George Stickney House

The story

The George Stickney House, often called the Stickney Mansion, stands in the small village of Bull Valley in rural McHenry County, Illinois. It was built for George and Sylvia Stickney in the mid-nineteenth century. Wikipedia dates it to 1865 and calls it an English country house; the National Register record gives 1856 as its significant year, a period of significance of 1850 to 1874, an Italianate style and an unknown architect. A date somewhere between about 1856 and 1865 is the safest reading.

The Stickneys were Spiritualists. Both were said to be skilled mediums, and they reportedly chose this isolated spot for its quiet and for the freedom it gave them to hold parties and séances with friends. They may have been drawn to Spiritualism by grief: of their ten children, only three lived to adulthood, and séances may have been a way to reach them. The family held séances on the upper floor, in what became known as Sylvia's ballroom.

The house is two stories high, with the second floor largely given over to that ballroom, which runs the full length of the building, plus smaller connecting rooms. According to Wikipedia, it housed Union soldiers during the Civil War and held the first piano in McHenry County, though those claims rest on that single source. After it left the Stickney family, a series of owners lived in it. It joined the National Register on May 14, 1979, and since 1985 it has served as the headquarters of the Bull Valley Police Department and the home of village offices.

The legend

The most famous story about the house concerns its shape. The Stickneys are said to have told their architect to avoid right angles, because they believed spirits could become trapped in square corners, or, in another version common among Spiritualists of the period, that such corners drew evil spirits. The interior was therefore supposedly built without a single ninety-degree angle between walls. A popular embellishment claims that one square corner slipped through and that George Stickney was found dead in it. Wikipedia rejects this: the house was examined and documented and no such corner was found, and the circumstances of George's death were never recorded, so nobody knows how he died.

Modern ghost reports come from the people who work in the building. In October 2005, WGN-TV interviewed Bull Valley Police Chief Norbert Sauers for a segment on the house. He said village employees had heard numerous sounds they could not explain, above all footsteps in the second-floor ballroom, the old séance room, which is now used only to store village records. The footsteps sometimes seemed to carry out onto the stairs. Staff also described noises that sounded human, voices, and toilets flushing when they were alone in the building.

Sauers described his own experiences: objects shifting on his desk, lights switching off, doorknobs turning and a door swinging open with no one there, and, on one occasion, a shout right next to his ear when no one was near him. Another Bull Valley officer said he had come face to face with an apparition he identified as George Stickney's father-in-law, a claim that appears in only one source.

It is often assumed that George, Sylvia or their lost children are the spirits in question, but the sourced accounts do not name them; the reputation rests on the family's Spiritualist past rather than on specific sightings of them. The account is also thin on independent corroboration. The accounts we read depend mainly on the 2005 WGN report and the Prairie Ghosts website, which is now offline. No paranormal TV investigation of the house has been found.

What remains today

The mansion survives and remains in public use as Bull Valley's police headquarters and village offices. The upstairs ballroom, once the setting for the Stickneys' séances, is now a storage room for municipal records. No detailed description of the exterior is available, and the National Register nomination has not been digitized.

Visiting

The Stickney House is a working police station and village office, not a museum or a haunted attraction, and no ghost tours are offered. Do not wander the grounds or try to get inside looking for ghosts; it is a law-enforcement building. At most, it can be seen from the public road while passing through Bull Valley.

Sources

1. National Register of Historic Places file (NRHP #79003115) — U.S. National Park Service · Public domain (U.S. government)
2. Wikimedia Commons category : George Stickney House — Wikimedia Commons
3. USGS 1:250000-scale Quadrangle for Rockford, IL 1958 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1958 · Public domain (USGS)
4. USGS 1:62500-scale Quadrangle for Mc Henry, IL 1926 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1926 · Public domain (USGS)
5. Wikipedia article — Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Text written by AI from the sources above and checked by a separate AI fact-check (how we work). Images: credits and licenses under each picture.