A Visit From Paula (day 2)

The sun rises on day 2, and we make the short road trip up to Mansfied. More precisely, the Ohio State Reformatory.


Constructed in 1834, through the years, the prisoners (some with notoriety), experienced fire, death, disease, murder, riots and movie productions... one of the most notable being Shawshank Redemption.

If you're so inclined, here's a wonderful link to some of the history of the prison.

Mansfield Reformatory's History

But for us, the prison's biggest draw is that it's supposedly very haunted. We are so there! It's been featured on Travel Channel's "Scariest Places on Earth" and the reason for our visit today, Ghost Adventures!

We start off in the Warden's Quarters, taking our time and exploring all the rooms.



We take a moment to leave our mark in history... or on dirty glass.


And then things get interesting. Unbeknownst to me at the time, I ended up catching one of the most controversial photos of our trip. Using the macros setting on my camera, I was attempting to get an artsy fartsy shot of a bullet hole in a 2nd story window. I'm 100% positive I was alone in this particular hallway when I took the following photo:


Take a closer look. Click on the image to enlarge, if you must.


Seriously. What the heck?!

We have tried and tried to figure out how this image was captured. I was standing very close to the bullet hole, holding my camera in front of me with both hands. The camera was on the macros setting. Now I was wearing a black shirt that day, so common sense should tell us that I'm the monkey dude. But how could my reflection be there if I'm blocking the hole with my camera... and BOTH my hands are holding it? And who the heck is the headless dude?!

As I stated, neither of us had any idea at the time that I'd captured such an image so we went on with our adventure. An adventure which included Paula creating faux scratches on her back. If you're a fan of all the ghost hunting shows, as we are, you'll notice a trend of everyone, and their grandma, discovering three "mystery" scratches somewhere on their body. So we staged the following photo:


The granny panties add a touch of klass and believability, don'tcha think?

The obligatory cell block shot:


And self portrait:


Then we moved into Solitary Confinement. And it's here that we had an "incident". Since we were visiting the prison on a weekday, all of the tours were self-guided and there weren't a lot of people milling about. As a result, we were alone in solitary. (chuckle... alone... solitary) Anyways, the 2nd story of solitary was roped off and all the lights up there were dark. But we could clearly hear someone or something moving about, knocking and what, we think, may have been a door closing. This is Paula peeking up the stairs at the noise and whispering, "Helllllooo".


After spending the better half of the day exploring every un-roped-off inch of the prison, and its supposed hauntings, we were exhausted!


And we'd worked up a Man vs Food kind of appetite!

Come back soon and read the next installment of our adventure, Paula vs Food.