MINERAL SPRINGS HOTEL Hotel — Alton, Illinois Status: Closed · Access: Open to public · est. 1914 Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/mineral-springs-hotel-alton-illinois/ Hotel associated with documented cultural history. Mineral Springs Hotel is a hotel in Alton, Illinois, built in 1914. Hotel associated with documented cultural history. The name the accounts keep returning to is Jasmine Lady. The dossier holds 3 reported claims, 1 legend, 2 documented facts and 1 named or described presence — documented record and retelling kept side by side. Closed to the public, but not to the record. The Mineral Springs Hotel exists because an ice plant failed to happen. German immigrant meatpackers August and Herman Luer were excavating a cold-storage warehouse for their packing operation at Broadway and Alton Street when the shovels broke into a natural spring — sulfur water, by all accounts foul-smelling. Hotel man August Ratz talked the brothers out of ice and into hydrotherapy, and in June 1914 the Mineral Springs Hotel opened on top of its own bottling plant, which ran in a sub-basement roughly five levels below the street and shipped curative bottled water to twelve states. Alton has since acquired the civic nickname of most haunted small town in America — a title for which there is, the archive notes, no accrediting body — and the old hotel, now a mall of shops and event space, is one of the load-bearing claims in that argument. THE DOCUMENTED RECORD The finished building was an Italian Villa structure of more than a hundred rooms, with bathing pools for swimming lessons and water polo, spa rooms for the sulfur water, a dining room that boasted the largest dining table in Illinois, and a swimming pool billed at opening as the largest in the state — said to have drawn more than three thousand people in a single season. August Luer sold the hotel in 1926; it passed through owners including his brother Herman, declined through the 1950s and 1960s, stopped taking guests around 1970, and closed for good in 1971. Restoration began in 1978 to convert the property into the mall it remains. The water business is the part of the record worth keeping. Ratz marketed the sulfur spring as curative — the claims included, reportedly, the power to instantly sober a drunk — which places the building squarely in the era when Americans would pay to sit in something that smelled like eggs. ONE NAME IN THE LEDGER The haunting file is anchored by a single verifiable drowning. Clarence Blair, a sheet-metal worker in his late teens from Granite City, drowned in the hotel pool during swimming lessons — accounts put it in 1918 — and was not discovered until hours later. He is, per local historian Troy Taylor, the only recorded drowning in the hotel's operation. Everything else arrives without paperwork. The Jasmine Lady is detected by smell before sight — a floral perfume in the halls and a woman in one particular stairwell, prompting a rumor of an old murder for which no proof exists. George is said to be the artist who died before finishing the Crystal Room mural. Cassandra is a girl said to have drowned in the pool at a birthday party, a drowning the record does not confirm. Longtime building manager Dave Nunnally distinguishes between historic hauntings — names like Pearl Sans and Lou Harwood, attached to deaths and suicides — and folklore hauntings, a rotating cast that recurs in reports: Derrick, Nicolas, Tomasina, Molly, none of them tied to any document. WHAT VISITORS FILE The pool, empty now, is the busiest address. Tour groups report taps on the shoulder and a man in tan pants, white shirt, and tie standing at the pool's end before he is not. Overnight investigations fill the rest of the claim sheet — voices, footsteps, the jasmine smell — across five levels of a building that has outlived every business that built it. The archive notes that the hotel's most durable product may turn out to be neither the water nor the rooms, but the filing of reports itself. FILED CLAIMS — 3 on record, reported not verified · [Local folklore] haunting: Alton tourism recounts the Mineral Springs Hotel's resident ghosts and the 'Jasmine Lady' — a perfumed presence said to drift through the staircase near the old pool level, named for the floral scent that accompanies her. The 1914 hotel's faded grandeur supplies the setting; the pool floor is where the reports concentrate. source: Haunting Season in Illinois (https://www.enjoyillinois.com/plan-your-trip/road-trip-itineraries/haunting-season-in-illinois/) · [Investigation claim] named ghost legend: Mineral Springs tour lore describes the 'Jasmine Lady,' announced by her perfume on the staircase, and a man said to have drowned in the basement pool — the two named presences attached to the hotel's most atmospheric level. The pool deck is where overnight investigations spend most of their time. The staircase is where she's met. source: Mineral Springs Ghost Tours (https://mineralspringsghosttours.com/) · [Anecdotal] reported anomalies: Investigators at the Mineral Springs report voices, footsteps and objects moving on the mezzanine and pool deck — the standard anomalies attached to the hotel's lower levels. The reports are anecdotal, but they concentrate consistently on the same two floors, which is what keeps the lore specific. The pattern holds across teams. source: Mineral Springs Ghost Tours (https://mineralspringsghosttours.com/) HISTORY — 2 documented facts · [1914] Opened in 1914 with a mineral-water pool; closed as a hotel in 1971 and now operates as an antique/paranormal venue. A hotel with this much documented history gives the dossier real substance underneath the lore. This belongs to the verified spine of the entry, the layer everything else is measured against. 'McPike Mansion' documents the entry. The record keeps it — history, not lore. · [1914] The 1914 hotel is documented. Mineral Springs Hotel's documented history in Alton, Illinois is the record the rest of the file stands on. This belongs to the verified spine of the entry, the layer everything else is measured against. The record appears in 'Mineral Springs Alton'. The record keeps it — history, not lore. SOURCES — 4 cited · Haunting Season in Illinois — Illinois Office of Tourism https://www.enjoyillinois.com/plan-your-trip/road-trip-itineraries/haunting-season-in-illinois/ · McPike Mansion — Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McPike_Mansion · Mineral Springs Ghost Tours — Mineral Springs Hotel https://mineralspringsghosttours.com/ · Mineral Springs Alton — Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mineral_Springs_Hotel — HauntHunt is a research archive. Claims are filed as reported — documented where sources exist, marked as folklore or unverified where they do not. Methodology: https://haunthunt.com/methodology/ · Corrections: https://haunthunt.com/report/