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She Does Herself In Nightly at Roseville Prison

With so many bad guys running around Ohio, Columbus' Ohio State Penitentiary was always on the verge of bursting at the seams. In order to alleviate that, the state of Ohio came up with the decision to move less violent criminals and those convicted of lesser crimes to satellite facilities positioned throughout the state. These satellite facilities could serve the dual purpose as manufacturing plants by using prison labor. Officials finally settled on an area in Roseville to serve as the site for one of these satellite prisons.

Oddly enough, while the facility was referred to as the Roseville Prison, it is actually in a different county from the town of Roseville. The prison, which also functioned as a brick manufacturing facility, stands on the outskirts of Roseville in neighboring Muskingum County.

Roseville looks and feels more like a place where people were actually incarcerated than its sister in Junction City, which mostly resembles a stripped-out factory. The walls are still here, topped in two places by guard posts, and the primary surveillance tower still stands across the street. Next door are two houses obviously related to the prison, built from the same brick, though renovated and recently occupied by renters.
Inside, there are cells on the ground floor of the main building. The doors still close, though the guts were wisely ripped out of the locks when they abandoned the prison. The upper floors are big, empty chambers which once contained shops and inmate dormitories but are now used for nothing but paintball, if the splatters on the walls are any indication. The bricks were made in the high-roofed outbuildings attached to the main structure. They're connected by a multi-gated hallway, which also contains the broken-down prison shower. Though the furnaces have been removed from the work buildings, the concrete canals used to channel cooling water to the creek nearby are still intact, and the mud along the bank is still stained brick red.

The exercise yard seems surprisingly narrow and claustrophobic, looked down on by one of the guard towers, but inmates here obviously had access to the sunny main field out front. A faded scoreboard even shows where prisoners used to play baseball.

Much of the biggest building still contains the leftovers of a haunted house conducted here some years ago––fittingly enough, since the Roseville Prison is supposed to actually be haunted. A ghostly young woman in a white dress is said to repeat her suicidal jump from the roof each night. Oddly enough, when the prison was in operation, it housed only male prisoners.

Those who refuse to let the legend die, however, simply state that in life, this ghostly woman was a local who simply chose the roof of the abandoned prison as the spot to make her journey from this world to the next. Apparently, though, she somehow managed to get trapped somewhere in between the two as her ghost is still seen today. 

Weird Ohio

 

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