Troy Taylor - Cabinet of Curiosities 3: The Haunted History of Americas Prisons, Hospitals and Asylums in 20 Objects

Introduction

I was sitting alone in the former library of the old Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield. I was tired, my feet hurt, and I was covered with a film of dust that I had picked up after several hours of wandering in and out of cellblocks, climbing stairs, and exploring every dark corner, nook, and cranny that I could find in the massive stone structure. I needed a short rest. I found a shadowy corner, away from the ghost hunters who were roaming the building and sat down.

I was only in the room for a few minutes when I heard the unmistakable sound of someones footsteps walking across the floor of the library. It was covered with debris and it was impossible to step silently as you walked. I peered into the darkness, but I couldnt see anyone. Worse, I knew that if I could not see them, they certainly couldnt see me and I was just about to give someone the fright of their life. Before they noticed me there, lurking in the dark, I decided to announce my presence. I cleared my throat and said loudly that I was in the room and didnt want to frighten anyone.

There was no response, but the footsteps abruptly stopped. Apparently, I had scared them after all. I switched on my flashlight to signal where I was sitting, but I didnt see anyone. I waved the light around the room, pointing it in the direction that I heard the sound coming from, but there was no one there. The wide, open room was completely and utterly empty.

And that night became one of my first experiences with ghosts at the Mansfield Reformatory. It would not be my last and I have long maintained that the former prison is one of the most haunted American places that I have ever visited. There are spirits that linger at the reformatory. If you havent been there, youll have to take my word for it. If you have, then you likely know what I mean.

This installment in the ongoing Cabinet of Curiosities series manages to combine two things that have long been passions of mine hauntings and abandoned places. Anyone reading this book who has picked up a past title of mine is well aware that ghosts have been a part of my life for many years, but abandoned places have been a big part of my world for just as long. When I was a child, traveling around the country, it was rare when a road trip didnt include several stops at ghost towns, old broken-down stories and abandoned structures that have given up their life on the side of a dusty road in the far corner of a distant state. When I was older, and living in Utah for a while, a favorite hobby was to take off on the weekends and search for ghost towns and lost mines. I never struck it rich at any of those places, stumbling across some forgotten mine that was still filled with gold or silver, but the memories that remain are something Ill always treasure.

Im not sure how this fascination began, but suspect that it has something to do with an incident that occurred one summer when I was about 13. I stumbled across an old, abandoned house in the woods. Such unusual finds were not uncommon for me. I grew up on a farm in a rural part of Illinois and during the summer months, I would often explore the back roads, cemeteries, and stretches of forest near my parents home. This particular house turned out to be a little more unusual than most, though.

It was situated pretty far back in the woods and it didnt look as though anyone had lived there for a long time. Whatever path or driveway that had once led to it was long overgrown and covered with decades of fallen leaves. In spite of the passing years, the house was in decent shape. The porch was sagging and the front door leaned a little, but I was able to open it and go inside.

Strangely, all of the furniture in the house had been left behind, even to the point that there were still photographs on the walls and coats left hanging in the closet. The years had not been kind to the place, but overall, it was eerily preserved and remarkably unsettling. I found the kitchen to be the strangest. It was there that I found the last real vestiges of human occupation in the house. There were still plates and silverware resting on the table and pots and pans still sitting on the cold, metal stove. It was as if the family that had once lived here had suddenly just gotten up and walked away one day never to return. What could have happened that this family had just walked away from their home one day, leaving everything that they owned behind?

Ill never know the answer to that. The house was later destroyed and I never found out who owned it, or what happened to them. But as time has passed, I have never forgotten the empty house in the woods and the mystery of what became of those who lived there. I have since come to realize that this puzzle will never be solved. I also realize, though, that this is where my obsession with abandoned places first began. After that, I was always on the lookout for empty crumbling buildings, decaying structures, and more. There is nothing that will make me turn off the highway faster than the sight of a long forgotten farm, abandoned church, or desolate farm house.

Sadly, though, places like this have become harder to find as the years have passed. In far too many cases, modern progress and urban renewal have wiped out historic spots across the country. This means that otherwise ordinary buildings and homes that lay scattered across the American landscape dont stand a chance. Too often, demolition sites include the abandoned prisons, hospitals, and asylums that lie within the pages of this book. History is often lost while so many of us are too busy to see that its happening.

And its not just the physical sites and the history that will be lost its the supernatural history as well. On more than one occasion, my search for the places left behind by the people of yesterday also led to encounters with ghosts. That has happened in all sorts of places, from abandoned homes to hospitals, prisons, asylums, and more. The places that are featured in this book go behind merely abandoned places, though. They are the places from which nightmares are born. They are the worst possible places that we can imagine, locked up, confined, and broken, behind bars of steel and within walls of stone. Is it any wonder that inmates of such places leave a bit of themselves behind?

Once again, I have chosen to tell the haunting tales of these places through a collection of objects. They have been ensconced in a Cabinet of Curiosities of sorts, although its the kind that can be found within the pages of a book. During the Renaissance era, Cabinets of Curiosities were collections of marvels and unusual objects that were dedicated to things that, in those days, were not yet defined. Modern man would categorize the books, writings and artifacts found in these cases as pieces of natural history, geology, archaeology, religious or historic relics, art, and sometimes outright bits of humbug like petrified mermaid carcasses and fish with fur. But no matter what the cabinets contained, they were collections of the unexplained. Even in those days, everyone loved a mystery. Man has always loved to question, to wonder, and to be baffled by things that he cannot understand. Cabinets of Curiosities were all the rage among those who could afford them and were eventually considered to be a precursor of the modern museum.

My own cabinet is a different sort. There are no fossils in it, no badly preserved bodies of mysterious animals no, my cabinet is different, although its just as puzzling as those of history. My cabinet contains records and remnants of the supernatural a curious collection of objects (both literal and figurative ones) that tell the story of the occult in our modern world. In this case, they tell the story of the prisons, hospitals, and asylums that once dominated both the small towns and big cities of America and how so many left a haunting presence in their wake.