Milton Schoolhouse

The Milton Schoolhouse in Alton, Illinois has a famous dead girl, and she almost certainly never lived. Her name is Mary, and the Alton ghost tour has carried her for over a decade. She stayed late one fall afternoon to finish a bulletin board, the telling goes, heard a noise near the gymnasium, and was found the next morning in the basement girls' shower room, "her small body bloody and battered." Police suspected the janitor over scratch marks on his hands. He turned up hanging from a beam in an upstairs hallway with a note: "I Did it!"

It's a vivid story. It appears in no newspaper from any era. A local reviewer who looked into it put it flatly: "The problem is, the story is 100% false." Historian Michael Kleen flags it the same way and notes the school's ghost reputation took off only after the empty building hosted a haunted attraction.

Subtract Mary, and the building still won't go quiet.

The school opened in 1904 and closed to students in 1986. The businesses that moved in afterward kept reporting the same handful of things, and those reports came before anyone wrote Mary down. Footsteps in dark halls. Objects gone, then back. Shadow figures by the basement stairwell. One worker came in to find X's and O's typed across a keyboard overnight, in a building no one had entered.

Ghost Hunters filmed here in 2010. A separate team ran a session in the locker room a year later, and the words "Dan," "Football," and "Return" came up. The building's owner said a former resident named Dan had been a football coach. One of their own investigators reviewed his footage afterward and reported he "did not see any thing paranormal."

The strangest name tied to the place was never a ghost at all. Robert Wadlow — the tallest human in recorded history at 8 ft 11 in — went to elementary school here, by local account. He died at 22. He'd have walked these same halls a foot above every other kid in them.