Fairfield County Infirmary

The building, begun in 1828 and rebuilt or enlarged in brick in 1840, gained an Italianate wing in 1865, and behind it lies a paupers' cemetery of an estimated 400 to 500 graves, most unmarked, with headstones as late as 1981. From 1986 to 2013 it housed county offices, the Health Department the longest. Since 2020 it has been privately owned by Adam Kimmell, who runs public and psychic ghost hunts there, and it is on the National Register of Historic Places. Its ghosts are recorded from 2014, when the Ohio Exploration Society gathered employees' stories of voices, a ghost called Willy and a vanishing girl. Some of the figures that circulate with them do not hold: the much-repeated last burial of 1929 comes from a page about a different Fairfield County, in South Carolina.

The Fairfield County Infirmary stands at 1587 Granville Pike, State Route 37, on the north side of Lancaster, Ohio, across the road from the Lancaster campus of Ohio University. Before it existed, township officers called overseers of the poor "let out the contract for the keeping of each pauper to the lowest bidder", as the county history of 1912 edited by Charles C. Miller explains. Around 1827 the county decided to build an infirmary on a farm of 170 acres, and "The first buildings were of frame, but in 1840 they were supplanted by a brick building." The Fairfield County Chapter of the Ohio Genealogical Society dates the purchase of the land to 1826 and the first building to 1828. The architect Steve Luchtenberg, of VPL Architects, who surveyed the building for the county commissioners in February and March 2014, read its fabric differently. In his report the original three-storey structure of 1828, 32 by 46 feet, survives inside the present building; the work of 1840 was a three-storey addition of 50 by 46 feet on its south side, and both had brick façades. In 1865 an L-shaped addition went up on the north side with arched windows and Italianate lintels. It carried the "widow's walk" cupola on the roof and the front porch that still faces Route 37. The building was entered in the National Register of Historic Places on 26 March 2020, reference 100005128, as an Italianate building. The infirmary was also run as a working farm on the land across the road. The Ohio Exploration Society, which researched the building for a 2016 article, found that the farm earned $4,300 from crops and livestock in 1917. Natural gas for lighting and heating arrived that year; piped water followed in 1926 and electricity only in 1958. The resident population peaked at 82 "inmates" in 1903. In February 1881 there were 70 male and 54 female residents, according to the genealogical society; 32 of them were children, and there was a common school on the site. In 1911 the county spent $9,775.54 on 69 paupers (Miller). The society also found the death of Jane Householder, aged 73, on 22 March 1929: her clothing caught fire at a gas stove, two attendants smothered the flames with rugs, and she died nine hours later. Up the hill behind the building is the paupers' cemetery. A memorial stone dated 1886 reads "To the Memory of Our Dead". The Ohio Exploration Society estimates 400 to 500 burials, most unmarked; among the few headstones it photographed in 2008 are those of Wilhelm Reel (died 1894), Bennie Stephens (died 1980) and Henry Jones Jr. (died 1981). The farmland across the road was sold to Ohio University in the mid-1960s. The infirmary closed in May 1985 with sixteen residents; they were sent to nursing homes or foster homes. In 1986 the county remodelled it as the Clarence E. Miller Building (named after the late congressman) and it held county offices, the Health Department the longest, until the department moved out in late 2013. In its 2014 report VPL put the cost of renovating it at $4,287,885. According to the Asylum Projects wiki, in a version archived in January 2023, the building was bought in February 2020 by Adam Kimmell, "who allows tours, photography sessions and private ghost hunts".

The building is at 1587 Granville Pike, Lancaster, Ohio 43130, on State Route 37 opposite the Ohio University Lancaster campus. It is private property, owned since February 2020 by Adam Kimmell, who opens it for night events. The Visit Fairfield County listing, updated on 13 March 2026, says "You can book day tours, public hunts, photography sessions, and self-guided tours by messaging the Fairfield County Infirmary Facebook page" and gives the telephone number (740) 994-1230. Kimmell's "Public Hunt" on Eventbrite, described as group rotations with staff followed by free roam, last sold tickets for 10 October 2025. A psychic hunt followed on 7 November 2025. VPL's report of March 2014 describes the interior. It records radon throughout the first floor in 2010 and two water mains that burst in its corridors in 2012. After the building emptied, a sprinkler main leaked and flooded parts of the first and second floors, and the report judged the old chimneys "dangerously weak". The Ohio Exploration Society found water damage from frozen pipes in April 2014 and thought "the overall structure seemed sound". The paupers' cemetery up the hill behind the building is a separate plot. The City of Lancaster took over its care going into 2015. A fence was planned around the burials, and the cemetery was to get its own entrance so that it could be separated from the building's plot (Ohio Exploration Society). The 1886 memorial stone stands at its south end.