Blood Prison Review (2024)

It takes quite a crowd to fill this place, but we thought the assemblage of actors on hand that night proved more than up to the task. They were an active and interactive bunch. Chained victims believably wailed and writhed in their cages. Instead of screaming, a drop window weirdo fixed us with a mute, penetrating gaze.

Talkers gave only sparse lines of dialogue, but many were memorable. Body part collectors said, “Let me get all your teeth” and “Help, I need eyeballs,” in croaky voices. A gregarious widow in the cemetery told us not to let her hubby out of the chained-up casket that he was trying to beat his way out of. A smiling psycho told us they’d cut our heads off and use them as bowling balls.

A priest sent us into a brightly lit room representing heaven, saying: “You will face the light, bald one – it will reflect nicely off of your dome.” Our other team member got sent the other way, with a dismissive “to the depths of hell with you!” A clown followed us very intently until we got to a squeeze tunnel. We motioned for the clown to follow us through, but their reply was: “I’m not going in there, that thing is gross!” Yeeeaaaahh, that’s usually how we feel about those things, clown. Just once we’d like to see a decontamination sprayer at the end of one of these things …or maybe just a hand sanitizer station??

The touch pass-wearing team member experienced a host of extra actor interactions. The crass cook in the crappy kitchen spanked his butt, hard, with a wooden spoon. That smarted! An aspiring gymnast hung upside down from the ceiling and touched his head. He got poked repeatedly while being told “you’re dinner!” The vicious nun came tearing down the church aisle and marched him down to meet the priest/prophet of Satan while monumentally mean mugging him. A clean freak polished his bald head with Windex (water in a squirt bottle) and a rag. It went that way through the whole walkthrough. Touch pass is the way to go if you want the maximum, most intense and engaging experience.

Costuming is typically a strong point here, and we saw nothing to indicate otherwise this time. They seemed to lean a little more than usual into the prison angle with a strong contingent of inmates appearing in grungy orange jumpsuits. Facial makeup jobs often came accented with dental appliques, prosthetics, and/or a whole optometrist office’s worth of contact lenses that added a good deal of additional flair and repugnance.

In the queue areas, we got spooked by a ghostly phantom in all black and a couple prisoners with messed up faces. The nun and the pentagram-emblazoned priest (okay, prophet of Satan) wowed us with deep, layered makeup jobs. We saw several heavily bandaged or pasty faces so thick it looked almost like a papier mache effect. A medical staff member looked horrific with a bloody rictus grin and different contacts in each eye for a super freaky appearance.

Gas masks and skull masks poked their faces in ours. A little girl character in the toy room wore an old fashioned dress like the ones you see in sepia photographs from the early 1900s. A clown with a close set collection of tiny fangs looked repulsive. A flight attendant with a brightly colored outfit who staggered out of a plane crash stood out among all the grimy surroundings, but still fit in with a bloodied face. Maybe best of all, a goat-headed apparition looked fantastically otherworldly, sprouting long twisty horns from its head and enrobed in a cult tunic.

The reformatory is located in Mansfield, Ohio. GPS never has failed in directing us there, and as long as you get close enough, that immense building with the spooky lights is what you’re aiming for. Pretty hard to miss. Free parking, and seemingly acres of it, is on grass and dirt fields and in overflow asphalt lots. A squadron of attendants directed us to our spot.

This is a mega-popular haunt where you will often get stuck in long lines to get in. It looks like they have improved since our previous visit (two years ago) on crowd control and line management. Last time we were here, the general admission line got mixed up with concession stand lines and created some confusion. It seemed to us there was more signage, cordoning, and personnel to correct this sort of thing.

Speaking of personnel, we also noticed a significant police and security presence, and speaking of signage, there’s also a sign directing you to the online ticketing webpage since there are no on-site ticket sales anymore. Note that timed ticketing is in place here.

Several stairwells must be negotiated, and at least one of them has fairly narrow steps, but otherwise we didn’t come across many physical impediments to safety.
Blood Prison along with its parent, the reformatory itself, have cultivated a strong online presence through their website and multiple social media outlets.

The reformatory’s exterior is endlessly impressive. What a terrific table-setter to get your appetite up and running for a satisfying haunt visit! It’s huge, it’s beautiful, it looks like you’re about to go meet the doctor at his baronial estate in a Frankenstein movie.

Red and green floods lit up the walls. A photo op of a block of cells was set up near multiple merch tents by the queue entrance. Blood-pumping music blared. A stilts walker and fire jugglers entertained the crowd.

Inside the doors, we passed mannequins and prison paraphernalia on the way to an official photographer’s station featuring wickedly grinning jack-o’-lanterns and a Warden’s Widow prop. The widow is a towering, terrifying presence who’s become the attraction’s trademark character that you can see all over their website and social media channels. Unfortunately, we did not encounter the Warden’s Widow in the flesh on this visit.

The authentic location, with its characteristics both physical (rusted/decrepit furnishings) and immaterial (its cruel history and reports of real haunting activity), plays a huge part in any visit. It’s hard to forget at any point that you’re in a real former prison full of even darker undertones than usual. In most attractions, a section of dark walls might be boring or off-putting. Here, they’d be in a naturally unkempt state or the crew has distressed them with such skill as to make them indistinguishable from the real deal, and either way the setting is a constant reminder and reinforcement of where you are.

The biggest barrier to immersion was a conga line we got stuck in quite early on. This was the Saturday before Halloween, therefore throngs of people had converged and other folks were our companions throughout the first part of the attraction. Blood Prison maintains several crowd control points and those helped with spacing us out from fellow visitors later on.

The endpoint led to a gift shop, coffee stand, and photo retrieval station. The gift shop featured merchandise for the haunt, the reformatory, and Shawshank licensed items; the reformatory served as a prime shooting location for 1994’s The Shawshank Redemption, an adaptation of a Stephen King novella. It also stood in for a Russian jail in 1997’s Air Force One, which starred Harrison Ford as a tough guy president personally battling airborne terrorists. We believe you can still see some Russian-language signs from that production in the last crowd control queue.

As we mentioned in Immersion, the effects crew have done an incredible job of matching and extending the existing prison infrastructure and environs, to the point where it was pretty much impossible to tell the difference. In watching several video walkthroughs, especially the one posted on YouTube by Spirit Light Productions just before the 2024 season started, we were stunned to see the extent to which the real and the simulated/constructed environments had been blended in some areas.

On the audio front, we heard loud swirling drones, piano music, screams, banging pots, insane laughing and kids giggling, booming voices, electric shocks, recorded emergency announcements, and battle zone explosions and gunfire, as well as a virtual cacophony of other noises, musical snippets, and sound effects.

The most immaculately detailed sets were displayed right up front, in the initial haunted mansion type rooms that comprise the residence of the Warden’s Widow. They had built an extraordinary whole house facade to enter. Inside, everything was covered in filth and seemed to be suffering from a destructive tree invasion a la Poltergeist. A gasp-worthy study/den mixed together rotting walls, a busted pool table, an ancient Egyptian statue or sarcophagus, dusty bookshelves, an antique record player, and too much else for us to properly register into a hyper-realistic and hyperactive set.

In the children’s room, twisted kids had crammed gross dolls in every nook and a Reagan/Exorcist prop poised up the wall twitched its gruesome head. The house area ended in a backyard of sorts with a winding stone path, a writhing scarecrow animatronic, and most unbelievably, a gigantic tree seemingly growing right out of the floor. This first section would be a crowning achievement for many attractions, but Blood Prison went way past that.

The new center for Ohio State Reformatory Medical Research (a.k.a. illegal, immoral, infernal experiments on prisoners) retroed things up with 1970s-era stand-up computer banks with spinning reels and a series of victims/creatures/mutated experiments in bio-tubes. Another recent addition, the evil church, looked awesome with stylish stained glass windows. The clown area impressed with rickety wooden fair booths and crazy big props like a titanic jack-in-the-box clown.

A hell hound actormatronic made us jump out of the way, a severed head stuffed inside a wiring box gave new meaning to the term brain power, and a triple-zombie-attack animatronic shot right at us out of a drop window. Keep your head on a swivel because between the prison features, props, sets, and actors, there’s always something to look at and it’s everywhere – even way up high on ceilings several stories tall!

The downright nuttiest section, named Bunker 13, painted a chaotic and bloody battlefield tableau featuring two tanks, broken down cars and military transports, rattling machine guns, those x-shaped fortifications you see in D-Day movies, a path lined by chain fencing, crates of munitions, and an entire crashed plane with its nose on the ground and the frame leaned up against a wall. If you endorse the motto go big or go home, know that Blood Prison goes so big it might as well end up about halfway around the world from its home in central Ohio.

Landing here from the Special FX section, we will note the scariest part of Blood Prison, and deservedly the least set-dressed because it’s unneeded, is the solitary cells area. Spine-tingling and blood-curdling are phrases we would use to describe that location. There is just something unnerving and overwhelmingly creepy about passing by the darkened cells. It hits us in the fear center every time.

As usual, the cells were kept very dark and the hallway filled with pounding music and occasional deafening noises. Some cells contained residents that would pop out, sometimes with an accompanying flash of light. Our touch pass wearer got an extra zing out of the experience when the cell denizens rushed out and grabbed him. For other instances of the super scarier treatment that came with the touch pass, refer to the Cast section. The touch pass made a significant difference in threat level and the amount and intensity level of scares from actors.

The ever present atmosphere of the prison itself reminded us of its haunting/haunted legacy and contributed to a high baseline of spookiness. Disorientation from lighting, sound effects, and the 360-degree aspects of many scenes contributed.

We met with plenty of jump scares, including a couple from animatronics. Frights also came from weapon threats like a machete slashed across a sparking electric shock fence, the freakiness of sinister ugly creatures getting in our space, bizarre remarks from monsters and inmates, the prospect of eternal damnation, chainsaw attacks, wartime horrors, clown conniptions, and the special hell of dealing with weird children.

The reformatory is very large and provides a lengthy experience. We were imprisoned in its confines for 35 minutes. With a $35 general admission, the MPD ratio (minutes of in-haunt entertainment per dollar) came out to 1.0, exactly hitting the 1-for-1 threshold we like to see. Getting to march around inside the awesome building and see intricate sets with horrific inhabitants delivers solid value.

Touch pass is available for $7. The ultra lightning pass cuts out a lot of wait time and makes a ton of sense for the frequent busy-as-heck nights, even at the cost of an additional $20 ($55 total). Otherwise, get ready to be standing outside for a good long while.

Blood Prison will run their holiday show, Christmas Incarceration, on December 13-14, 2024. We went last season and really enjoyed it. The Yuletide decorations were voluminous and on point, but just know you won’t get to see as much of the prison as you can during haunt season.

We’ve seen some bad reviews over the past couple of years, and we’re really not sure what these people are thinking or what they are expecting from a haunt. Blood Prison is solidly in the top tier of Ohio attractions. One argument that makes at least some kind of sense to us is that the haunt should remove much of the haunt trappings and focus exclusively on prison-related themes and the existing physical environment. But we would counter that if you want to observe the place in its unaltered condition, throughout the year (but not during haunt season) there are plenty of tours to view it that way, including paranormal and movie-oriented ones. Our recommendation: for best results, see the reformatory as both a haunt and as a historical site/Hollywood artifact/ghost hunt locale.