Jacoby Arts Center

The Jacoby building on Broadway in Alton, Illinois spent most of a century selling furniture upstairs and handling the dead downstairs. The morgue was in the basement. The chapel was on an upper floor. The caskets sat out on the showroom floor next to the dining sets, because back then one family often sold you both the furniture for the parlor and the box you'd be buried in.

C.J. Jacoby and Company ran that way at 627 E. Broadway from 1904 to 1997, one of the longest-lived businesses in town. The store closed, the building sat empty for six years, and in 2004 the Jacoby family donated the three-story brick place to an arts council, which moved in and hung work under its 14-foot tin ceilings. The morgue was long gone by then. The lore says its traffic wasn't.

The basement is the part people talk about. Visitors to the cellar report cold spots and a presence, and the strangest detail of all: an intercom that was disconnected many years ago, heard speaking on occasion. The Jacoby is a stop on Alton's ghost tours now, and on one of them a visitor wrote that her K2 meter "went crazy all through the basement." Then, standing alone, "something bumped into me." She turned. No one was nearby. It's one person's account, not a documented haunting, but the basement keeps drawing those reports.

No source names a ghost. Nobody can point to a single death at the root of it. The morgue handled real bodies for decades, and that history is the only backstory the building has.

The arts center has since moved its programming to a new space across downtown. The historic Broadway building is being renovated into apartments and shops. The store is gone, the furniture is gone, the morgue is gone. The story is that something in the basement stayed behind to mind a place that no longer does the work that put it there.