Strange things at Mineral Springs

The Mineral Springs Hotel in Alton, Illinois, is a fascinating place. It doesn’t look particularly big from the outside, but appearances can of course be deceptive. While only two floors stand above ground, there are three more hidden beneath.

Built upon foul-smelling, supposedly restorative springs, the historic old hotel is largely unoccupied, aside from a few small shops on the ground floor. The place has most definitely seen better days.

Along with some friends, I was fortunate enough to spend a few hours poking around the place on Friday evening. We were guests on a public ghost hunting event. Generally, you don’t get much in the way of evidence in such cases; any situation in which lots of people go stomping around in the darkness, is not conducive to recording EVP phenomena, for starters. I was excited to visit the place with a knowledgeable tour guide (if you should visit, ask for Luke — he’s a great guy), see the sights, and hear some of the ghost lore. I wasn’t expecting anything more than that.

The tour was a lot of fun, and ended with a couple of hours of free time. People split up and went to whatever part of the building interested them the most. I had found the huge main swimming pool to be intriguing. Today, it is crumbling and cracking, but back in the day, it was one of the largest pools of its kind in North America, and was the scene of swanky soirees, in which socialites would gather to while the evening away.

A couple of ghosts have been reported in the vicinity of the pool. One is said to be the spirit of a little girl, which explains the fact that a host of children’s toys have been placed on the concrete floor at the deep end.

Five of us went into the pool. There are only two doors — one through which you enter and exit the pool from the staircase, and another leading to an open area behind one of the walls. Several open windows (the glass long since gone) are inset into that wall. As we filed down into the pool we could hear the sound of another group talking to one another. Looking through those windows, we could see flashlight beams playing off the ceilings on the other side. A couple of people wandered past the windows. My colleague, Wes, clearly saw one of them stick his head through and take a look at us.

So far, so ordinary. We continued to hear their voices for a while, discussing temperature readings, EMF levels, and other bread-and-butter matters. At some point, the lights went out and the talking stopped. No big deal. We naturally assumed that they had gone dark and were sitting around, waiting to experience something. Two guys came into the pool from the direction of the staircase, spent a little time fiddling with their SLS camera, and then left — we would find out later that they were sitting just outside the door.

After a few minutes passed, it began to seem odd that the other group were being so quiet. We called out to them, and got no answer, so we went in to check on them. The entire area behind the wall was empty. Puzzled, we searched high and low for the exit that they had taken to get out.

There was none. The only door leading out was locked. No tour guests would have the key to it (even the tour GUIDE didn’t have a key). Which begged the question: how, exactly, had they gotten past us? Conditions in the pool were dark, yes, but not so dark that we couldn’t see people moving about. Five sets of eyes in the pool had missed them, assuming that they had gone past us; that added up to seven when we took into account the presence of the SLS guys in the room outside, which lay between the pool and the staircase.

We began to dissect the situation in a little more detail. If they had, for whatever strange reason, decided to try and sneak out, they would have had to tiptoe so quietly that none of us had heard them, and without using a flashlight to guide their way. All five of us, plus the two guys in the room outside, would have had to have been looking in the wrong direction for long enough that they could have gone past us — a ridiculous idea, at the end of the day.

It looked as though three or four fellow guests had, for want of a better term, disappeared into thin air, down in the basement of the Mineral Springs Hotel.

We asked both our tour guide and Troy Taylor, who has been investigating the hotel for many years, whether there was any secret exit by which the group could have gotten out. They both insisted that there was none. None of us were able to offer up a non-paranormal explanation for what we were starting to think of as ‘the phantom tour group.’

I played back the file from my digital audio recorder, which had been continuously running throughout. The sounds of the group were clearly audible on the recording. Although we never saw them clearly (the area was shadowy) we do know that we definitely saw them.

It was a strange, puzzling, and fascinating little mystery, one that still has me scratching my head forty-eight hours later. Unless all seven of us took leave of our senses, we may have had an encounter with a new set of ghosts of the Mineral Springs Hotel.