Peoria State Hospital

The story

At Bartonville, just outside Peoria in central Illinois, the State of Illinois ran a psychiatric hospital from 1902 to 1973. It went by several names over its life: the Illinois Asylum for the Incurable Insane, the Bartonville State Hospital and, from 1909, Peoria State Hospital. The grounds are listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a historic district.

The hospital's beginnings were awkward. In 1895 the Illinois General Assembly provided for an asylum for patients judged incurable, and Governor John Altgeld named a three-man commission to choose a site. Its president was John Finely of Peoria, and one member, J. J. McAndrews of Chicago, later sat in Congress. They picked Bartonville. Work began that year, and by 1897 the main building was finished, but it never received a single patient. Wikipedia's account says abandoned mine shafts under the property had undermined its structure. A 1927 history of the hospital tells it differently: the first building, a copy of a feudal castle, was judged out of step with modern ideas of care and was torn down in favor of a cottage plan overseen by Dr. Frederick Howard Wines, secretary of the State Board of Charities. (A later writer's claim that the castle opened in 1885 is very likely an error.)

Under Dr. George A. Zeller the site was rebuilt as a cottage system of 33 buildings, including patient and staff housing, a store, a power plant and a utility building. The asylum opened on February 10, 1902, and patients labeled incurable were transferred in from other state institutions. A nurses' training school followed in 1906. The institution was renamed the Illinois General Hospital for the Insane in 1907 and Peoria State Hospital in 1909. It came under the Department of Public Welfare from 1917 to 1961, and then under the new Department of Mental Health.

Zeller served as superintendent twice, from 1902 to 1913 and from 1921 to 1935, and was respected for putting treatment first. He campaigned for public understanding of mental illness, even inviting reporters and local residents to tour the wards. By the hospital's 25th anniversary in 1927 it held 2,650 patients, and 13,510 people had been admitted since opening. From 1943 to 1969 it trained psychiatric nursing students from regional hospital schools. The population peaked at about 2,800 in the 1950s, but by 1972, when closure was announced, only around 600 patients remained.

After the hospital shut in 1973 the buildings were auctioned. The first buyer went bankrupt, and a developer's plan to turn the cottages into offices was never fully realized. Many structures were demolished; others were refitted for commercial and industrial tenants, and the Village of Bartonville made the whole property a tax increment financing district to encourage redevelopment. Of an eventual 63 buildings, about 12 survive. The Bowen Building, which had housed administration and the nurses' dormitory and school, came down in 2016-2017, after an attempt to fund its rescue with paranormal tours failed.

The legend

Peoria State Hospital's reputation rests on a ghost story attributed to its own superintendent, though the accounts we found are second-hand and we have not seen his text. What follows is the tale as later writers tell it; none of those we read quotes or cites a page of him.

The tale concerns a patient known as "Old Book." His real name is uncertain; he is usually called Manuel Bookbinder or A. Bookbinder, and he supposedly owed the nickname to a past job in a print shop or bindery. Assigned to the hospital's burial crew, he became known for weeping at every burial while leaning against an old elm in the potter's field. When he himself died, the story goes, the mourners at his graveside saw him standing by the elm, crying as usual, while his coffin was being lowered. Zeller ordered the lid opened; the body lay inside, and the weeping stopped. Accounts of the crowd vary widely: Wikipedia speaks of more than a hundred people, another writer of some 400 staff and patients, a third of about a hundred nurses and over 300 onlookers. The event is usually placed around 1910, and the dates sometimes given for Old Book, 1878 to 1910, along with a grave marker numbered 713, rest on weak sourcing.

The story continues with the tree. The "Graveyard Elm" withered after the funeral, and men who tried to cut or burn it reported hearing moans or wailing, until it was eventually struck by lightning or brought down in a storm and removed. According to one account, Old Book himself is still seen near the old cemetery.

The paper trail is the weak point. Zeller is said to have written the episode down himself in Befriending the Bereft, called a memoir or a diary depending on the source, which reportedly collected several strange experiences from his years at the hospital. Wikipedia dates the book to the 1920s; another source gives 1937, and the question is unresolved. Without his text, his reputation for scientific, humane care cannot vouch for the story: we know only what others say he wrote. Wikipedia's own article on Old Book calls the ghost rumors "highly speculative," relying on local sources such as Bradley University's Historic Peoria project and Stephanie E. McCarthy's Peoria's Haunted Memories. The story was spread further by ghost writers such as Troy Taylor and the authors Graczyk and Boonstra.

Modern reports are far vaguer, as the writer Michael Kleen points out. They include ghostly laughter in the old gymnasium, a little girl with her dolls in the cellar of the Bowen Building plus shadowy shapes on a staircase (from a single blog), and the upper half of a torso drifting past in one of the cottages, described by one of the current museum's operators. In 2008 investigator Rob Conover told Peoria Magazine he had helped 28 spirits "move on," though two would not leave.

Television has followed. Ghost Hunters investigated in season 9, episode 3, "Prescription for Fear," aired January 30, 2013, when renovations were said to be slowed by strange events. The hospital also appeared on Ghost Asylum, though sources disagree on the network and season. Janette Marie's documentary For the Incurable Insane and Sylvia Shults's book Fractured Spirits are devoted to the site.

What remains today

Most of the hospital is gone. Around 12 of its original buildings still stand, mostly converted for businesses, and the Bowen Building has been reduced to an empty lot. One of the surviving buildings was renovated and opened on July 12, 2022, as the Peoria State Hospital Museum, which presents the institution's history alongside its ghost lore. The grounds remain a National Register historic district.

Visiting

The Peoria State Hospital Museum is the legal way in. Since its 2022 opening it has run paranormal tours and public ghost investigations, which sold out in its first season; check the museum's own channels for current dates and prices.

The rest of the former campus is private property occupied by working businesses and is not open to the public. Do not wander the grounds or try to enter closed structures. Remember too that thousands of patients passed through here, many of them buried in the hospital's cemetery, and their memory deserves respect.

Sources

1. National Register nomination #82002590 (texte intégral) — U.S. National Park Service · Public record
2. National Register of Historic Places file (NRHP #82002590) — U.S. National Park Service · Public domain (U.S. government)
3. Pellagra: Observations of This Disease as Found in the Peoria State Hospital — Internet Archive · Talcott, Mary Bird, 1910-05-01 · Public domain (pre-1929)
4. USGS 1:250000-scale Quadrangle for Peoria, IL 1958 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1958 · Public domain (USGS)
5. USGS 1:62500-scale Quadrangle for Peoria, IL 1905 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1905 · Public domain (USGS)
6. "Ethereal Remains of Peoria State Hospital" — Michael Kleen (author/historian, 23 Jan 2018) — Michael Kleen (author/historian, 23 Jan 2018
7. "Haunted Illinois mental hospital opens to public" — Patch (Anna Schier, 21 Jul 2022) — Patch (Anna Schier, 21 Jul 2022
8. "Haunts from Peoria's Past" — Peoria Magazine / Art & Society (Amy Groh, Sep/Oct 2008) — Peoria Magazine / Art & Society (Amy Groh, Sep/Oct 2008
9. Old Book — Wikipedia — Wikipedia
10. "The Wailing Elm of Peoria State Hospital" — The Line-Up (Orrin Grey, 26 Jul 2017) — Up (Orrin Grey, 26 Jul 2017
11. 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.