McPike Mansion

The Italianate mansion at 2018 Alby Street was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on June 17, 1980. After the Laichinger family departed in the 1950s, the house sat empty for decades — weather and vandals did what the mortgage never could. Sharyn and George Luedke bought the property in 1994 and have been restoring it ever since, funding the work largely through donations and through the tours that made the house famous in the second half of its life.

The grounds include a gravesite of uncertain attribution — the current owners believe it to be a woman's — and a cellar that the restoration plan treats as both a construction problem and a destination. Alton itself has cultivated a reputation as one of the most haunted small towns in America, and the mansion sits near the top of its itinerary: the Haunted America Conference has routed tour groups through it, which is how a photo from one such weekend ended up in front of the local paranormal press.

The Luedkes' working census stands at about twelve spirits, assembled from old photographs, newspaper clippings, and consultations with psychics and at least one shaman. The roll includes Henry himself; his mother Lydia, described as the matriarch who likes to be properly introduced at the entranceway; his first wife Mary, shy and fond of children; his son James; and daughter-in-law Jenny, filed as the trickster of the group — she touches people, tugs hair, taps ears. A former domestic servant and several unnamed children round out the household.

Sharyn Luedke, who describes herself as a big chicken and says she never set out to own a haunted mansion, reports seeing a man at a window seven weeks after the purchase closed. A later tour photo produced a figure in the second-story far-left window that even skeptics in the local press agreed was difficult to explain away.

The cellar is the house's focal point — psychics and mediums describe concentrated energy there, and it is where the Luedkes host their dark-room experiences. Visitors' photographs routinely produce orbs, balls of light, and figures in windows that nobody saw with the naked eye; the file notes that a house being actively restored offers the camera a great deal of dust, and offers the counterargument anyway.

Ghost Adventures devoted a 2019 episode to the mansion, and it anchors most haunted tours of Alton — a town that has leaned into its standing as one of America's most haunted small cities with the efficiency McPike himself brought to viticulture. The record cannot confirm a single ghost. It can confirm that the house has been empty for seventy years and has never once lacked for residents.