The year was 2015, and I'd been trying to set up an interview with Janet Kolar, Alton's hearse-racing "Mistress of the Macabre" and proprietor of the Historic Museum of Torture Devices.
I had first been drawn to Alton while exploring the river, struck by its historic architecture and dramatic topography, but the more time I spent there, the more I was also drawn to its interesting inhabitants — so much so that I married a local. I felt pulled to the town like the moon pulls the tides.
My calls and emails to Kolar went unanswered, so one Saturday I made the 40-minute trek from south St. Louis to the museum, which was tucked down a long, dimly lit corridor inside the famously haunted Mineral Springs Hotel, which overlooks the Mississippi and the towering Clark Bridge. The museum gates were padlocked.
Disappointed, I began to leave. A shopkeeper whose store faced the interior corridor asked, "Who are you here to see?"
"Janet Kolar," I replied. "But she's not here."
"Oh, she'll be back. Just have a seat."
I downshifted from my city rhythm and surrendered to the local pace. Sure enough, Kolar's hearse soon pulled up, and the 78-year-old woman, dressed in all black with a pewter pentagram necklace, entered the building. She'd recently been featured on ABC's 20/20, and here I was seeking an impromptu interview for a local LGBTQ magazine.
I introduced myself, careful not to come off as pushy with my request, and asked her if this would be a good time to talk.
"I'm here, and you're here," she said serenely, "so this is a good time."
A young woman, who I presumed was a property employee, approached Kolar. "A candle was burning in the Crystal Ballroom when I arrived today," she said in a concerned tone.
"That's odd. We blew them all out last night," Kolar replied.
We settled into the cluttered lobby of the deserted museum, where she shared stories of paranormal happenings there, including the sounds of hooves walking around her. She then placed an EMF reader on the vintage coffee table.
These devices test electromagnetic fields, but its lights were responsive to my inquiries, which was an adrenaline rush. Even so, I'd never interviewed a spirit, and quickly ran out of questions. "Can you give me a sign that you're here?" I asked. Just then, something crashed deep inside the empty museum. Upon investigation, we found an easel had broken apart.
Curse of the Riverbend
Alton is nationally recognized as one of the most haunted places in America, drawing ghost tourists, media and entire conventions on the subject. In 2019, Travel Channel's hit show Ghost Adventures featured a two-part special on Alton, "Curse of the Riverbend." The show's website says of the area, "There's a powerful force at work in Alton that shaped this land thousands of years before humans ever set foot here. ... This town is a perfect paranormal storm."
We have no way of knowing what the area was like before humans, but there's clear evidence that the Alton area terrified folks way before Europeans lived here.
In 1673, French missionary Father Jacques Marquette was exploring the Mississippi when, high upon the bluffs, he saw a cliff painting that struck terror in his heart. It was among the largest Native American painting found in North America at that time, which we'd come to know as the Piasa Bird. A legend was later born that the massive beast plucked humans from the river and devoured them in its bone-filled lair high above the shore.
Marquette wrote in his journal, "While skirting some rocks, which by their height and length inspired awe, we saw upon one of them two painted monsters which at first made us afraid, and upon which the boldest savages dare not long rest their eyes."
It was beneath this ominous image that early settlers decided to build a city, which for a moment was the largest settlement in Illinois, with one of the busiest ports on the Mississippi. It was a town growing so mightily that nervous St. Louis interests founded the competing town of Grafton 15 miles upriver in order to stymie it.
My research into what made Alton such a haunted place led me back to the Mineral Springs Hotel, some eight years after my interview with Kolar. This time, I was there to see bestselling author Troy Taylor, who literally wrote the book Haunted Alton.
The Mineral Springs remains the region's epicenter for paranormal enthusiasts. There are frequent ghost hunts and séances in the empty basement pools, where people once came seeking the healing mineral water but didn't always make it out alive. Even when there are no planned events, it's a place where mystics, witches, Wiccans, psychic mediums and others come to just hang out and talk to kindred spirits.
The interior corridor of the hotel where Taylor's business is located is also home to a popular Zen shop, a salon and the torture device museum that Kolar founded, but has since sold. It is now called the Soul Asylum.
Taylor has written nearly 140 books, including The Devil Came to St. Louis, about the 1949 exorcism that inspired William Friedkin's classic 1973 horror film. "I spent 25 years working on the exorcism story, and interviewed everyone who was still alive," he tells me. That includes the boy who was the focus of the exorcism, who died three years ago.
Founder of americanhauntingsink.com, Taylor hosts countless storytelling events and has been leading ghost tours around the world for three decades but chose Alton as his home and his base.
"It's hard to get Alton out of your blood," Taylor says.
As far as supernatural activity goes, Taylor places the town up there with famously haunted places like Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and Tombstone, Arizona. "Over the last two centuries, Alton has seen more than its share of death, disaster, violence, murder, epidemics, the Underground Railroad and even the mayhem of the Civil War," he says. "I think these events — the deaths and the morbid happenings of yesterday — have left spirits lingering here, which has earned Alton its reputation as one of the most haunted small towns in America."
A favorite quote of Taylor's comes from William Faulkner: "The past is never dead. It's not even past." According to Taylor and others, this quote is uniquely applicable to Alton. The reasons for that? Water and limestone.
"Being built on top of porous limestone bluffs, filled with caves and natural water sources, some believe that the energy from the past is contained in those things, returning like a recording to haunt the present," Taylor says. "The British have a name for this, the Stone Tape Theory, which is how they explain the inordinate number of hauntings in the castles. It's a bit of pseudo-science, or at least something we don't understand yet, but events from the past do seem to sometimes leave an impression on a place and repeat themselves like an old film loop, running over and over again until they eventually fade away."
Lured by Fate
A native of Decatur, Illinois, two hours to the northeast, Taylor became intrigued by Alton in 1998 after coming across a story about the city in the long-running paranormal publication Fate Magazine. He moved to the beguiling burg that same year, thanks in part to an old friend, Sonny Irvin, who owned a local trolley company. "He really piqued my interest in the stories of the area, even though he's not a believer," Taylor recalls. "I ended up moving here, started researching the haunted history, then wrote the first book about Alton's ghosts and started the tours."
Taylor quickly fell under the river town's spell. "What's not to love? In addition to the reputation for hauntings since the mid-19th century, we have all these connections to the past. The Mississippi River, Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War, historic homes, bluffs, caves, great restaurants, small shops, pubs and more. And then, obviously, for me, it was all the ghost stories and places like the Mineral Springs, which has become a home away from home for me."
Ghosts lure in the readers, but first and foremost, Taylor considers himself a historian — albeit a self-taught one.
"I've had a lifelong interest in history, sparked when I was a kid from hearing stories about crime and ghosts by my police officer grandfather, and a really great history teacher I had in school," he says. "I was an avid reader, which is where I learned to write and do research. Somewhere along the way, this became my full-time job."
Haunted Alton is full of historical accounts of the paranormal that were documented in local papers and witnessed by many. In October 1889, for instance, a supernatural shower of rocks, rained down on a single house for days, attracting a crowd of hundreds.
There are news reports of multiple families moving out of the same house due to a poltergeist, and of factory worker accounts of seeing a woman in black, described as a "banshee-like death omen," before fatal accidents at the plant. Over the years, numerous witnesses reported seeing a phantom carriage and even a phantom steamboat.
The Underground Railroad and the Civil War
Being a big town in a free state bordering a slave state, Alton became a hub for abolitionists. It was a major stop on the Underground Railroad, and played a significant role in the Civil War. It was also home to Southern sympathizers, as evidenced by the mob that killed abolitionist newspaper editor Elijah Parish Lovejoy in 1837 and threw his printing press into the river. Alton was a city of secrets, where life-or-death maneuvers took place in underground tunnels and hidden chambers. Some local homes still connect to those tunnels, and some, like the home of Kevin Dyer, feature secret compartments.
"Our house has a crawl space between the first and second level that was used for hiding soldiers from the Confederate prison to sneak them out of Alton," Dyer says. "The house across the street has a secret passageway from the basement to the garden shed that was used as part of the Underground Railroad to smuggle slaves through Alton."
Built in 1833 in the heart of town, the Alton State Penitentiary had an atrocious reputation as a corrupt, inadequate and inhumane institution. Due to the poor conditions there, many inmates died within months of their release. It was abandoned in 1860, when the new state penitentiary opened near Chicago, but reopened as a prisoner of war camp in 1862. As bad as things had been, they got much worse.
Roughly 12,000 Confederate prisoners passed through the limestone walls. The prison was described as a grim and horrific place, grossly overcrowded and plagued by vermin, lice and disease. There was always a lack of clothing, fresh water, edible food and medical care. Inmates were rarely able to bathe, and they reported rats running all over them when they slept.
Prisoners suffered from malaria, pneumonia, dysentery, scurvy and anemia. The Soldiers Monument in the North Alton Confederate Cemetery lists the names of 1,354 Confederate POWs who died there.
The 1863 smallpox outbreak proved the most deadly. The dead and the dying were eventually banished to Sunflower Island, near the Missouri shore, where hundreds were buried.
The prison yard was turned into a public park in the 1870s, with the main building looming on the back of the lot for 100 years until it was finally demolished in 1974. According to Taylor, those who ventured inside reported ghostly voices, screams, cries and eerie weeping. In 1889, there were newspaper reports of the sound of inmates marching in lockstep inside the abandoned structure.
"Even in recent years, passersby have claimed to see the apparition of men and soldiers on these grounds," Taylor says.
Life and Death on the River
If the past leaves an imprint like a roll of film, there's a lot of footage of the river. The Mississippi used to be a very active and tumultuous place.
"There were more pirates on the river than in the ocean," Taylor says. "People were moving west with all their money and worldly possessions, making them especially vulnerable during river crossings."
Steamboats were widely used in the 19th century — and were dangerous. A steamboat fire burned down much of St. Louis in 1849, and more than 3,000 steamboats were lost on American rivers during the 1800s.
In fact, the worst maritime disaster in U.S. history, deadlier than the Titanic, happened on the Mississippi on April 27, 1865. The steamboat Sultana, bound for St. Louis and packed with Union soldiers who'd been released from Confederate prison camps, exploded and sank near Memphis, killing an estimated 1,800 people.
There was also the Mississippi Queen steamboat, which inexplicably vanished without a trace, along with all her passengers and crew, in April 1873. The fate of the Mississippi Queen remains one of America's greatest maritime mysteries.
Taylor's book explores the resulting legends of the river, including the belief that when a phantom boat appears and sounds its mournful whistle, a river worker will be injured.
After the Civil War, locals steered clear of Sunflower Island, where the prisoners with smallpox had been sent. Some feared that the smallpox lingered, while others feared the restless spirits. In 1874, a dike built for flood control caused the shore of Sunflower Island to erode, washing some of the graves away, and in 1935, a new lock and dam was built using some of the island's soil.
On July 22, 1935, an Alton Telegraph reporter took a rowboat to the island to investigate accounts of human bones uncovered during excavation work. The following passage ran the next day in a story titled "Island Yields Skeletons of Prison Dead":
Tying up to roots of a maple tree, the reporter stood up, the land just above his head. He was about 1/4 mile west of the Clark highway, the railroad bridge between. Two half skulls lay on the surface, more were entangled in the roots of the maple tree.
As he dug into the bank, he exposed more and more bones. In recalling the event, he feels that bones extended to a level below his knees, the initial bones in the roots of the maple about shoulder height. The reporter's description would indicate that the bones were complete skeletons, placed together. There was no evidence of caskets. A flagstone was found nearby that may have been used at one time as a marker.
Once completed, the dam raised the water level, submerging much of what remained of the island. An untold number of disturbed Confederate graves lay beneath the murky Mississippi at Alton.
The Alton Allure
If Hollywood had invented Alton, it would've been panned as too far-fetched. In addition to being the site of Native American cliff paintings of terrifying monsters — which were believed to have devoured men — Alton was also home of the world's tallest man, the 8-foot-11-inch Robert Wadlow. This colorful town puts a literal spin on the term "tall tales."
It's a place where the locals seem to have always embraced the mysterious and the macabre. There are newspaper reports of ghost hunting in the town's cemeteries going back to the 1880s, some drawing up to 300 participants, and from 1915 to 1996, the mummified remains of a local character known as "Deaf Bill" was on display in Burke Funeral Home.
Altonians know their ghosts. They know (or posit educated guesses on) who they were, how and when they died and what they want.
It only makes sense that the town boasts one of the oldest Halloween parades in the United States, which has taken place on Halloween night since 1919.
Taylor's headquarters in the hotel's former ballroom serves as his primary event space. The focal point of the room is his visually inviting retail store at the far end, which serves as the backdrop for many of his television appearances.
"If you turn on the Travel Channel in October, you'll see me pop up a lot with different haircuts, beards and a number of tattoos throughout the years," he laughs.
From his website, americanhauntingsink.com, his followers can buy tickets for numerous themed dinner events, ghost hunts, bus tours and even a 10-day ghostly trek through Wales. Taylor's book and events about the 1949 St. Louis exorcism are generating the most buzz at the moment.
"I've done a lot of documentaries on it, I sat on a panel with Linda Blair at Comic-Con in San Diego, and my book on the case is currently under option with a big studio, and who knows? The movie may get made someday."
I wrapped up my interview with Taylor around 4:15 p.m. and walked out of the Mineral Springs. I had a party to attend in the Central West End where my husband and friends were waiting, but I stalled because I didn't want to leave Alton. Standing on the sidewalk near a group of old men on a bench who were still engrossed in the same conversation as when I'd arrived, I called a friend in nearby Elsah to see if she was up for a visit, but she had plans in the city as well.
Ghost Adventures star Zak Bagans believes a demonic entity is keeping lost souls trapped inside the Mineral Springs, but I prefer to think many of the spirits are simply drawn to the place like I am. And if the Stone Tape Theory is correct, then part of me may already be haunting Alton right along with them, reluctantly pulling myself away from the hotel, only to return, on an endless loop.
If you don't find me there, just have a seat.
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