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Troy Taylor: There’s a story about a phantom riverboat that I always liked, about how if you heard the riverboat whistle blow on a foggy morning but you never saw the boat, that meant that someone who worked down on the docks was going to die within the next seven days.
Amanda McGowan: A lot of old waterfront towns really play up the quaint and cutesy factor, you know, with a brunch cruise on a steamboat or something like that. But in Alton, Illinois, the vibe is a little bit more Widow’s Bay.
Troy: Now, I don’t know how this story got started. There are rumors that it got started because of a riverboat that disappeared one year, but nobody knows for sure.
Amanda: It makes sense. Alton is on the Mississippi River, which was the lifeblood of the city for much of its history. But the Mississippi is pretty unpredictable and it was often dangerous. Shipwrecks were really common. One stretch of the river in Southern Illinois was known as the graveyard because so many ships were lost there.
Troy: The depths are always changing and they didn’t have depth finders and radar and GPS and things. And so, you know, people were dying on a regular basis on that river. And that’s a lot of stories. That’s a lot of ghost stories.
Amanda: Today, Alton doesn’t depend on the river like it used to, and shipwrecks are, of course, a lot less common. But in Alton today, ghost stories still rule the day.
Troy: I will say we are the most haunted small town in the Midwest. Absolutely. And one of the most haunted small towns in America, for sure.
Amanda: I’m Amanda McGowan, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Today’s episode was brought to you in partnership with Enjoy Illinois. And today we’re going to Alton, which has been called the most haunted small town in America. It’s a place where practically every building has its own ghost story. And bubbling underneath all this lore is the fascinating history of a town shaped by the wild and unpredictable waters of the Mississippi River. We’ll explore some places with their own ghostly lore, and we’ll learn how these stories are helping to keep the history of the city alive. Or should I say, undead.
This is an edited transcript of the Atlas Obscura Podcast: a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.
Troy: We love history. That’s the thing. Without history, we wouldn’t have all our ghost stories.
Amanda: Alton, Illinois has become a destination for fans of the eerie, creepy, and weird. It’s home to one of the oldest Halloween parades in the country, which started back in 1916.
And there’s no shortage of allegedly haunted places. There’s the Old Mill Company, where the owner can still be sensed checking up on his employees. There’s the First Unitarian Church, which is haunted by a troubled minister from the past. Or the Mineral Springs Hotel, this old 1920s resort where the former guests never exactly check out. if you know what I mean. But one of Alton’s most notorious sites is actually a little under the radar. It’s a parking lot right along the riverfront behind a row of industrial warehouse buildings.
Troy: It can be an eerie spot at night. I still hear ghost stories.
Amanda: This is Troy Taylor. He’s the author of Haunted Alton, the host of the American Hauntings podcast, and he also owns the American Oddities Museum in town.
Troy: In fact, the very first ghost story anyone ever came into my bookstore to tell me was from a guy who did not know what the parking lot was and was walking his dog there one night and said that a man had approached him, was walking toward him, said he was dirty and torn up ragged clothes and everything was walking toward him. And his dog started barking at this guy.
He said, he reached down to just sort of, grab ahold of his dog’s collar because he was really upset. And he reached down and then he said he looked up to apologize to the man and he was gone. It freaked him out so much that he just took his dog and went home and told his wife that he thought he’d seen a ghost. And she says, “Where was it?” And he explained and she said, ”Oh gosh, that’s where the prison was.”
Amanda: Before this area was a parking lot, it was a penitentiary, actually the first penitentiary in Illinois. This system, the penitentiary system, was supposed to be a more humane form of punishment. We’ve done an episode more in depth on this in the past called Eastern State Penitentiary, which I’ll link to in the episode description. But it did not work out as planned. Very quickly, the Alton prison became overcrowded and flooding and poor drainage from the river led to all of these sanitary issues and disease outbreaks.
Troy: The conditions were pretty awful. Not a lot of the money went into the food or the health care or the clothing. It went into people’s pockets instead. So the place was always pretty miserable anyway. And so there was a lot of death and things at the penitentiary for the first 20 years or so that it was open.
Amanda: The state actually closed the facility in 1860. But shortly afterward, the Civil War broke out. And suddenly there was this crisis around where to house prisoners of war and defectors from the Union Army. Alton was a pretty convenient spot because men could just be shipped upriver from the battlefields down south. So the prison was reopened.
Troy: And then things got really, really bad because it was so overcrowded, conditions no better than they were before. And then a smallpox epidemic broke out the following summer after they reopened. And they buried the bodies of a lot of the dead within the prison grounds because they couldn’t take the bodies out because they were contagious and then never moved them. So they left a lot of them there on the grounds in downtown Alton where the penitentiary was. And, you know, even after they closed the penitentiary, the bodies were left there.
Amanda: They moved the cemetery, but they didn’t move the bodies, did they? As they say. After the war, the prison was closed once again. But over time, the surrounding land was converted into a public park, and the stones of the old prison got dragged away and reused in other construction projects.
Troy: The rest of it was just left to decay. And that’s when the ghost stories really got started, was after the war in the 1870s. I’ve got newspaper articles that I’ve collected where people were talking about seeing and hearing ghosts and things out there. And then eventually they tore it down and turned it into a parking lot. And it’s still a parking lot to this day.
Amanda: Today, there is a small marker on the edge of the lot made of remaining stones from the penitentiary. But most visitors probably pass by this parking lot without paying it much notice—unless they’ve come specifically to see a ghost.
We’re going to take a quick break, but after this, we’ll visit a small spit of land that is slowly being eaten away by the Mississippi River, which would be pretty convenient for a certain Abraham Lincoln, who almost killed somebody here.
Troy: He was embarrassed of it his entire life.
Amanda: Today, the place once known as Bloody Island is not much of an island anymore at all. The shifting tides of the Mississippi River have over time reconnected this bit of land to one side of the river and washed away the rest of it. But back in the 1800s, this was an island right off the coast of Alton. The island was technically in between state lines between Illinois and Missouri, which made it a kind of no man’s land. It was a place where you could go to do things that were not quite approved by society—like having a duel.
Troy: It was illegal in both states to duel, but because you were in that kind of shaded gray area, you could get away with it.
Amanda: We’ve done a more in-depth episode on the dueling history of the island. I will link in the episode description. But just a few quick and relevant incidents. Early on in his political career, long before he was president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln had quite the dust up on Bloody Island. It was back when he was still a lawmaker in the Illinois Statehouse. The state was going through an economic crisis, and Lincoln did not approve of the way that the ruling Democratic Party was handling it.
So he and his then-fiancé, Mary Todd, started to write these letters to a local paper under a pen name, Rebecca. The letters were directed at the state’s auditor, James Shields, and they were pretty insulting. And Shields was not very happy about this.
Troy: So he challenged him to a duel and they went out there to the island Lincoln, because he was the one challenged, got to pick the weapons, and so Lincoln picked broadswords. And Lincoln, 6’4”, long, gangly arms, James Shields, an average-sized guy, so he’s like 5’7”. So Lincoln picks these bladed swords, and he stands, you know… a foot taller than this guy with these long arms. And Shields took one look at this and went, that’s a terrible idea. And they patched things up. And so there was no duel.
Amanda: The two actually went on to make up, but Lincoln was not exactly proud of this behavior.
Troy: He was embarrassed of it his entire life.
Amanda: Reportedly, when he was asked about it later at the White House, Lincoln said, “I do not deny it, but if you desire my friendship, you will never mention it again.”
But even after dueling fell out of fashion, the island had this fascinating and sometimes a bit gruesome afterlife. This prominent local family called the McPikes built a summer cottage on the island. But then in the 1860s, when the smallpox epidemic broke out at the Alton Penitentiary, this little summer cottage was reappropriated into a kind of quarantine hospital.
Troy: They used the cottage to treat the sick. And then anybody that was close to death, they just took them out there. And I think it was kind of like, okay, well, if you’re going out to that island, you ain’t coming back, you know? And they just buried them out there when they died and left them after the war. And most of them, the bodies, a lot of them washed away during various floods.
Amanda: Troy writes in his book Haunted Alton that local residents began avoiding the island in the late 19th century, in part because of rumors of ghosts that wandered the grounds. Today, the geography of the island is very different thanks to years of flooding and various damming projects. But today this is a recreation site. It’s even named after the infamous Lincoln incident. It’s called the Lincoln Shields Recreation Area, which I’m sure Lincoln would have loved.
One final ghost story I’ll tell today is a little bit about ghosts, but a lot about the community of ghost enthusiasts who have really adopted Alton over the years and embraced the city’s allegedly haunted past. I mentioned the McPikes before. That was the local family who built a summer cottage on Bloody Island. After the Civil War, the family ended up building a much bigger mansion elsewhere in Alton.
Henry McPike was a real estate developer and former mayor of the city, but his real love was wine and growing grapes. So he made sure to build a large wine cellar in his mansion. But after McPike died, the house just could not find a long-term stable owner.
Troy: The house went through several different families and then eventually was just abandoned and sat empty for years and got a reputation. As an abandoned house that looks like the Adams family mansion will do in any town, it got a reputation for being haunted.
Amanda: The future of the McPike mansion looked pretty dicey. In the 1980s, it was going to be torn down and replaced with a shopping mall. And it actually ended up on a list of the 10 most endangered historic properties in America. But then in the 90s, a couple named the Luedkes stepped in. Sharon and George Luedke bought the house thinking that they would fix it up and turn it into a historical bed and breakfast. But as it turned out, the amount of work and renovations that the house needed to stay upright was just too much.
And grants and funds to help preserve the property would just not cover the cost. So they leaned into the house’s reputation and they started to hold ghost tours there.
Today, these have become really popular, there’s even overnight versions. And paranormal enthusiasts with their ghost detecting equipment descend on the mansion, and in particular, the wine cellar, to try to pick up evidence of Henry McPike and the other residents of the house.
Today, the McPike mansion frequently makes lists of the most haunted houses in America. Troy says at first he was a little skeptical.
Troy: I think it was more of a case of it just looked like a haunted house and kids broke in and tore things up and vandals got in there. And it became the local haunted house. And again, in air quotes. But I think there was something to it. I mean, I’ve had my own experiences in this house over the years when I’ve had chances to be inside. I don’t think it’s anything malevolent or anything. I think it’s a family that really loved that house and are still there. But I do think there’s something to it.
Amanda: Maybe you’ll see a ghost in Alton. Maybe you won’t. But however you feel about the paranormal, Troy tells me that in this city, ghost enthusiasts are helping to preserve the local history and make sure that it doesn’t fade away.
Troy: We love history. That’s the thing. Without history and without these cool locations and historic spots, we wouldn’t have all our ghost stories. So we want to support that kind of stuff. We get together, we support the weird locations and even the not so weird locations, you know, the battlefields and the old houses and you name it—and that’s our thing.
Our podcast is a co-production of Atlas Obscura and Sirius XM Podcasts. The production team for this episode includes Dylan Thuras, Kelly McEvers, Doug Baldinger, Kameel Stanley, Johanna Mayer, Manolo Morales, Jerome Campbell, Alexa Lim, Casey Holford, and Luz Fleming. Our theme music is by Sam Tindall.
