$59K will buy you a Stephen King-worthy poorhouse-turned-Bible-college-turned-'House of Nightmares'

Update: Hours after this story was published, the Knox County poorhouse caught fire. Concerned that the building may collapse, local firefighters opted to let the building burn out, according to WCHM-TV Columbus, which has video of the building burning Friday afternoon.

“It’s burned all the way through both wings and looks like the center has collapsed,”Central Ohio Joint Fire District Chief Joe Porter told the Mount Vernon News. “It’s twice as dangerous as it was before the fire."

The fire is under investigation.

The Knox County poorhouse in the tiny hamlet of Bangs, Ohio, has served as an infirmary, a Bible college, and an authentically decrepit Halloween haunted house, and now awaits a new purpose--or the wrecking ball.

The immense Gothic structure lords over every other building populating the rural town. It consists of four floors, nearly 100 rooms, a 65-foot tower and a back courtyard, and it's on the market for $59,000. (Click here or on a photo for a slideshow.)

That may seem cheap for the 40,000-square-foot space, but the building is condemned, and clearly not your average fixer-upper. A listing that starts out sunnily enough, promising that the property has "tons of potential," concludes by taking advantage of caps lock: "DO NOT ENTER. ANYONE ENTERING BUILDING WILL BE CONSIDERED TRESPASSERS AND WILL BE PROSECUTED."

In fact, when the building's current owner, Toby Spade, first saw the building go up for auction in April 2014, nobody bid on it at all, he says.

So Spade arranged to purchase the property for $900 with plans to turn it into a bed and breakfast, but mounting costs caused him to put the property on the market. He originally listed it for a whopping $1.1 million, hoping to attract investors.

It lead more than 1,000 inquiries, he says, but nothing materialized. So he turned to listing agent Richard Ketchel to sell it for much less--$59,000. Ketchel says that hundreds more people have inquired about buying the crumbling poorhouse — showing "serious intent" and a desire to restore it — though he's found no takers so far.

"I would love to see it restored," he told Yahoo Homes. "I have been intrigued by it since I was a kid."

The building has long been the center of lore in central Ohio, pulling in ghost hunters and abandoned-building tourists for years.

The thing is, at least according to the poorhouse's historian, Aubrey Brown, it was really a very normal place.

Dating to 1875, the Knox County Infirmary (colloquially known as the poorhouse) housed the destitute, the mentally ill, orphans and the elderly. Buildings of this type were common at the time, though maybe not as grand, Brown said.

It closed in 1958 because of "deteriorating structural conditions," according to the local Mount Vernon News. Brown says it simply became too costly to maintain for the number of people it served.

(Click here or on a photo for a slideshow.)

After it shut down, Foursquare Gospel Church purchased the building, fixed it up and ran it as the Mount Vernon Bible College for several decades. Students attended classes in rooms on the lower floors and lived in dormitories above. Recent visitors to the building have discovered dorm-style beds and wardrobes from this period, along with group bathrooms and showers.

The college decamped for Virginia in the late 1980s, and the building sat uninhabited for about a decade — until it became a primo Halloween attraction called the House of Nightmares in the 1990s. One of the state's largest haunted houses, it sported black-light graffiti designs of horror-movie icons, costumed mannequins with elaborate sets, and fake blood splashed all over the walls.

But even the haunted house couldn't last. In January 2006, four floors collapsed; no one was hurt, but the building was closed to the public and condemned. The accident was somewhat ironic, considering that over the years, plenty of grisly tales had sprouted up around building — one claiming that an elevator once crashed with several students fatally trapped inside, another claiming that students were killed by a floor's collapse. (According to Ketchel's listing site, a real-life former student says the elevator story was made up by the haunted-house operators.)

There have even been rumors of bodies unearthed on the property. It's true that a cemetery with unmarked graves remains from the property's days as a poorhouse, says Brown, who thinks that rumors and truth have been mixed over the years.

More structural failures followed. Another wall came down sometime after Brown visited in 2011.

After sitting abandoned once again, and changing hands a few times, according to the Mount Vernon News, Spade stepped in.

He was looking for funding from a number of sources, and had two serious investors who eventually dropped out. There was even a now-defunct Fundly page started by a group of residents hoping to save the property involved.

But given the price to get Spade's dream off the ground, which he estimates at nearly $2 million, and the deterioriting condition, there may not be much hope left for truly saving the building.

Ketchel has hope for the property's future, even if the building doesn't get restored.

"I'm a dreamer, but I'm not impractical," he says. "I think if someone tore it down they could make a very nice hotel on the property, or a nice upscale restaurant."

Click here or on a photo for a slideshow of the Knox County poorhouse.

More abandonment issues on Yahoo Homes:

• Abandoned behemoth with 46 bedrooms — or 'more like 70' — is for sale in Texas, where else? (41 photos)
• Vacationing family stumbles across decaying French chateau, decides to restore it (55 photos)
• The eeriest and most beautiful cities of the dead (35 photos)
• Haunting photos of abandoned castles (17 photos)

YouTube footage of the poorhouse: