The Bissman Building: Shawshank’s Boarding House in Mansfield

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated August 27, 2026 · How we verify

Stand on the sidewalk outside the Bissman Building in downtown Mansfield, Ohio, and you are looking at two things at once: a nineteenth century wholesale grocery house that outlived the trade it was built for, and a movie set that thousands of Shawshank pilgrims photograph every year. The brick block went up in 1886, when Mansfield was a railroad and manufacturing town in the middle of its boom, and it has been known ever since as the Bissman Block. What has kept it in the ghost literature is not the architecture but the stories told by the people who worked in it, toured it, and sat in its basement with recorders running.

What the Record Actually Says About the Bissman Block

The verifiable outline is short and worth separating from the folklore. The building dates to 1886 and was raised by the Bissman family as a wholesale grocery operation, a business that made sense in a city that had four railroads running through it by the late 1880s. Mansfield, the seat of Richland County, sat almost exactly halfway between Cleveland and Columbus, and freight moved through it constantly. The Sandusky, Mansfield and Newark Railroad had arrived in 1846, followed by the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago Railway in 1849 and the Atlantic and Great Western in 1863. A grocery wholesaler with a rail connection and a multi-story warehouse could supply a wide stretch of north central Ohio, and the Bissman Block was built for exactly that kind of volume: heavy floors, loading access, a deep cellar.

The twentieth century was harder on the neighborhood than on the building. As heavy industry left Mansfield, locally owned downtown businesses closed, and the blocks around North Main Street emptied out. Downtown has since seen a long revitalization effort through the organization now called Downtown Mansfield, Inc., and the Bissman is one of the surviving anchors of that older commercial streetscape.

Jacob, the Girl on the Stairs, and the Bissman Basement

None of what follows is documented history. It is the accumulated testimony of employees, tour groups, and paranormal investigators, and it should be read that way.

The most repeated Bissman story concerns a worker remembered as Jacob, said to have died at the building in an accident and said to have never entirely left it. A second recurring figure is a young girl described as looking for her father, an image that fits neatly into a family business where children would plausibly have been on the premises, though no record here confirms her.

Reported phenomena cluster in the lower levels rather than the upper floors. Visitors describe shadow figures moving at the edge of flashlight beams in the basement, abrupt cold spots that do not track with the stairwell drafts, footsteps on floors above or below the group, and the general sense of being watched in rooms that are structurally dead ends. Investigators have come away with audio they interpret as voices. As always, a dark brick warehouse with poor lighting, heavy timber that expands and contracts, and a century of stored objects supplies a great deal of raw material for a nervous imagination. The honest position is that people consistently report these things, and that no one has demonstrated a cause.

Where Brooks Fed the Birds: the Bissman on Film

The building’s other life is cinematic. In The Shawshank Redemption it stands in for the Maine State Brewery and, on its upper floor, the Brooks Hatlen boarding house, one of the most quoted sequences in the film. Mansfield as a whole became a shooting location in the 1990s, most famously for The Shawshank Redemption, Air Force One, and Tango & Cash, all of which used the Ohio State Reformatory north of downtown as a backdrop in pivotal scenes. The Bissman has also been credited with appearances in Air Force One and a version of Moby Dick. For a certain kind of visitor, the film history and the ghost stories are the same trip.

Visiting the Bissman Building and the Rest of Haunted Mansfield

This is the part where the article has to disappoint people. The Bissman Building was open for tours on a seasonal schedule, roughly March through November, but those tours were discontinued in 2019. Treat it as a look-from-the-sidewalk stop unless you find a current, verifiable announcement of access. Do not attempt to enter. It is private property in a working downtown, and the interior is not a maintained visitor attraction.

The good news is that the Bissman sits inside a walkable cluster of Mansfield’s better known sites. The Ohio State Reformatory, built between 1886 and 1910 to resemble a German castle, is north of downtown, is open as a tourist attraction, and runs a Halloween season haunted attraction called Blood Prison that draws visitors from Michigan and Indiana. Downtown itself holds the Mansfield Memorial Museum, built in 1887 and opened to the public in 1889 as the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall, and the Historic Carousel District with Richland Carousel Park, which opened in 1991. Oak Hill Cottage, an 1847 Gothic Revival house operated by the Richland County Historical Society, is a short drive away.

If your interest is the Bissman specifically, go for the exterior, the film locations, and the streetscape, and be honest with yourself that the basement stories are stories. That is still a worthwhile afternoon in Mansfield.

Sources

• Perry sworn in as mansfield mayor Directory
• U.S. Census website (US Census Bureau)
• Find a County
• U.S. Population, Combined Statistical Area Population
• In the Heartland: An Ohio Road Trip by RV, Part II by Harry Basch & Shirley Slater
• Wikipedia: Mansfield, Ohio

Address: 193 N Main St

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