Alton, Illinois, a small port town on the Mississippi about 25 miles north of St. Louis, has a reputation that outgrew its size. Local paranormal historian Troy Taylor, author of Haunted Alton and host of the American Hauntings podcast, calls it the most haunted small town in the Midwest and one of the most haunted in America. The town even runs one of the country's oldest Halloween parades, dating to 1916.
The ghost stories track the town's rough history on the river. In the steamboat era, shipwrecks were routine — one stretch of the river in southern Illinois was literally known as "the graveyard." Local lore includes a phantom riverboat: if you heard its whistle in the fog but saw no boat, dockworkers supposedly had a week to live.
Among the town's haunted landmarks are the Old Mill Company (where a former owner is said to still check up on staff), the First Unitarian Church, with its troubled minister, and the 1920s Mineral Springs Hotel. But the grimmest site is unassuming: an ordinary riverfront parking lot. It sits on the grounds of Illinois' first penitentiary, reopened during the Civil War as a prisoner-of-war camp where overcrowding and a smallpox epidemic killed so many inmates that bodies were buried on site — and never moved. Ghost sightings there date back to newspaper reports in the 1870s. Today only a small marker made of prison stones hints at what lies beneath the asphalt.
Alton's dark history also includes Bloody Island, once a lawless sandbar between Illinois and Missouri where duels were legal-ish. A young Abraham Lincoln nearly fought one there in 1842, challenging state auditor James Shields to a duel — Lincoln, 6'4", picked broadswords, and Shields, five inches shorter, thought better of it. They reconciled; Lincoln was reportedly embarrassed about it for the rest of his life. Later the island's McPike cottage became a smallpox quarantine hospital, with the dead buried in the ground that floods later washed away. The area is now the Lincoln Shields Recreation Area.
The McPike family's Alton mansion — built by former mayor and viticulture enthusiast Henry McPike, complete with a wine cellar — changed hands until it was abandoned, and its Addams Family looks cemented its haunted reputation.
Why go? Alton works for travellers who like their history spooky but substantive. Ghost tours and Taylor's American Oddities Museum anchor a weekend trip, but the town also has a handsome historic riverfront and easy access to the Meeting of the Great Rivers scenic drive. Come in October for the parade and peak atmosphere, or any misty autumn morning for maximum phantom-riverboat effect.
