Mineral Springs Hotel

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.

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.

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.