Mineral Springs Hotel

The Mineral Springs Hotel in Alton, Illinois has an old swimming pool, and people who visit leave marbles down at the deep end. By the time they come back, the marbles have moved. They've rolled to the shallow end, uphill, against the slope, in a pool that has been bone-dry since the building closed in 1971.

The story ties the marbles to a little girl. They call her Cassie, and they say she drowned in that pool, though no death of a child there was ever written down. She's just the name the visitors give the thing that moves the marbles.

The pool was the whole point of the place once. The hotel opened in 1914 over a natural sulfur spring, and the spring was an accident. The Luer brothers, German-immigrant meat packers, were digging an ice house when they hit mineral water in the bedrock. So they built a five-story spa hotel instead, more than 100 rooms, terrazzo floors and marble stairs, and advertised the largest swimming pool in Illinois. In a good season the pool drew over 3,000 people.

Cassie isn't the only one said to have stayed. There's a woman on the main staircase you smell before you see her, a drift of jasmine perfume with no source. Locals call her the Jasmine Lady, and tell of someone who fell to her death on those stairs. There's an artist, sometimes called Charlie, sometimes George, said to have died before he finished the mural in the old barroom. The mural is still there. Who painted it isn't in any record.

The building is an antiques mall now, with shops and a ghost tour that runs out of it. The man who runs the tour is Troy Taylor, who has researched the place harder than anyone, and he won't vouch for most of it. The only death he can document is a 1925 staircase fall, ruled accidental. He tells the stories anyway. Asked once why a ghost might linger in a dry pool, he didn't reach for a haunting. "Maybe he just wants to listen to somebody talk about him after all these years."