Dowling House

The Dowling House in Galena, Illinois doesn't have a ghost with a name. It has a photograph that keeps happening. Aim a camera at the town's oldest building, at the upper limestone windows or the second-floor porch, and a figure turns up in the shot, visitors say, standing where no one was standing, in a museum that's supposed to be empty.

People have been bringing those photos back since the 1960s. Different visitors, different cameras, different decades, the same recurring image in the same windows. No death anchors the story. Locals chalk it up to the house's age and the people who passed through it.

And a lot of people passed through it. John Dowling built the place out of limestone in 1826, and for years the first floor was the only trading post in Galena — back when the town was the lead-mining capital of the world and the wealthiest city in Illinois. The Dowlings lived upstairs. So did the fur traders they put up in rough quarters on the second floor, the same floor the figures keep appearing on. When people guess at who's in the windows, that's who they mean: the occupants and the traders who slept up there in the 1830s.

The building sat abandoned for decades before a local resident named William McCauley rehabilitated it in the 1960s and opened it to the public the following decade. It's a museum now, run by the Historic Galena Foundation, with combination tickets sold alongside Belvedere Mansion. The Haunted Galena Tour Company is careful about it: the daytime walk-through, they say, "is an historic tour, not a haunted themed tour." The ghost story is for after dark.

There's a cat, too. Visitors report something brushing past their legs in the empty rooms, low and quick. No one ever finds it. It just brushes past, and keeps going.

They'll tell you the daytime tour isn't haunted. Then they shut off the lights, hand you a camera, and let you point it at the windows.