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We love a good behind-the-scenes filming story and, with Halloween season upon us at last, we certainly don't mind if they venture into the ghostly. That was the case at Baltimore Comic Con 2024, where actor Mark Rolston told an unsettling on-set tale during his time filming The Shawshank Redemption. Ironically, Rolston was speaking on a panel about his work in 1986's Aliens, but got into a different kind of horror altogether when he revealed that Shawshank's filming location, the Mansfield Reformatory in Ohio, definitely "had spirits."

"To prepare myself before I did my solitary confinement scene," Rolston began, "I ran it by security and said, 'You know I'm going to come here and spend the night here, right?' There was the bowels of the prison, which was their dungeon, and they locked me up in a cell."

You have to hand it to Rolston, the man is dedicated to his craft. But there's dedication and there's common sense, and Rolston, thankfully, chose the latter.

"I sat there," he continued, "It was night, cold, dark, and I lasted about 4 hours. And I felt like, 'Oh, this place had spirits. For sure.' After about 4 hours, I just tapped out. I was like, 'Guys! Okay! I've had enough! ...Guys?'"

Rolston went on to explain that, even though he had no encounters with the unexplained himself, he spoke to plenty of people who had.

"The security guys they had watching the prison at night..." he said in conclusion, "Man, they had a turnover like you wouldn't believe. These guys would say, 'No way, I've had enough. I've heard voices. I went down to the end of the prison block to see what was going on -  I heard noises, I heard people shouting - and there was nobody there. It was a pretty spooky place."

A pretty spooky place indeed. Yet, ironically, the filming location of Stephen King's biggest non-horror story. Go figure.

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