Raven's Grin Inn

Jim Warfield bought a derelict 1870 Victorian in Mount Carroll for $3,000 in 1987 and turned it into Raven's Grin Inn, a year-round haunted attraction filled with his own handmade effects, secret passages, and a three-story slide into the wine cellar. The actual ghost stories are separate from his work: his first wife left because something in the cellar kept pulling her hair, and Warfield himself saw a pair of empty jeans walk across his living room.

Jim Warfield once saw a pair of jeans walk into his living room with nobody inside them. He still lives in the house.

Raven's Grin Inn in Mount Carroll, Illinois is not a seasonal haunted attraction. It's a year-round, full-time haunted house that doubles as one man's actual home. Warfield bought the five-story Victorian at 411 North Carroll Street in 1987 for $3,000. It had no plumbing. No electricity. He spent a year rigging the place with mechanical effects, secret passages, slides, animatronics, and handmade robots, and he's been giving tours ever since.

The building was constructed in 1870 and has served as a hotel, a tavern, an apartment complex, a speakeasy during Prohibition, a schoolhouse, a brothel, and an Oldsmobile dealership. That list alone would make it one of the more interesting buildings in rural Illinois. But Warfield didn't buy it for the history. He bought it because he'd been building haunted houses in his parents' basement since childhood, and this was the real thing.

The tours last one to three hours depending on how much Warfield gets going. He guides every group himself, delivering a manic, partly in-character monologue about the building's history mixed with his own autobiography. Visitors follow him through 15-plus rooms, outside into a sculpture garden, back inside through a labyrinth of passages where stone walls swing open at the push of a button, down a three-story slide into the wine cellar, and through a hearse they're required to crawl through. He once replicated a gag from Young Frankenstein but tore it out. "I didn't want it to be another person's ideas," he told visitors.

The haunted house effects are all Warfield's creation. The ghosts, apparently, are not.

His first wife left him because of the house. Specifically, because something in the wine cellar kept pulling her hair. Warfield couldn't explain it and couldn't make it stop. Visitors have since reported seeing a woman in white moving through the wine cellar and passing into the ceiling. That's not one of Warfield's effects. He's been very clear about the difference between what he built and what was already there.

The walking jeans are his most direct personal encounter. He saw them cross the living room. No legs, no body, just a pair of jeans moving on their own. Visitors report strange noises and physical sensations throughout the house that don't line up with the mechanical setups they can see.

The challenge with Raven's Grin Inn is separating the attraction from the haunting. Warfield has spent nearly four decades filling this building with elaborate, handmade scares. The walls move. The floors tilt. The lights go out on cue. So when visitors describe feeling watched, or hearing sounds that aren't part of the show, the obvious explanation is that they're being fooled by a very good showman. Warfield doesn't argue with that interpretation. He just points out that his first wife didn't leave because of the animatronics.

"The village idiot became the town hero," Warfield has said about his transformation of the building. He turned a derelict Victorian in a small Illinois town into a destination that draws visitors from Chicago, 140 miles away. The house is his art project, his livelihood, and his home. If it's also haunted, that's just one more room he hasn't figured out how to wire yet.