, met over drinks and relived their unhappy days in captivity. Daniels was cocky; West was unafraid and ready to kill. The men sought revenge for the way a guard had treated them in Mansfield. They only recently had been paroled: Daniels served three years and two months at the reformatory farm for car theft, and West served a little more than one year for the theft of auto parts. They had been friends in prison. Daniels was a handsome and intelligent young man who held a powerful influ
ence over West, whom the prison psychiatrists had labeled a moron. West enjoyed killing. He tried to imitate Daniels in every way, going so far as to buy the same kind of suits that Daniels wore. Daniels used West the way a puppeteer uses his puppets. Reporters would call them the Mad Dog Killers, and their story could make a modern gangster movie.
After drinking heavily on the night of July 23 in Columbus, the men decided they needed a little cash. They walked into Earl Ambrose’s tavern with guns drawn and demanded money. Ambrose had the audacity or stupidity to stand up to the two thugs. West shot him dead and laughed. He and Daniels took four hundred dollars from the cash register but missed the twenty thousand that Ambrose had hidden in a safe.
They took Ambrose’s car and drove to Mansfield to find a guard who they had hated during their incarceration. A newspaper reporter reconstructed their conversation:
“I want to kill that guard,” West said.
“We could kill him slow, and really settle the score,” Daniels said.
But during the long drive that night, the two decided that an even better target would be John W. Niebel, the prison superintendent. He and his family lived in a large white house next to the fifteen-hundred-acre compound. “We didn’t like the Mansfield superintendent and planned … to go up there and beat the hell out of him,” Daniels said later.
Daniels and West arrived early the next morning and rang Niebel’s doorbell. Niebel woke up and answered the door while his wife, Nolanda, and twenty-year-old daughter, Phyllis, slept upstairs. Daniels and West forced Niebel to take them upstairs, where Daniels raped Phyllis Niebel. After torturing the family, the two men took them outside into the darkness, ordered them to remove their clothes, and shot them with .25-caliber pistols.