The Mineral Springs Hotel in Alton, Illinois, was never meant to be a hotel at all. In 1914 the Luer brothers, who ran a meat-packing business, started cutting into the bluff on East Broadway to build an ice warehouse, struck a natural spring in the bedrock, and changed plans on the spot.
More than a century later, the five-story building is better known for its ghost stories than its water. Alton’s tourism bureau calls it one of the most haunted places in the town and the state, and local guides run paranormal tours through its halls.
The ghosts, and what can be checked
The best-known figure is the “Jasmine Lady,” a woman visitors say they have seen on a stairwell or smelled as a waft of floral perfume in the corridors. A rumor holds that she was a guest who came to harm on the stairs, but no such case has ever been proven.
The pool has its own legend, centered on a young man named Clarence. Accounts disagree on the details, even on his age. Ghost historian Troy Taylor, who runs tours from a shop inside the building, said in an interview that a drowning in the pool was one of the only recorded deaths in the hotel’s working life. Another pool story, about a girl drowning at a birthday party, has never been verified, the tourism bureau notes.
Paranormal investigators who visit bring the usual toolkit and come away with electromagnetic field readings and voice recordings. None of that is evidence a skeptic would accept, and the honest way to read the Mineral Springs is as a well-preserved 1914 spa with a lively folklore attached.
From ice house to spa
The spring arrived at the right moment. Mineral water cures had been fashionable since the 1800s, so the Luers built a bottling plant deep below the street, about five levels down by the tourism bureau’s count, and shipped “curative” water to 12 states.
The hotel went up on top of the plant and opened the following June. Guests who checked in found:
- An Italian villa-style building with more than 100 rooms
- Terrazzo floors, marble staircases and art glass
- Pools for swimming lessons and water polo, plus spa rooms for soaking in sulfur-heavy water
- A pool billed at opening as the “largest swimming pool in Illinois”
The pool is said to have drawn more than 3,000 visitors in one season. New rooms came in 1925, the same year an orchestra was hired for Sunday afternoons and evening diners. August Luer sold the hotel in 1926.
Decline, rescue and a second life
The building held on for decades before it began to slide in the 1960s, and it shut for good in 1971. Seven years later Roger Schubert restored it and reopened it as a shopping mall. Today it houses small shops, a barber, a curiosities museum and a restored ballroom used for weddings and paranormal evenings.
That timeline gives the place an unusual shape: it spent about 56 years as a hotel and has now spent more than 45 as a mall, so it has been a shopping arcade for almost as long as it was ever a spa.
Today Alton leans into the legends. The town markets itself as the “Most Haunted Small Town in America,” and the hotel competes for top billing with the nearby McPike Mansion. For another look at how old houses gather spirit stories, read about the Ontario farmhouse where Dan Aykroyd’s great-grandfather held séances.
More strange-but-true places are collected in Badiyaa’s Offbeat section. The building stands at 301 East Broadway, and its shops open Tuesday to Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Illustrative image. Image: ksablan, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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