Ohio is one of the most underrated urbex states in America, and it shouldn't be. With 221 documented abandoned places on the Urbex Maps atlas, a Rust Belt backbone that stretches from Youngstown to Toledo, three major cities (Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati) that each peaked and contracted at different speeds, and enough industrial decay to fill a lifetime of explorations, the Buckeye State is a genuine tier-one destination for anyone interested in abandoned architecture, forgotten infrastructure, and the physical evidence of American economic cycles. This is the state that gave the world the setting for The Shawshank Redemption, filmed inside the real Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield. The state where an entire town called Helltown was condemned and cleared by the federal government in 1974 and has been feeding ghost stories ever since. The state where a complete, functional subway system was built under the streets of Cincinnati in the 1920s, never carried a single passenger, and still sits sealed beneath the city today.
Ohio's abandonment isn't random. It follows a pattern that anyone who studies American urbex can read like a textbook. The northern half of the state is classic Rust Belt: steel mills, rubber factories, auto parts plants, and rail yards that boomed between 1880 and 1970, then shed jobs when steel imports, automation, and corporate consolidation gutted the industrial Midwest. Youngstown alone lost 40,000 manufacturing jobs between 1977 and 1985. Cleveland's population peaked at 914,808 in 1950 and had fallen to 372,624 by 2020. The southern half of the state tells a different story: coal mining towns in the Appalachian foothills that emptied when the seams played out, tuberculosis hospitals that closed when antibiotics made sanatoriums obsolete, and amusement parks that couldn't compete with the interstate highway system and the rise of mega-parks like Cedar Point and Kings Island.
This guide covers 10 of the most iconic abandoned places in Ohio, from the sealed tunnels of the Cincinnati Subway to the crumbling cement works of the Hocking Hills. Every spot has free GPS coordinates on the Urbex Maps interactive atlas, a YouTube video embed, historical context, and access notes. These aren't hypothetical locations scraped from a list. They are real places, verified on the ground, with the kind of dense Rust Belt history that makes Ohio one of the most rewarding states in the country for serious urban exploration.
Free urbex GPS: how Urbex Maps works
Every spot in this guide has a free GPS pin on the Urbex Maps interactive atlas. No paywall for these 10, no registration wall, just coordinates dropped onto the map with access notes. The atlas works on mobile, which matters when you're navigating rural Vinton County looking for the Moonville Tunnel or trying to find the right gate at Lima TB Hospital. The full Ohio database has 221 locations and growing, covering everything from decommissioned steel mills in the Mahoning Valley to forgotten schoolhouses in the Appalachian foothills.
1. Cincinnati Subway
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The Cincinnati Subway is one of the most remarkable pieces of abandoned infrastructure in the United States: a rapid transit system that was partially built, never completed, and never carried a single fare-paying passenger. The tunnels are still there, sealed beneath the streets of downtown Cincinnati, a time capsule from the 1920s that has been sitting empty for over a century.
The story begins in 1884, when Cincinnati started digging the Miami and Erie Canal out of the center of the city because the waterway had become an open sewer. The canal bed left a natural trench running north-south through the urban core, and city planners saw an opportunity: build a subway line in the old canal trench, cover it over, and create a grand boulevard on top. In 1916, Cincinnati voters approved a $6 million bond issue (roughly $170 million in today's dollars) to build a 16-mile loop of rapid transit connecting the hilltop neighborhoods to the downtown basin.
Construction began in 1920. Workers poured concrete tunnels, built stations with tiled walls and curved ceilings, and laid out platforms designed for electric streetcars that would eventually be upgraded to full subway trains. By 1927, about 2.2 miles of tunnel and several stations were complete, including the Race Street Station and the Hopple Street portal. Then the money ran out. The bond issue had been calculated at pre-World War I prices, and wartime inflation had roughly doubled the cost of materials and labor. The city needed additional funding to finish the line, but Cincinnati voters rejected every subsequent bond proposal. The Great Depression killed whatever momentum remained.
The tunnels have been sealed ever since, though they have never been demolished. Periodic proposals to convert them into a wine cellar, a fallout shelter, a water main, or a modern light rail line have all died in committee. The Cincinnati Metro, an attempt at a modern streetcar system, opened in 2016 but runs on the surface and does not use any portion of the subway tunnels. The original tunnels remain under Central Parkway, accessible only through maintenance hatches and occasional city-led tours that draw thousands of applicants for a handful of spots. The concrete is still in excellent condition. The platforms are still there. It is the largest abandoned subway system in the United States and, arguably, the most complete unfinished transit project in North American history.
2. Ohio State Reformatory (Mansfield)
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If one building could represent the entire concept of institutional abandonment in America, it might be the Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield. The building is enormous, theatrical, and heavy with a century of institutional history that ranges from progressive reform to documented brutality. It is also the filming location for The Shawshank Redemption (1994), which makes it one of the most recognized abandoned buildings in the world, even among people who have never heard the word "urbex."
The reformatory was designed by Cleveland architect Levi T. Scofield and built in stages between 1886 and 1910. Scofield designed it in a Romanesque Revival style that was deliberately intended to be imposing but not crushing: the idea was that the architecture itself would inspire reform in the inmates, an idea rooted in 19th-century theories of moral architecture that seem naive now but were taken seriously at the time. The front administration building features an ornate stone facade with turrets, arched windows, and a grand entrance that looks more like a European cathedral than a prison. Behind that facade, the six-tier cellblock stretches back 600 feet, rising to a height that makes it the tallest freestanding steel cellblock in the world. Each cell measures roughly 7 feet by 9 feet, and at the reformatory's peak occupancy, two or three men were housed in each one.
The reformatory operated from 1896 to 1990, processing more than 155,000 inmates over its lifetime. Conditions deteriorated steadily through the mid-20th century. A 1978 federal lawsuit filed by inmates documented overcrowding, inadequate ventilation, and physical abuse by guards. In 1983, a federal court ordered the state to close the facility and transfer inmates to newer prisons. The last prisoners left on December 31, 1990. The state planned to demolish the building, but a preservation group formed in 1995, purchased the property, and has been running it as a museum, haunted house attraction, and film location ever since.
The Mansfield Reformatory Preservation Society now operates self-guided and guided tours year-round, including overnight ghost hunts and seasonal "haunted prison" events. The east cellblock is the most photographed interior: six tiers of rusting steel catwalks and cell doors receding into a vanishing point that has become one of the most iconic images in American urbex photography. Director Frank Darabont chose the location for Shawshank specifically because the cellblock's scale and decay matched the look he wanted for the fictional Shawshank State Penitentiary. The warden's office, the yard, the solitary confinement wing, and the rooftop where Andy Dufresne's crew tarred the roof are all visitable.
3. Helltown (Boston Township, Summit County)
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Helltown is not an official name on any map. It is the popular nickname for a cluster of abandoned homes, a boarded-up church, closed roads, and dead-end streets in Boston Township, Summit County, about 20 miles south of Cleveland. The area became a ghost town not through economic decline but through federal legislation: in 1974, President Gerald Ford signed a bill creating the Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area (now Cuyahoga Valley National Park), and the National Park Service began acquiring private land throughout the valley using eminent domain. Hundreds of families in Boston Township were relocated. Their homes were boarded up, some were demolished, and the roads were closed or rerouted.
What remained was eerie enough to generate one of the densest clusters of urban legends in the Midwest. The stories include a church with upside-down crosses (actually a church with standard Calvinist architectural details that look unusual from certain angles), a school bus abandoned in the woods where children were supposedly killed (a bus that was simply left behind by a property owner), chemical waste dumps that created mutant wildlife (the Krejci Dump, a real Superfund site that was cleaned up in the 1980s, though the contamination was mundane industrial waste rather than anything that would produce mutations), a "road to nowhere" that dead-ends at a locked gate, and a "crybaby bridge" where infant ghosts can supposedly be heard. The legends are, without exception, folklore attached to the genuinely unsettling visual of an entire community that was emptied by government order.
The National Park Service has demolished most of the original structures over the decades. The old Boston Township cemetery remains, and scattered foundations and overgrown driveways are still visible from the road. The Stanford Road area and the "end of the world" dead-end are the most visited spots. Boston Township itself still exists as an administrative entity within Cuyahoga Valley National Park, and the park is open to the public year-round, free of charge. The Helltown reputation is entirely a creation of the 1980s and 1990s, when teenagers from Akron and Cleveland started driving down on weekend nights to scare themselves, and the stories compounded from there.
4. Moonville Tunnel (Vinton County)
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Deep in the Appalachian foothills of southeastern Ohio, where the Raccoon Creek drainage cuts through the sandstone ridges of Vinton County, there is a single brick-arch railroad tunnel standing alone in the forest with no tracks, no road, and no town attached to it. The Moonville Tunnel is all that remains of a ghost town that never had more than about 100 residents at its peak, and the tunnel itself has become one of the most photographed abandoned structures in the state.
Moonville was a small coal mining and iron furnace settlement that existed from the mid-1850s through the early 1900s along the Marietta and Cincinnati Railroad (later absorbed into the Baltimore and Ohio system). The town was so isolated that the railroad was its only reliable connection to the outside world. There was no paved road. Residents flagged down passing trains for transportation, a practice that proved deadly: the town's history includes multiple fatalities from people being struck by trains while walking the tracks or trying to board moving freight cars. The most famous death was that of a brakeman named Thomas Keyes (or Keyes), killed on the tracks in 1880, whose ghost is said to haunt the tunnel with a swinging lantern.
The settlement had emptied by the 1940s. The railroad abandoned the line in the 1980s, and the rails were pulled up. The tunnel, built of local sandstone and brick around 1856, survived because it was too solid to collapse on its own and not worth the cost of demolishing. It stands 20 feet high and roughly 100 feet long, set into a cut in the hillside, with trees growing on top of it and the old railbed leading away in both directions through the Zaleski State Forest. The interior is dark, slightly curved, and perpetually damp, with decades of graffiti layered over the original brick. A short hiking trail (about 1.5 miles from the nearest trailhead parking lot off State Route 278) leads to the tunnel through the forest.
The Moonville Tunnel is on the National Register of Historic Places. Vinton County is the least populated county in Ohio (about 13,000 residents in 387 square miles), and the forest around the tunnel is dense, quiet, and genuinely remote by Ohio standards. The tunnel is publicly accessible year-round through the Zaleski State Forest trail system.
5. Chippewa Lake Park (Medina County)
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Chippewa Lake Park was once one of the oldest continuously operated amusement parks in the United States. It opened in 1878 as a lakeside resort and picnic ground on the shores of Chippewa Lake in Medina County, about 50 miles south of Cleveland. Over the following century, it grew into a full-scale amusement park with roller coasters, a Ferris wheel, a dance hall, a swimming beach, carnival rides, and a ballroom that hosted big band acts during the 1930s and 1940s. At its peak, the park drew visitors from Cleveland, Akron, and Canton, serving as one of the regional amusement centers for northeastern Ohio.
The park closed abruptly after Labor Day 1978. The owner at the time, Continental Business Enterprises, simply locked the gates and walked away, leaving the rides standing, the buildings intact, and the midway attractions in place. No auction was held. No dismantling crew was hired. The roller coaster, the Ferris wheel, the bumper cars, the ballroom, and the concession stands were all left to the weather and the woods.
For the next three decades, Chippewa Lake Park became one of the most famous abandoned amusement parks in the country. Trees grew up through the roller coaster tracks, their trunks intertwining with the wooden support beams until it became impossible to tell where the ride ended and the forest began. The Ferris wheel stood rusting in a clearing, tilting slowly as its foundations settled. The dance hall's wooden floor buckled and rotted. Photographers, urbex explorers, and filmmakers documented the site extensively. The 2007 horror film Closed for the Season was shot on location at the park.
In 2014, a developer purchased the 140-acre property with plans for a lakeside residential community. Demolition of the remaining structures began in 2015, and by 2018 most of the park had been cleared. The roller coaster, the most photographed structure, was torn down in 2016. What remains today is largely cleared land with scattered concrete foundations and traces of the old midway. The GPS pin marks the location where the park stood, and the surrounding Chippewa Lake community retains some of its original resort-era character, but the park itself is gone. Its legacy lives on in thousands of photographs that document what an American amusement park looks like after 35 years of uninterrupted natural reclamation.
6. Lima TB Hospital (Allen County)
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The Lima Tuberculosis Hospital sits on a wooded rise on the outskirts of Lima in Allen County, a cluster of institutional buildings from the early 20th century that once formed one of Ohio's network of county-level tuberculosis sanatoriums. Before the development of streptomycin (1944) and the subsequent antibiotic cocktails that made tuberculosis curable, the standard treatment for TB was isolation, fresh air, sunlight, and rest. Counties across Ohio built dedicated facilities to quarantine TB patients, and the Lima facility served Allen County and surrounding rural areas from the 1910s through the 1960s.
The hospital followed the typical sanatorium design of the era: long, low pavilion-style buildings with large windows, open-air porches (called "cure porches") where patients were wheeled outside in their beds even in cold weather, and grounds set back from the road in a park-like setting. The architecture was functional rather than ornate, designed to maximize ventilation and sunlight exposure according to the prevailing medical theory that fresh air was the primary therapeutic intervention for tuberculosis.
As antibiotics made sanatorium treatment obsolete, TB hospitals across the country closed in waves through the 1950s and 1960s. The Lima facility was repurposed for other county health services for a period, then gradually abandoned as the buildings deteriorated. The complex has been empty for decades, with the main buildings showing severe roof damage, collapsed interiors, and extensive water infiltration. The grounds are heavily overgrown, and the cure porches, the most architecturally distinctive features of the sanatorium era, are partially collapsed.
The Lima TB Hospital is representative of a category of abandoned building that is uniquely common in Ohio and the broader Midwest: the county-level tuberculosis sanatorium. Ohio had one of the highest TB mortality rates in the industrial Midwest during the early 1900s, driven by factory working conditions, crowded urban housing, and coal dust exposure in the southeastern counties. The state built a network of county and state TB hospitals that once numbered in the dozens, and many of those buildings survive in various states of decay across the state.
7. Warner and Swasey Observatory (Cleveland)
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The Warner and Swasey Observatory is a Beaux-Arts astronomical observatory on Taylor Road in East Cleveland that was built in 1919 by the Case School of Applied Science (now Case Western Reserve University) with funding from Worcester R. Warner and Ambrose Swasey, two industrialists who made their fortune manufacturing precision machine tools and telescope mountings. Warner and Swasey's company built telescope mounts for some of the most important observatories in the world, including the 72-inch reflector at the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory in British Columbia and instruments for the U.S. Naval Observatory. Building a teaching observatory for their alma mater was a natural extension of their life's work.
The observatory housed a 9.5-inch Clark refractor telescope in its main dome and a transit telescope for positional astronomy. For decades it served as the primary astronomical teaching facility for Case students and as a public outreach center, hosting open nights where Cleveland residents could look through the telescope. The observatory's location on the hilltop above Taylor Road offered a clear view of the sky that was adequate in 1919, when East Cleveland was still semi-rural, but deteriorated steadily as Cleveland's suburbs expanded and light pollution from the urban core made serious astronomical observation increasingly difficult.
Case Western Reserve University moved its astronomical research operations to a remote observatory site in the 1980s and eventually ceased regular operations at the Taylor Road facility. The building was formally decommissioned in the early 2000s. Since then, it has sat empty on its hilltop, the dome closed, the windows boarded, the grounds overgrown. The neighborhood around it has undergone the same economic decline that has affected much of East Cleveland, one of the most distressed municipalities in the Cleveland metropolitan area.
The observatory is notable for its architectural quality: the Beaux-Arts detailing, the copper dome, and the classical proportions of the entrance make it one of the most visually striking small observatory buildings in the United States. Various proposals for adaptive reuse have been floated over the years, including conversion to a community center or a museum, but none have materialized. The telescope itself was removed before the building was abandoned, but the dome mechanism, the observation floor, and the interior layout remain intact.
8. Youngstown Sheet and Tube (Mahoning Valley)
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The Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company was once one of the largest steel producers in the United States, operating a string of blast furnaces, open hearth shops, and rolling mills along the Mahoning River between Youngstown and Campbell, Ohio. At its peak in the mid-20th century, the company employed over 10,000 workers in the Mahoning Valley and produced millions of tons of steel plate, pipe, and structural shapes used in construction, shipbuilding, and infrastructure projects across the country.
September 19, 1977 is the date that everyone in Youngstown knows. That is the day the company announced the closure of its Campbell Works, eliminating 5,000 jobs in a single afternoon. The event became known locally as "Black Monday," and it triggered a cascade of steel mill closures across the Mahoning Valley that would ultimately eliminate more than 40,000 manufacturing jobs in the region. Republic Steel, U.S. Steel's McDonald Works, and other facilities in the valley followed in rapid succession. The population of Youngstown dropped from 140,000 to under 65,000 over the following decades. The term "Rust Belt" was essentially coined to describe what happened to cities like Youngstown.
The physical remains of the Youngstown Sheet and Tube complex are scattered along the Mahoning River corridor between Struthers and Campbell. The Jeannette Blast Furnace, one of the most photographed industrial ruins in the Midwest, stood until it was partially demolished. Other structures, including portions of the rolling mill, the pipe plant, and various auxiliary buildings, survived in various states of decay along the riverbank. Environmental remediation of the old mill sites has been ongoing for decades, as the soil and groundwater beneath the former plants are contaminated with heavy metals, petroleum products, and industrial waste.
Youngstown Sheet and Tube is important to understand not just as a single site but as the epicenter of the American deindustrialization story. The closure of the Campbell Works was one of the first major steel shutdowns in the country, predating the broader wave that hit Pittsburgh, Gary, and Bethlehem in the 1980s. The Mahoning Valley was the canary in the coal mine for the entire Rust Belt, and the physical landscape of the valley still bears the scars. Driving along the river from Youngstown to Campbell, you pass through a landscape of cleared lots, capped brownfield sites, remaining industrial structures in various stages of demolition, and the occasional original building repurposed for small commercial use.
9. Ashtabula Power Station (Ashtabula County)
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The Ashtabula Power Station is an abandoned coal-fired electrical generating plant on the shore of Lake Erie in Ashtabula County, in the far northeastern corner of Ohio. The facility was part of the constellation of coal-burning power plants that lined the southern shore of Lake Erie throughout the 20th century, burning Ohio and West Virginia coal to generate electricity for the industrial cities of the northern Ohio corridor.
The plant was built in stages through the mid-20th century, with generating capacity added in phases to meet the growing electrical demand of the postwar industrial boom. The facility features the standard architecture of mid-century coal-fired power generation: a main boiler house with a tall smokestack, turbine halls, coal handling facilities, and cooling infrastructure. The plant's lakeside location allowed it to draw cooling water directly from Lake Erie, a practice that was standard for thermal power plants of this era but later became a source of environmental concern due to thermal discharge and the entrainment of fish and aquatic organisms in the intake screens.
The plant was decommissioned as part of the broader transition away from coal-fired power generation that accelerated through the 2000s and 2010s. Stricter EPA regulations on sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and mercury emissions made it increasingly expensive to operate older coal plants that lacked modern emissions controls, and many utilities chose to shut down aging facilities rather than retrofit them. The Ashtabula facility was among the casualties.
Since closure, the plant has sat empty on its Lake Erie shoreline site, its smokestack and boiler house visible from the road and from the lake. The facility is a striking visual presence in the flat coastal landscape of Ashtabula County, and it represents a category of abandoned industrial site that is becoming increasingly common across the Great Lakes region as the coal-to-gas and coal-to-renewable energy transition continues. The site is on private property and not publicly accessible, but the exterior is visible from adjacent roads and the Lake Erie shoreline.
10. Columbia Cement Plant (Hocking County)
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The Columbia Cement Plant is a complex of abandoned industrial structures in the hills of southeastern Ohio, near the Hocking Hills region. The plant was built to exploit the local limestone deposits for Portland cement production, a process that involves quarrying limestone, crushing it, heating it to extreme temperatures in rotary kilns to produce clinite, then grinding the clinite into the fine powder that is sold as cement.
The facility operated through the mid-20th century, serving the construction markets of central and southeastern Ohio. The cement industry in this part of the state was driven by the same geological formation that makes the Hocking Hills one of Ohio's most scenic natural areas: the exposed Blackhand sandstone and limestone formations of the Appalachian Plateau provided both the raw material for cement production and the dramatic gorges, caves, and rock shelters that draw hikers and tourists today.
When the plant closed, the industrial complex was left in place. The rotary kilns, the silos, the crushing equipment, the conveyor systems, and the support buildings were never fully demolished. The result is a sprawling industrial ruin set into the wooded hillside, with concrete foundations, rusting steel structures, and the distinctive cylindrical shapes of cement silos and kiln tubes visible through the tree cover. The site has become a well-known destination for Ohio urbex explorers, who document the progressive deterioration of the industrial structures as the forest gradually reclaims the site.
The Columbia Cement Plant is representative of a type of abandoned site that is common in the Appalachian foothills of southeastern Ohio: extractive industry facilities that were built to process local mineral resources, operated for a period of decades, and then closed when the resource was exhausted, the market shifted, or the facility became obsolete. The Hocking Hills region is dotted with similar remnants of the old industrial economy, including abandoned coal mines, brick kilns, and iron furnaces, many of which date to the 19th century. The cement plant is a more recent example of the same pattern, and its massive scale makes it one of the most visually impressive abandoned industrial sites in the region.
FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions about Abandoned Places in Ohio
How many abandoned places are there in Ohio?
The Urbex Maps database currently lists 221 verified abandoned locations across Ohio, including industrial facilities, hospitals, churches, schools, residential properties, and ghost towns. The actual number of abandoned structures in the state is certainly higher, as many rural sites in the Appalachian foothills and small-town properties in the Rust Belt corridor go undocumented. Ohio's position at the intersection of the Rust Belt and Appalachian coal country gives it one of the highest concentrations of abandoned structures in the eastern United States.
Is urbex legal in Ohio?
Trespassing on private property is a misdemeanor in Ohio under ORC 2911.21. However, many of the spots listed in this guide are on public land (Moonville Tunnel is in Zaleski State Forest, Helltown is in Cuyahoga Valley National Park) or operate as museums and tour destinations (Ohio State Reformatory). Always check the access status of a specific location before visiting. The Urbex Maps GPS pins include access notes for each spot.
What is the most famous abandoned place in Ohio?
The Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield is the most famous, primarily because of its role as the filming location for The Shawshank Redemption. The Cincinnati Subway is the most unique, as it is the only complete, unfinished subway system in the United States. Both draw significant visitor and media interest.
Can you visit the Cincinnati Subway?
The Cincinnati Subway tunnels are not regularly open to the public. The city occasionally offers guided tours through the Duke Energy Convention Center or through special arrangements with the Cincinnati Transit Authority, but these tours are infrequent and capacity is very limited. The tunnels are structurally sound and well-preserved, but access requires descending through maintenance hatches that are normally locked.
What happened to Helltown, Ohio?
Helltown is the popular nickname for the area around Boston Township in Summit County that was cleared by the National Park Service in the 1970s to create what is now Cuyahoga Valley National Park. The federal government purchased private properties using eminent domain, relocated the residents, and demolished most of the structures. The area is not a traditional ghost town but rather a cleared residential zone within a national park. The urban legends that surround the area were invented in the 1980s.
Is the Ohio State Reformatory really haunted?
The Mansfield Reformatory Preservation Society operates seasonal "haunted prison" events and overnight ghost hunts. Multiple paranormal investigation television programs have filmed at the reformatory. Whether any genuine paranormal activity occurs is, of course, a matter of personal belief. What is certain is that the building's history includes documented inmate deaths, a warden's wife who died of a gunshot wound in the family quarters (ruled accidental in 1950), and nearly a century of institutional confinement in conditions that were formally condemned by a federal court.
What is the best time of year to explore abandoned places in Ohio?
Late spring (May and June) and early fall (September and October) offer the best conditions. Summer in Ohio is hot and humid, which makes exploring enclosed structures uncomfortable and increases the risk of encounters with poison ivy, ticks, and wasps that colonize abandoned buildings. Winter exploration is possible but the Appalachian foothills sites (Moonville Tunnel, Columbia Cement Plant) can be icy and the trails difficult. The Ohio State Reformatory is open year-round with climate-appropriate hours.
Conclusion: Ohio, the Rust Belt's richest urbex state
Ohio sits at the center of nearly every major American abandonment narrative. The Rust Belt story is written in the blast furnaces of Youngstown and the smokestacks of Ashtabula. The Appalachian story lives in the Moonville Tunnel and the cement kilns of Hocking County. The suburban-era story plays out in the locked gates of Chippewa Lake Park and the sealed tunnels of the Cincinnati Subway. The institutional story fills the cellblocks of Mansfield and the cure porches of the Lima TB Hospital. And the federal government's own hand in creating ghost towns is visible in the cleared streets of Helltown and the overgrown lots of Boston Township.
With 221 spots on the Urbex Maps atlas and more added regularly, Ohio is one of the deepest states in the country for serious urban exploration. The 10 spots in this guide are starting points, not endpoints. Every county in Ohio has its own layer of abandonment, from the lake-effect industrial cities of the north to the coal hollows of the southeast. The GPS coordinates are free. The map is live. Go find what Ohio left behind.
Explore more abandoned places in the United States
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