Jacoby Arts Center

This Alton arts center was a Jacoby Brothers furniture store and funeral home from 1883, with a morgue in the basement and a funeral chapel on the second floor. Ghost tour visitors report K2 meters going wild in the basement, physical contact from invisible sources, and cold spots in a building that sits on Alton's haunted limestone-and-three-rivers foundation.

The basement of the Jacoby Arts Center used to be a morgue. Upstairs, the second floor was a funeral chapel. And the ground floor sold caskets alongside bedroom sets and dining tables. For decades, this building on Broadway in Alton, Illinois was where furniture shopping and death preparation happened under the same roof.

Casper J. Jacoby started the business in Bunker Hill in 1883, combining furniture sales with undertaking, which was a common pairing at the time. Families buying a loved one's casket often needed new furniture too, since the deceased's bedroom set carried too many memories. By 1897, C.J. had opened the Alton store, and in 1925 he expanded into two adjacent buildings on Broadway. The modern three-story store opened in November 1930, with the morgue in the basement, the funeral chapel upstairs, and retail in between.

The building is an arts center now. Galleries on the first floor host painting exhibitions and photography shows. There are pottery classes, textile workshops, summer camps for kids. It's a bright, community-focused cultural space. The basement tells a different story.

Ghost tour groups that visit the Jacoby basement bring K2 meters, the electromagnetic field detectors that paranormal investigators use to pick up energy fluctuations. The meters go wild throughout the space. One visitor on the Eating with the Entities tour stood alone in a section of the basement when something physically bumped into her. She spun around. Nobody was within ten feet.

Alton has a reputation as one of the most haunted small towns in America, and there's a geological theory for why. The city sits on a limestone foundation at the convergence of three major rivers: the Mississippi, the Missouri, and the Illinois. Paranormal researchers believe both limestone and running water act as conduits that trap or amplify spiritual energy. Whether you buy the theory or not, Alton has an unusual density of haunted sites packed into a small area: the Confederate Cemetery, the old Confederate Prison site, the McPike Mansion, Milton School House, Mineral Springs Mall, and the First Unitarian Church all sit within a few miles of each other.

The Jacoby Arts Center fits right into that cluster. The cold spots in the basement don't have an obvious explanation. The building's HVAC runs on the first and second floors but doesn't circulate into the basement in a way that would create isolated pockets of cold air. People who spend time down there describe a presence, something heavy in the atmosphere that the upstairs galleries don't share.

The bodies that passed through that basement were real people from Alton and the surrounding area. They were prepared for burial in the same room where tour groups now stand with their meters blinking. The funeral chapel on the upper floor hosted their services. The Jacoby family ran this dual business for decades, and in a town where three rivers meet over a bed of limestone, the dead apparently found reasons to stick around.