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Built in 1834, the Ohio Penitentiary was actually the second Ohio Penitentiary, the third state prison, and the fourth jail in early Columbus. In April 1955 it housed an all-time high of 5,235 prisoners. The Reformatory closed its doors to prisoners December 31, 1990.

The OSR has housed a few famous prisoners over the years. Henry Baker went on to achieve notoriety as a member of the Brinks Gang in the 1950s. Gates Brown, who served a year from 1958 to 1959, would later play baseball for the Detroit Tigers. And in 1989 Kevin Mack, star running back for the Cleveland Browns, did a month on drug charges.

 it has also been used as a set for four movies (Harry and Walter Go To New York, Tango and Cash, Air Force One, The Shawshank Redemption) and music videos (such as "Awake" by Godsmack; Marilyn Manson has done photography here). Naturally, it's also about as haunted as one single place can be. 

As with any prison, OSR accumulated its horror stories over the years. Two corrections officers lost their lives at OSR; one in 1926, shot to death by a former inmate who was trying to spring his buddy; the other in 1932, beaten to death with a three-foot iron rod in the Hole--slang for solitary confinement. 

In July of 1948, two inmates released from the Reformatory for "good behavior" displayed some very bad behavior when they went on a killing spree. Robert Daniels and John West, dubbed the "Mad Dog Killers" by the papers, first murdered Columbus tavern owner Earl Ambrose, then stole a car and drove to Mansfield, where they kidnapped OSR farm superintendent John Niebel, his wife, and his twenty-year-old daughter. They murdered all three in a cornfield off Fleming Falls Road. The next day they killed a farmer from Tiffin, whose new bride managed to escape, then shot a truck driver. Two days later the two ex-cons were trapped at a roadblock near Van Wert Ohio. West died in a shoot-out with police but Daniels was captured. He bragged about the possibility of dying in the electric chair. The following January he got his wish at the State Pen in Columbus. 
On November 6, 1950, the wife of the prison superintendent apparently knocked a loaded gun off a closet shelf and shot herself through the left lung. The next day she died in the Mansfield hospital. It's possible that the superintendent shot her in order to spare himself the messy legal work and political stigma of a divorce. In February 1959 the superintendent himself died from a heart attack in his office.

An inmate hung himself in his cell in 1955. One burned himself to death in his cell with turpentine and paint thinner stolen from the prison furniture shop. Two convicts were once left in a cramped single-occupancy solitary confinement cell overnight; in the morning only one walked out. The other was stuffed under the bunk. In 1957 a riot put 120 men into the 20 solitary cells for 30 day stints.