AUG 7, 2014
Sure the politics in the state capitol make it a scary place sometimes, but there’s also some pretty eerie and foreboding places elsewhere in Illinois.
We recently featured some of the state’s creepiest roads, but what about abandoned Illinois sites rife with alleged hauntings and other hair-raising paranormal activity?
Reboot Illinois was unable to independently verify the ghost stories associated with these eight abandoned places, as told by the Illinois Paranormal Society and Mysterious Heartland.
While any reports of haunted places could be the result of active imaginations and old local legends, these sites are real — and definitely creepy. Be scared. Be very scared.
1. Manteno State Hospital – Manteno, Ill.
Manteno State Hospital opened in 1929 and was the largest psychiatric hospital in Illinois — housing more than 6,000 residents. Ten years later, a typhoid fever outbreak infected 384 patients and staff, 50 of whom died. The institution closed in 1985 and most of its buildings were converted for business, industrial and residential uses. Visitors have reported seeing apparitions of patients and nurses, including the sound of voices over an intercom system — an intercom that no longer works.
2. Devil’s Gate - Libertyville, Ill.
Devil’s Gate is located in the Independence Grove Forest Preserve off River Road, which once served as the St. Francis Boys Camp until the 1980s, and as an orphanage in 1925.
According to local legend, it used to be the site of a private all-girls school in the 1950s. One night, a man abducted several students, killed them and mounted each of their heads on the gate’s spikes. There are various accounts, some of which claim the murderous man was the school’s principal who snapped, others a madman, or an escaped convict. Visitors and people who have stumbled upon the gate at night claim to have seen severed heads reappear on the spikes and blood dripping down the iron supports. Spine tingling.
3. Chanute Air Force Base – Rantoul, Ill.
Chanute AFB was operational from 1917 until it closed in 1993. While much of the site has been converted into residential and commercial units, some of Chanute’s main structures remain abandoned. People who have explored the empty halls have described unusual sightings, from an officer working at a desk to pilots strolling down the dilapidated sidewalks.
Perhaps the strangest incident occurred just two days after 9/11, when a police K-9 unit arrived at Chanute’s largest building, the White Hall, after reports of trespassing. A canine credited with nearly 1,000 drug arrests chased someone — or something — to the roof, where it inexplicably jumped off and plummeted 15 feet to its death.
4. Hartford Castle – Alton/Hartford, Ill.
Near the cities of Alton and Hartford, a French immigrant named Benjamin Biszant constructed a 14-room mansion known as Lakeview for his newlywed wife in 1897. Following her death in the early 1900s, Biszant sold the mansion and moved to California. During the Prohibition era, it was briefly believed to be a speakeasy resort where gangsters and party-goers enjoyed the seclusion, and of course, alcohol that was allegedly provided by the infamous Shelton brothers bootlegging gang.
Lakeview was abandoned in the 1960s. Vandals later wrecked the interior and a fire destroyed most of the mansion in 1973. All that remains today is debris and several deteriorating gazebos. Previous owners and visitors have reported hearing oldies party music and seeing the spirit of the Frenchman’s wife who weeps as she wanders through the estate she lost long ago.
5. Vishnu Springs – Colchester, Ill.
Once a popular resort community, Vishnu Springs land was inherited by an entrepreneur named Darius Hicks who built the Capital Hotel. In 1908, Hicks committed suicide and no one else was willing to invest in the hotel. While a group of hippies tried to turn the land into a commune during the 1970s, all that is left today is the hotel. According to people who have visited the site, there are reports of a women dressed in black who wanders the grounds.
In 2003, a Western Illinois University alumna named Olga Kay Kennedy inherited all 140 acres of land, which she then donated to WIU to be used as a wildlife sanctuary.
6. Peoria State Hospital – Bartonville, Ill.
Peoria State Hospital was rebuilt in 1902 after the demolition of Bartonville State Hospital in 1897. The new facility was led by a progressive mental health physician named Dr. George A. Zeller, who instituted more humane treatments than had been used there earlier. Zeller recorded stories of his patients and daily life at the hospital.
The main story associated with the hospital is that of Zeller’s patient, A. Bookbinder, whom he assigned to the institution’s burial crew. According to Zeller, Bookbinder mourned each person he interred in the cemetery. After Bookbinder’s death, hundreds of staff and patients claimed to have seen his ghost crying at his own funeral. Bewildered, the hospital’s staff opened Bookbinder’s coffin to make sure he was inside. He was.
7. Axeman’s Bridge – Crete, Ill.
Axeman’s Bridge is located in the woods northeast of Old Post Road. The collapsed steel bridge is believed to be where the “Axeman” killed a group of kids he caught trespassing on his property. There are remains of an old house in the surrounding woods, which others claim to be the house of a man who used an ax to chop up his family and two investigators. The man was chased down by other, backup police officers and shot at the site of the bridge.
8. The Sweetin Home - Walkerville Township, Greene County, Ill.
The Sweetin Home was part of a mansion built in 1848 by Azariah Sweetin. At a farewell party for Union soldiers, two farmhands got into an argument on the third floor ballroom that ended with one of them being stabbed. The blood formed an outline of the man’s body and left a permanent stain in the stone floor.
During the Civil War, Sweetin buried jars full of gold coins around his property, but was unable to remember the exact locations following a horse-riding accident after the war. When the property was abandoned, treasure seekers scoured the land but never found the gold. As the story goes, Azariah’s ghost and snakes protect the long-lost loot.
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