Elgin State Hospital

The founder of Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps escaped from this asylum in 1945, and the son of Mormon prophet Joseph Smith Jr. spent 27 years confined here. At its peak, the 1872 Kirkbride-plan hospital in Elgin held 7,700 patients, and its cemetery contains 974 graves, many marked only with numbers because nobody recorded the patients' names.

Emanuel Bronner, the man who would later found Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps, was committed to Elgin State Hospital against his will. In 1945, he escaped. He never talked publicly about what happened to him inside, but he spent the rest of his life printing dense philosophical manifestos on soap bottles, which is either unrelated or very much related, depending on your read.

The Northern Illinois Hospital and Asylum for the Insane opened on April 3, 1872, authorized by the state legislature three years earlier. Architect Stephen V. Shipman designed it in the Kirkbride Plan, the dominant asylum layout of the era: a massive central building with staggered wings, 776 feet long, four stories at the center, built from brick and stone for $330,000. The north wing came first, with construction wrapping up on July 30, 1874. At its peak in the mid-1950s, the hospital held 7,700 patients.

Seven thousand seven hundred people. In a single facility. The math on staffing, food, and basic care at that ratio doesn't work, and the historical record confirms it didn't. A state report documented patient deaths that raised serious questions about conditions. In 1987, a consent decree between Illinois and the U.S. Department of Justice mandated improvements.

The hospital maintained a working farm from its founding through the 1960s. By 1880, the grounds held 285 hogs, 40 cattle, and 26 horses. In the 1930s and 40s, the farm produced roughly a third of the hospital's food. Patients worked the fields. Whether that was therapeutic or exploitative depended on who was running things at the time.

David Hyrum Smith, youngest son of Mormon founder Joseph Smith Jr., was confined at Elgin for 27 years. He died on the grounds without ever being released.

The cemetery sits behind the main buildings. The first burial took place on October 27, 1933. There are 974 marked graves. The older stones bear only numbers, because many patients arrived without names, or at least without names that anyone bothered to record. The newer stones have names, birth dates, death dates, and patient numbers. Volunteers and the City of Elgin maintain the grounds today.

When the hospital started downsizing in the 1960s, the older buildings were abandoned. The Kirkbride center building was demolished in early 1993 after 119 years, documented by the Historic American Buildings Survey before the wrecking crews arrived. By 2008, most of the original northern campus was gone. What remains: the powerhouse (still running), a 1967 administration building designed by Bertrand Goldberg, and the cemetery.

The abandoned buildings attracted trespassers for decades before demolition. People who broke in reported footsteps in empty hallways, voices with no source, and figures glimpsed through doorways that led to rooms with no one in them. The cemetery drew paranormal investigators and teenagers in roughly equal numbers. Most of the specific ghost claims are vague, the usual "voices and footsteps" that could describe any abandoned building at night.

But there's a difference between a haunted house and a place where 7,700 people were warehoused at once, where patients were buried under numbers instead of names, and where the son of a religious prophet spent nearly three decades locked inside. The buildings are mostly gone now. The cemetery is still there, and the numbered stones still face the same direction they faced when they were planted in 1933.