Edinburgh Manor

The poor farm ran from roughly 1850 to 1910 under a steward and matron, housing the destitute, disabled, orphaned, and mentally ill in exchange for labor. Residents were free to come and go, but the ledgers still called them inmates. Records from the period suggest at least thirty lived there at a time, and somewhere around eighty died during the farm years and were buried in an on-site cemetery.

In 1909 the county board planned a replacement; the new manor went up in 1910-1911 and served as the Jones County Home and later a residential care facility under contract with Community Care. In 2009-2010 the building was judged unfit for its residents — dangerous, in the words of the nonprofit's president — and thirty-six residents were moved to Anamosa. The county sold the surplus building in 2011 for $52,050 to a land trust that planned a bed and breakfast. What it got instead was the paranormal circuit: the manor opened to investigators in 2012. The site's own accounting claims more than 230 documented deaths on the property across all eras.

Unlike many files in this archive, Edinburgh Manor's haunting claims are not tied to a famous named victim. The signature entity is an aggressive male presence visitors call Nick, or the Joker — a spirit said to stalk the basement and corridors, answering to nothing in the documented record. The name appears to be an investigators' coinage, which is its own kind of documentation. No Nick and no Joker appears in the commitment books, the farm ledgers, or the admission rolls that survive — a spectral resident with no intake paperwork at all.

Since 2012 the manor has run day tours and overnight investigations. Filed reports include disembodied whistling and singing, footsteps, voices in empty wards, and the Joker's signature brand of intimidation. The building cooperates atmospherically: peeling wards, patient records and personal belongings still scattered in rooms, a cemetery out back for the farm years, and a basement that investigators consistently flag as the Joker territory. The manor leans into the attention — overnight lock-ins are a staple — and the reports accumulate accordingly, though they remain, as the file insists on saying, reports.

Whether Scotch Grove harbors anything more than a well-preserved institution and a hundred years of institutional sorrow is, as always, beyond the archive's mandate. What is documented is a building that housed the county's unwanted for over a century and then stopped — mid-sentence, furniture and all.