Illinois Executive Mansion

At the Illinois Executive Mansion in Springfield, the ghost gets blamed for the small malfunctions. Lights that flicker. Smoke alarms that go off in a clean building. And the one story everybody repeats: an Illinois State Trooper shut inside the mansion elevator for four hours, with no fault anyone could find in it afterward.

Tour guides pin all of it on Catherine Yates. Her portrait hangs in an upstairs bedroom, the room they call the most active in the house, and guides credit her with tampering with the electronics. She was the wife of Richard Yates Sr., the governor who ran Illinois through the Civil War. She and her family lived here through those years, in the 1860s.

The house is one of the oldest of its kind in the country — built in 1855, one of the three oldest governor's residences still lived in today. Lincoln walked through it in 1860. Grant and two Roosevelts came later. And in 1860, Governor William Bissell died inside it of pneumonia, the first Illinois governor to die in office.

So there's a real death in the house. It just isn't the one the ghost story uses. Bissell died here; Catherine Yates died in Jacksonville in 1908, an hour away, and no one connects the haunting to the man who actually died in the building.

The people who actually live in the mansion don't buy it. In 2023, First Lady MK Pritzker, who wrote a 272-page book on the mansion's history, was asked point-blank whether it's haunted.

"We found no evidence of anyone officially reporting they had seen the alleged ghost," she said. Then, with a laugh: "we have not seen HER on our watch."

The trooper in the elevator was never named, and no record anywhere puts an actual sighting on the books. The legend keeps the lights flickering. The residents keep the lights on.