In Brief
The First Unitarian Church in Alton, Illinois sits on a bluff over the Mississippi. Its minister, Reverend Phillip Mercer, was found hanging there in 1934. People inside still catch his cologne, his footsteps, and a voice that gives back his own name.
The Full Story
At the First Unitarian Church in Alton, Illinois, the man people keep meeting is the minister who died there. Inside the stone sanctuary they report footsteps in empty halls, knocking, voices, and the cologne of a man who isn't standing there. Some have seen him outright, a figure in a white shirt and black pants. The congregation thinks it knows who it is. They think it's Phillip Mercer.
Mercer came over from England as a young man, worked a railroad in St. Louis, took ministries out in Minnesota and the Dakotas, and reached Alton in 1928 to lead the church on its bluff above the river. The congregation liked him. He boarded with a local family and kept his own life closed.
In the fall of 1934 he went on vacation and came back, by the accounts that survive, a changed man. One source describes him during a November sermon as "agitated and in a hurry to get the service finished. He was sweating profusely."
On the morning of November 21, 1934, he was found hanging from a cord tied over a window transom, in a hall behind the auditorium, a chair kicked over beneath him. He was 48. There was no note. His study papers had been gone through, as if someone had searched the room. The death was ruled a suicide, and his fiancée in Minneapolis said he had slipped into depression in the six months they'd been engaged. But the rifled study left a question the ruling never closed, and nearly a century on, Alton still tells it both ways.
The congregation held its last service in 2023, after 187 years, and moved on. The ghost hunts kept coming.
In 2013 the Ghost Research Society spent a night in the building. Their meters read normal. The Ghost Box did not. The responses came back as plain words in a deep male voice. One said "I was murdered." In the Minister's Office, they say it gave back a single one.
It said "Mercer."
