Ohio State Reformatory

Shortly after moving to Ohio, Andrew and I realized that the place where they filmed Shawshank Redemption was in Ohio and only a few hours away from us. We knew instantly that we should try and tour the place when mom was here. At first our plan was to do an overnight ghost hunt. Yeah, we are all nerds. Sadly, by the time they listed the tour dates on the website, they were all booked and we had to settle for a day tour.
The cool thing about weekday tours at Ohio State Reformatory is they're self-guided tours! No body pushing you along, no boring speal about this and that. We got to walk, look and take pictures at our own pace. Perfect.





This tour is not recommended for pregnant people. All that flakey stuff on the walls and ceiling: lead paint and asbestos. They also say to wash your hands thouroughly after your tour and the not touch the walls. We are such daring, dangerous nerds. : )


The staircase to nowhere. A funnier picture would have been that both my mom and Andrew went that way and got stuck. I was the smart one who went the right way.


Man, look at those doors!


This was a spiral staircase up to a watchtower. The welcome people said we could go anywhere there wasn't rope or caution tape. Well, there was some tape, but it had fallen...That counts right?

The watchtower at top, and a very small turn around, and I was asking why on earth I thought it was a good idea to climb up the stairs. But, I'd do it again in a second.

Andrew's feet going down.



Solitary cells.



All the shanking tools, and the pictures, you're lucky you can see them well. They were after pictures of shanking victims at the prison. yuck.




It was pretty awesome to look around. I took about another 200 pictures, it was hard to pick these but, it gives a nice overview of what we saw.