In Brief
The Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, the castle prison from The Shawshank Redemption, keeps its dead. In the solitary block called the Hole, visitors say a guard murdered in 1932 still jabs them with a nightstick. Upstairs, a warden's wife lingers as rose-water perfume.
The Full Story
The Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield is a castle of a prison, the one Hollywood used for The Shawshank Redemption. In the solitary block staff call the Hole, visitors keep reporting the same thing: a jab between the shoulder blades, a shove, a pressure against the back like the end of a nightstick. The lore gives the presence a name. Frank Hanger, a guard who died here and never quite finished his rounds.
Hanger was real, and so was the night that killed him. On October 2, 1932, an inmate named Merrill Chandler, 22 and sent up from Columbus for auto theft, crouched on top of a cabinet in the West Diagonal tier with a cot leg in his hands, a two-foot length of angled iron. When Hanger came past on his rounds, Chandler swung down and fractured his skull. The guard never regained consciousness and died in the prison hospital four days later. Chandler was executed in the electric chair in November 1933.
Hanger was killed in the West Diagonal tier. But the story files him somewhere else, down in the Hole, where people now report him jabbing and shoving as if he is still fighting off the man who attacked him. The dead guard moved.
The reformatory ran for nearly a hundred years, and not all of its dead came easy. After a 1930 fire at the Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus, 266 survivors were packed into a windowless attic on the building's west side. Their signatures are still scratched into the walls, and people who go up there sometimes smell smoke. A federal court finally condemned the place as inhumane and closed it in 1990.
Hanger is not the only name the staff still carry. Arthur Glattke ran the place as warden from 1935 until a heart attack took him in his office in 1959. Nine years before that, in 1950, his wife Helen died in the family's quarters when his handgun fell from a closet shelf, discharged, and put a bullet through her lung. She died of complications days later.
People still catch cherry pipe tobacco in the halls, the kind Arthur smoked. And the prison's paranormal program manager, Kathy Feketik, says rose-water perfume keeps turning up on the second floor near Helen's old bedroom, with no source she can place. "The very first time that I was here, I was taking a tour and I smelled roses coming down the second floor," she says. It was a perfume Helen used to mix herself.
