In Brief
Jim Warfield built every scare inside Raven's Grin Inn in Mount Carroll, Illinois by hand. But the woman who floats across the wine cellar and vanishes into the ceiling was already there when he bought the place. Her, he didn't wire in.
The Full Story
At Raven's Grin Inn in Mount Carroll, Illinois, a woman in a white dress floats across the wine cellar and passes up into the ceiling. People who tour the place describe her the same way: dark hair, a white dress, drifting across the corner of the room. Jim Warfield, who has run the house for decades, says she was already there when he arrived. He didn't build her.
He built almost everything else. In the late 1980s — some accounts say 1987, most say 1988 — Warfield bought a derelict Victorian here for $3,000. It had no working plumbing and no electricity, and it was slated for demolition. He spent about a year converting it and the next four decades filling it: stone walls that swing open at the push of a button, a hearse you crawl through, a multi-story slide that drops you from an upstairs bedroom down a twisting chute to the basement. A 1950s Hudson juts out of the second floor. "I make all of my own stuff," he says. "I try not to copy other people."
The wine cellar is the part he can't account for. His first wife left him, he says, because something down there kept pulling her hair, and he couldn't explain it or stop it. He once watched a pair of jeans walk across his living room with nobody inside them. The ghosts, he's careful to say, aren't part of the attraction. They mind their own business for the most part.
The building had a long life before him — hotel, tavern, schoolhouse, a speakeasy during Prohibition, even a car dealership — though that history comes mostly from Warfield's own telling, not the record. Who the woman in white was, when she died, how she ended up in the cellar: none of it is written down anywhere.
He spent forty years engineering things to frighten people. The one no one can shut off is the one he found waiting.
