Peoria State Hauntings

Hi there, and thank you for allowing me to be a part of your journey today. I'm your host, K-Town, and you're listening to Mysterious Radio. During the first half of the 20th century, the Peoria State Hospital was the premier mental health facility of its day. Dr. George Zeller instituted the eight-hour workday for his staff, removed patient restraints, and made the asylum into a model for care of the mentally ill. Today, there are only a few buildings of the hospital left. Some of them are still in use. Others are inhabited only by ghosts. Our guide to these ghosts and the history they represent is Sylvia Schultz. In Fractured Spirits, Hauntings at the Peoria State Hospital, she brings a passion for paranormal investigation to her adventures at this haunted hotspot. And here is my special guest, Sylvia Schultz. I have wanted to tell stories my entire life. I come from a tradition of storytellers, and I learned to read at a very early age. So I've always just been devouring tales and spooky tales, mysterious tales. That's what really interested me. I started off writing fiction, horror and romance. I know, fine line between the two. But I really loved ghost stories. I've always loved history, too. So when I got the chance to start writing paranormal nonfiction, I took that chance. And it's been a really wonderful experience. I've gotten to have many incredible adventures. And people have shared so many incredible stories with me. now when I started writing non-fiction I would tell people what I was working on and they would say oh have you written anything about the Peoria State Hospital and I said no please tell me more because I didn't grow up in this area so they told me about this abandoned asylum that was just really close to my house and I started learning about the history of the place as well as the ghost stories. And it just captured my attention. And I've never looked back. It's such a wealth of stories and information. All right. You're not from the area. I want to know, are you close to the property there or is it in another town? Where is it in proximity to where you live? Close to it. There is the biggest town in this area is Peoria. And I live about 20 minutes south of Peoria on the other side of the Illinois River. Now, the asylum is actually in Bartonville, Illinois, which is a 10 minute motorcycle ride from my front door, which is a wonderful thing. And Bartonville is about 10 minutes south of Peoria. The reason it was called the Peoria State Hospital was because that was the closest biggish city. So when they were looking for a name for the asylum, it started off as the Illinois Asylum for the Incurable Insane. And Dr. Zeller, who we'll be talking about, said, you have to change the name of this place. Don't tell my patients they're incurable. That's what I'm here to do. So when they changed the name, they looked to the nearest big city and they said, oh, we'll call it the Peoria State Hospital. I see. All right. So go ahead and continue on with Dr. Zeller, George Zeller. And tell us like when it actually officially opened and things like that. Sure, sure. The asylum actually opened in 1902, February 1902. Dr. Zeller was tapped to be the superintendent of the place when it opened. When it was being built in 1898, he was actually out of the country. He was an army surgeon and he was serving in the Spanish-American War in the Philippines. um dr zeller was very proud of the fact that he had no psychiatric training he was a doctor but he wasn't a psychiatrist which meant that he was not hidebound in current practices of treating the mentally ill he just said let's treat these people with simple human kindness and see what happens. And what happened was that the Peoria State Hospital became the premier institution for the care of the mentally ill in the world. That's interesting about his background there. So what was he proposing to do for them besides treating them with kindness? I mean, tell me how were they being treated as far as like medically? What kind of treatment were they getting? Well, a lot of our patients came from almshouses and in the almshouses, they weren't getting much treatment at all. In almshouses, they weren't prepared to treat the mentally ill. An almshouse was simply a place where if you were down on your luck, you could go for three hots and a cot. They really weren't designed as hospitals. The state hospitals were a little better, but they were still using very old-fashioned cures, like wrapping people in wet blankets to calm them down, and cold sheets, and putting them in cages, and handcuffing them if they were violent. Dr. Zeller felt that he had a mandate to care for these people. His job, His very reason for existence was to go out and find the worst of the worst. His feeling was that no one is beyond help. So he opened up his asylum to whatever dregs the almshouses could send him. And when our patients got here, they were treated with kindness. They weren't put in a big building altogether. They were put in cottages, which felt more like home. Dr. Zeller insisted on leaving the doors to the cottages unlocked, and he insisted that his staff leave the windows open several inches so the patients could see for themselves that they weren't locked in, that they weren't trapped. um he absolutely absolutely forbade the use of any sort of restraint handcuffs foot cuffs bed saddles utica cribs um muffs he had straight jackets he completely forbade any use of any sort of restraint drug restraint too he refused to use that the only reason given any medications no no they weren't they weren't um and by medication i don't mean the things that we're used to now that were developed in the 1980s like thorazine and things like that i'm talking laudanum and opium yeah yeah yeah just to keep them quiet yeah he refused to use any of that some people came to the asylum in straight jackets and handcuffs and Dr. Zeller kept those and he kept them in an office, a small room next to his office. And the only reason he kept any of those was for when reporters came, Dr. Zeller would allow his staff to point to those handcuffs and those straight jackets and say, never again, not here, not at this asylum. That is interesting right there. Is there any type of record from the people that used to work there about how it was for them? Because I'm not saying that drugs needed to be used to calm these people down or whatever, but sometimes they have violent outbursts and things like that. And it's beyond having someone with them 24 hours a day, you know, and they may hurt themselves or somebody else in the meantime. I mean, how were they handling things like that? I mean, do you know that or is that is that written somewhere about how they were about that? That is a very interesting question. Yeah. And luckily for us, we do have a wealth of historical material. We have journals that the nurses kept. So we do have quite a bit of evidence, written personal evidence of the care that these patients received. Yes, they had violent patients. They had the worst of the worst, and that was on purpose. But Dr. Zeller did other things to make sure his patients got the best care. He refused to have any employee hired that had previously worked in another asylum. He called them bug housers. He was very contemptuous of that. And if he found that you had lied on your resume and had worked at an asylum previous to coming to the Peoria State Hospital, he would fire you immediately and without cause. Is that because he thought that they would bring over some of the things that they learned from those other hospitals into his facility? Is that why he did that? Precisely, yes. Yes, he wanted to train his people the way he wanted them trained. He didn't want anyone coming in with any preconceived notions of how to treat the patients under his care. he also insisted that the head of the wards be a woman and the people in charge of the cottages did he say why he absolutely said why oh yes he absolutely said why he said he wrote that the gentle touch of a woman is much better for an agitated patient than the hard hand of a man Most of his staff was women. And that's because he would rather have a gentle touch than a big, burly male attendant trying to intimidate his patients. Right. I get it. All right. That is interesting there, really. I wouldn't expect you to say that, but that's an interesting fact. Most of them, they use restraints and straight jackets and heavy medications and things like that. And the treatment can be really cruel when you start to dig into the history of it. Um, okay. When you say haunted, when you say haunted mental asylum, your mind automatically goes all American horror story on you. And you assume that there was pain and fear and abuse. And it is my privilege and my great joy to tell people that was not the case with the Peoria State Hospital. This was a place where the patients were treated like family. They were considered part of the family. Dr. Zeller and Sophie never had children of their own. They considered the patients their children, and they insisted on hiring women that would feel the same way. Now, okay, so did that ever change? Did their philosophy over the years, did that ever change? I mean, did they ever get to where they started treating their patients like, you know, we hear that they were treated at every other asylum in the country? Or did they stay that way? Unfortunately, well, Dr. Zeller's personality was very forceful and very take charge. His influence lasted well beyond his death in 1938, fortunately. Unfortunately for us, during the very last years of the Peoria State Hospital's history, things did start to go downhill. In the mid-1960s, there was a need for remodeling in the asylum. They needed to widen doors to make them ADA compliant so wheelchairs could get through. The buildings, some of them had been up since 1902, and they needed some TLC. So they asked the state for money for this rehab in the mid-1960s. and the state gave them this money. But in addition, the state of Illinois took a good, long, hard look at our finances and our care system, our duty of care. And what they found was that the Peoria State Hospital had the highest rate of reintegration into society of any asylum in the country. We were also the most expensive. So the state of Illinois, in its wisdom, decided to start cutting funding. Dr. Zeller's ideal was one nurse for every two patients. And with the reduction in funding, it became one nurse for every five patients, and then one nurse for every 10 patients, and then one nurse for every 60 patients. And that, unfortunately, is when the, I don't want to say neglect, but the staff just couldn't keep up with the patients that were there. In 1972, there were three patient deaths at the asylum. Two of them were patient-on-patient violence. And again, that's simply because there were not enough staff members to oversee all of the patients there. And somebody cornered somebody else in a dark hallway and beat them. And the guy died. Another one was a case where a patient for no one knows why he did this. He was not mentally all there, but he screwed a piece of gum wrapper up into a little ball and stuffed it into his ear canal. And he got an ear infection and he wasn't able to tell the doctors this and nobody noticed it until it had gotten so bad that it had infected his brain and he ended up dying of meningitis. So with these three patient deaths the state of Illinois put together a panel to look at the asylum not realizing that it was their underfunding that was causing the problem in the first place And the panel found that there was understaffing and underfunding, and they said, you have to close this place. And I have talked to nurses who worked there in 1973 when it closed. And they told me about marching on Springfield and marching in front of the state capitol and saying, please don't close our asylum. Our patients need us. But it was closed anyway. And these patients had to go to other places and they didn't have that sense of home anymore. that's okay so let's talk about something um let me see where i want to go here i do want to talk about the paranormal activity quite a bit but i have to ask you about the you said there were patient on patient deaths so do you know about how many is there a recorded number of how many times that happened throughout the entire history or yes throughout the entire history and the The entire history. I think for our entire 71 year history, there were fewer than a dozen instances of patient on patient violence. OK. Some of them have led to hauntings, actually. Yeah, I bet. And that's why I want to ask you about that. What about before you go into that? What about what about patient or staff suicides? Did that happen? There was one instance, and again, it has also resulted in a ghost story, where a patient attacked a staff member and she died because of it. That was sheer stupidity on the staff, on this part of the staff member. And I'll get into that story, too. But that's, gosh, that's the only one I can really think of that ended up in a death. I mean, and that's over 71 years of history. Yeah. Hmm. Okay, so. It's not as bad as a small town, really. Yeah. Not as bad as a middle-sized town. Murder rates are not even that bad, so. All right, so go ahead and tell us about the hauntings connected to those, Sylvia. Okay. Well, the first one happened in the mid-1960s. there was a patient at the asylum named James Sample. And he grew up in Manonk, which is about an hour and a half from here. And he was ethereally beautiful. He had the face of an angel. Everyone agreed about that. They also agreed that he was absolutely crazy. um there was a story about someone who had grown up with him that he and james were up on a grain elevator and they were standing on the platform there and james looked over at this kid and very casually said you know i could push you off this platform and nobody would ever know what happened so creepy creepy kid he did something in minunk we're not sure what to land him in Bartonville. And part of James's mania was that he thought he was the angel of God. And he carried something called the staff of God. And it didn't matter what it was. It could have been a crowbar. Some days it was just a stick that he found on the ground. But he always had to have something in his hand that he referred to as the staff of God. And usually, I mean, the attendants all knew about this. And when it was time for bed, you know, if he was outside, they'd say, well, James, let's put the staff down in a safe place. And you don't want to take that to bed with you or anything. Let's put it down here and we'll come back and get it tomorrow when they would lead him off to bed. So in the mid 1960s, there was everybody at the asylum had a job to do. And James was working in the kitchen at one of the buildings that was, it was not a dormitory, but it was a hospital for patients who were actually suffering from illness. So it was one of the hospitals. And there was a staff member, a dietician who had been on the job for like two days. She didn't know anything about the staff of God or about James's mania. And she was very bruce. She was very short with the patience. She didn't really have much patience for them. So James was working in the kitchen, and he had the staff of God, which that particular day, it was an iron bar that was used to pry up milk lids, lids on milk cans. So he had it tucked under his arm, and he was working one-handed. so this dietician comes over to him yanks the bar out from underneath his arm slams it down on the counter and says use both hands well this is the staff of god you do not touch the staff of god without the angel's permission so james took up the staff of god and he smote her with it he hit her in the head so hard that he he caused a head wound and she's she ran from the kitchen into the dining hall and he hit her again and she fell and she was dead by the time she hit the floor there was a big pile on a couple other attendants and nurses james did not hit anybody else he was enough compost meant to know that he had attacked the person he meant to attack and he wasn't going to attack anybody else so they wrestled him to the ground the dietician was already dead um but james had used up his chances he went to an asylum for the criminally insane he was not allowed to stay at the peoria state hospital anymore um did he have a trial if that happens i've never known this i don't know maybe i i've never heard but anyway um if if something like this happens uh when they're in a state's custody and they kill a staff member or maybe another patient are they do they go through the criminal court process i mean do you know that or if he did it or did i i believe he did i believe he did go to a prison for the that had a section for the criminally insane. So yeah, he did go to prison for that. And this, this was late enough that, that yeah, he, he did end up in prison. Um, he, uh, the haunting that, uh, resulted from this is that, um, during tours of the Pollock hospital, um, I'm switching gears just a little bit during tours of the Pollock Hospital, which still stands, they used to do walkthroughs for the paranormal investigators and have little scenes, little vignettes of the history of the asylum. And they would kind of give an idea of the history behind the hauntings, which I think is a wonderful idea for a paranormal investigator. So one year, one of the little vignettes that they did was this murder of the dietician by James Sample. And we had a little sketch, a little sketch all planned out. There was narrator, there was James, and there was the dietician. And I played the dietician. So the setup of the sketch was that I would, we had a little kitchen scene laid out. I would go over to James, take the staff of God away from him, put it on the counter, say use both hands, just like the dietician did. And then I go out through a swinging door and James would follow me through the swinging door. And when it closed, what the audience couldn't see was that there was a car seat, like a car cushion, like the backseat of a car behind that door. And I would scream and the actor playing James would hit this car cushion for a couple of times and then come out of the door breathing heavily. And that was the description. That was, that was our depiction of the murder of the dietician. And then the narrator would gather everyone up and say, Oh, we, we, we better go and escort them back to the, the, the, where the ghost hunt would actually start. So somebody came to see this scene and they had their recorder running. the whole time and we caught a couple of evps we caught a couple of ghost voices commenting on the scene that was being played out by the actors when the narrator said the one thing he had to have was the staff of god there was a young girl's voice on the recorder that said that's right And then we got to the end of the scene. I go through the swinging door. James follows me. I scream. He thwacks a couple times, then comes back out. There's a male voice on the recorder that says, bastard, James Sample was no angel. Really? Wow. Yeah. that's that's one of the most amazing things that i've ever experienced you can hear it clearly i mean it's not yeah yes yeah so that was a female voice amazing that was a female voice that was the the first voice was that of a female when we think it was a little girl it sounded like a child and then the second voice was a man that's creepy yeah creepy but wonderful okay so tell us about the oh all right so that was from him killing the uh killing the um the diet yeah the dietitian what about the patient on patient yeah so i mentioned the pollock hospital and that was the tuberculosis ward that still stands and that is still open for paranormal investigation. And it is very, very active. It was in use from 1950 to 1973. And during that period of 23 years, there was an average of three to five deaths a week in this building. So it is extremely active, not only tuberculosis deaths, but others, including this tale of patient-on-patient violence. Okay, let me ask you this real quick before you go on. When you say still open, is it still open? Are they operating something out of it now? Or are you just saying it's open to the public? They are. It's open to the public. It is being run by the historical society of the Peoria State Hospital. They've gotten a building to turn into a museum, but they're also affiliated with Apollic Hospital, and that is what they use for their paranormal investigations. I see. Okay. There were 63 buildings on the hilltop. 12 of those buildings are left. Only a couple of them are in their original state and available for investigation. The rest have been repurposed, but we are lucky enough to have the tuberculosis ward still available to us for ghost hunting. Okay. That sounds awesome. Go ahead. coming with a fast, heavy, angry pace. He likes scaring people. That is this spirit's reason for being. He just likes to scare the snot out of people. So we got to thinking about this, and we said, well, who might this be? And we realized, the historians among us realized that the Pollock Hospital, again, with all All the other hospitals on the hilltop, this was staffed and manned 24-7. This is a working hospital. So there were people that worked on the graveyard shift overnight. This was round-the-clock care. In the 1950s, there were two patients at the Pollock Hospital who had been admitted about three years before, two young men named James Sparr and Jesse Bonham. They were in there for mental reasons, but they had both picked up very mild cases of tuberculosis, and they were recovering in the men's ward of the Pollock Hospital. And one night, James, for reasons known only to himself, came barreling up behind Jesse and thwacked him across the back with a broom handle. unprovoked, just totally out of nowhere. Jesse was understandably annoyed by this completely unprovoked attack. So he picked up a floor polisher and beat the crap out of James with it. He died at the scene from his injuries. This was Jesse. Jesse's spirit is probably. Completely. He didn't expect to be attacked. So he picked up this floor polisher and be the other guy to death with it. Jesse was only 25 and James, the guy who got killed, was 33. so these are this this is a young guy who got killed immediately for something he maybe thought was funny hitting the other guy with a broomstick and he ends up dead because of it so this we really think is heavy boots because he likes intimidating people he likes to stomp up behind people and just scare the beast out of them and he's he's still got a lot of unresolved issues we think because of his sudden violent death has anybody captured anything and this happened i'm sorry oh did it where where did this happen again and where i mean what part of the hospital this happened in the men ward of the pollock hospital the pollock hospital is set up like an h shape and the legs of the H are the men ward and the women ward And then the bar of the H is the hallway connecting the two And there are little rooms off of the hallway that used to be used for blood draws and oxygen therapy and exam rooms and stuff. But the two long legs of the H were the men's ward and the women's word and this happened in the man's word and that is where heavy boots is most often experienced is that end of the building too which also leads us to believe that it is jesse what about any kind of uh pictures maybe taken in the hallway of just seemingly nothing there and been able to capture an image of an entity or anything like that or what about evps or have you guys done anything like that see if you can get oh we've got we've got pictures and evps galore i don't know that anyone has captured heavy boots on tape or in a picture but we do have um there's an entity that hangs out in one of the exam rooms on the men's ward end of the hallway that we call mr peekaboo He will lean out, take a look and see what's going on in the hallway, and then he'll dart back. And I think somebody's caught a picture of him at one point. But the interesting thing, now that you ask about EVPs and photographs and whatnot, the interesting thing about fractured spirits and fractured souls in the books is that when you're reading through them, if you find a little ghosty, a cartoon ghosty in the margin, that's your signal that there's extra stuff on the internet. So if I'm talking about, if I'm writing about an EVP that somebody captured, and you see a little ghost, you can go to sylviashultz.wordpress.com, and there's a section there that has recordings from the books, and it'll tell you which page it's on. And you can actually listen to that EVP or watch that video that someone has captured while you're reading the book, while you're reading about that situation. Oh, that's neat. Okay. All right. That's good information right there. Okay. So let's go back to heavy boots real quick. Like when Sylvia, so when people are hearing that, the stomping of the boots, is it an audible sound that the whole group, a whole group of people or maybe a few people are hearing or is it captured by digital recorder? How is that coming across? I don't know if anyone has captured him on a recorder, but there are several people that have heard him. Um, there was, um, the person in charge of the building, Chris was locking up one night after the haunt. They, they run a haunted house through it under the auspices of the Limestone High School JFL. It's a fundraiser for the JFL every year. And Chris and her then boyfriend were locking up. They were locking the doors at night. and Chris started hearing heavy heavy footsteps coming down the hallway and she was convinced that there was somebody a haunt patron who had been locked in and was coming to dress her down coming to give her a piece of her of her his mind and she she said low to her boyfriend her boyfriend was trying to get the lock to work and he had he had the flashlight and Chris wanted the flashlight to see who was coming and she said give me the light and the footsteps kept coming closer and closer and closer and Chris said give me the light and the footsteps were closer and closer just pounding down the hallway and Chris was really getting nervous now but she wanted to see who this was so she yelled Jeff give me the light and he finally heard her and gave her the flashlight and Chris whipped around with the flashlight and the footsteps were right there and there was no one there. Wow that's unnerving and there was another haunt volunteer this is several years ago that was down at that end of the building at the men's ward end of the building and this year with the haunt it was a different year but this year they had a decoration that was a deep barrel with a red light bulb in the bottom of it to cast an eerie glow over that part of the hallway. So she leaned down and unscrewed the light bulb. Everything was cast into darkness, and all of a sudden she hears heavy footsteps coming towards her. And she told me, she said, I had a decision to make. Do I feel around in the bottom of the barrel and screw the light bulb back in? Do I try to find a light switch where I don't exactly know where it is? And these footsteps are getting closer. And she just, her nerve broke and she just ran, ran towards lights, towards safety. And she was just pounding down the hallway and Chris saw her coming. Chris was in her room and saw this girl just run past her. And the girl just turned her head, saw Chris and just said, heavy boots and just kept on booking. I don't blame her. She knew exactly who she meant. Yeah. Sometimes, you know, you just, you got to get the hell out of there. Let me, okay. So I'm wondering also, uh, being that you've been there a lot, you know, trying to investigate some of these hauntings and things. Have you been up there with a medium to try and see if they pick up anything? Oh, I have. And it's the most wonderful experience. I have oh gosh I don't know which story to tell you first I've been up there with several mediums and they have been able to make contact with a couple of the spirits at the asylum and it's just been extraordinary there's a story that I really want to tell you but I I need to tell you about Rhoda first. So I'm going to save that story for another time. But I was there with a different psychic medium and my good friend, Diane, and she came down into the basement of the public hospital. And there was, there is a spirit down there named Christopher that had tried to make contact with me in various ways over a couple of years. He likes to hold my hand, and that was my first experience of him as I felt my hand getting warm during an EVP session, and we had another, a different psychic down there, and she said, oh, yes, there's somebody holding your hand, And that's how we divined that his name was Christopher. And she said, he likes you. I said, well, that's wonderful. So I'm about as sensitive as a dining room table. I don't claim any sensitivity at all. So it was a real treat for me to go down there with Diane and actually have a way to talk with Chris. because I knew he wanted to talk and I wanted to talk to him to find out what his interest was in me. And we found out through Diane's mediumship that he was a young man, died of tuberculosis in the tent colony that was there before the Pollock even existed. And the reason he likes me so much is that I remind him of his sister that he left back in Indiana. He grew up on a farm in Indiana. And Chris and I have had many conversations with Diane's help, and I'll just hit the highlights of them. He said the last year he remembers is 1904, I think. and he said he was very sad about being in the tuberculosis hospital. I mean, obviously the guy was dying of tuberculosis, but he said the thing about the Peoria State Hospital is that they had movies every Friday night and dances every Saturday night. And he said we could hear the dances going on, but we couldn't go and join in because we were in quarantine because of the tuberculosis. And that was so sad. So the next time I went there, I recorded some ragtime music on my phone. And I played it for him. And Diane was there. And I played the music for him. And she said, he's doing something with his hands on his knees. I realized, it took me about three seconds, I said, he's doing the Charleston. He was actually dancing to the music. It was amazing. And when the song was done, he said, no one's ever done that for me before. Thank you. So the next time I came, I taught myself a ragtime dance. And I put that music on my phone and I played it and I set myself up with an invisible partner. And I said, Chris, would you like to dance? And he just jumped at the chance. And so we started dancing. And there's a time in this dance where the woman spins. And the woman is supposed to spin backward because the guy is leading. And of course, like a dork, I spawned forward. And Dan, from where she was sitting across the room, we get to this part of the dance, I start spinning. And she goes, he says you're trying to lead. Who would know that? Except a medium who was listening to the guy getting frustrated because I was trying to lead. And it was just a little stunning thing. And that turned me, if I wasn't a believer before, I would have become a believer right then. Because who would know that, right? And I'm like, oh my God, I'm sorry. I am trying to leave. And yeah, oh, it was just hysterical. I'm sure all three of us were just laughing. That is awesome. Yeah, it was so great. I love Chris and I love interacting with him. And it's really great to have a medium there to be the translator. Yeah. What happened to him? Yeah. He died of tuberculosis in the – there were canvas tents set up on that land. Tuberculosis was a scourge right from the beginning in 1902 when it opened. And Dr. Zeller did a lot with fresh air therapy, and he set up these canvas tents. And he had patients in those tents over the winter of 1904 to 1905. So since Chris says that's the last thing he remembers, the last year he remembers is 1904, Or maybe he was one of those patients that spent the winter in that tent. Now, he did tell Diane that it was very warm if you were next to the stove. But if you weren't next to the stove, it was pretty darn cold in that tent. And so he really gave us a picture of what it was like in that tuberculosis ward before the hospital even was there, when it was just the tents for patient care. Is there a graveyard on the property? There are several graveyards on the property. Um, people were dying from tuberculosis, from pellagra, from, from other diseases that swept through. Uh, so they did need a graveyard right from the very beginning. Um, at the beginning in 1902, there were two graveyards. There was Cemetery One and Cemetery Two. Um, they are both very close to where tuberculosis patients were treated. So they didn't have to carry the bodies very far. Cemetery one was for the people whose families had money. Cemetery one is also the place where all the veterans were buried and every grave, even today, every veteran's grave has a little American flag on it. 24, seven, three 65. Are the headstones still there? Yes. Yes, there are. Um, number two, cemetery two was for the paupers, the people whose families didn't visit them or didn't know they were in there. That was kind of the poor farm burying ground. Um, then when those two got filled up, they went a little farther away and made a really big cemetery, what we call cemetery three, four. it's two but it's one but it's kind of divided in half by a long road and that actually reflects cemetery design of the 1920s you started having cars so you needed a way to get back to the edge of the cemetery because the cemetery was big you could drive a car through it so you put this road in and it's called the path to glory so that is something that started being built into cemeteries in the 1920s. So it's really interesting that the asylum followed that more general idea of cemetery design. How many people were buried there? The headstone? There are 4,132 patients buried there. Wow. I didn't expect you to say that. That represents only about a third of the people that actually died there. Most of the patients were sent home to their families and buried in family plots. Okay. Okay. So let's stay on the graveyard here for a moment. Have you guys investigated, I'm assuming you have investigated the graveyard for any paranormal activity? And if you have, has, you know, have you experienced anything or has anybody captured anything? The graveyards are a very active part of the hilltop. There have been many, many EVPs captured there. Some of them are a little spooky. there was a medium that I talked to that was wandering around the graveyards and a woman came up to her and said I don belong here now whether that meant she didn belong in the asylum or didn realize that she was dead but was still stuck in a cemetery we not exactly sure There are EVPs that are very heartwarming. transforming. Chris, the historian, not the spirit Chris, the living person Chris, the historian of the Peoria State Hospital was giving a tour in the cemeteries one day. And one of the tour members asked, why are so many spirits here? Why is this place so haunted? Why have so many people stuck around and Chris started to say things like the excellent care the patients received the fact that they were treated like family the fact that they were cared for so well and somebody else had a recorder going and before Chris even started talking the guy asked why are there so many spirits around here why they stayed around you hear a young girl's voice on the recorders say they're just so nice here so you can make that out clearly there you can make that clearly yeah okay yeah yeah do you okay so those evps that you guys have been able to capture are those online somewhere that we can hear them or a lot of them are a lot of them are online if you go to sylvia schelps.wordpress.com there is a tab up at the top that says multimedia links for books. And that will say which page of fractured spirits or fractured souls each of these things is on. And it'll give you a link to YouTube or the ghost hunting site or wherever it is that I found this EVP. You can go there and listen to it. Got you. Okay. So I don't know how you would find this out, but I have to put the question to you anyway. What about family members that have came to visit their loved ones there? Do you know if they reported experiencing any type of paranormal activity or seeing something strange or maybe encountering what they thought might have been a ghost? That is a really interesting question. We have been very fortunate with the historical side of the asylum to have of something called the Book of the Dead. When I first started researching at the asylum, I visited the graveyards, and a lot of the stones, especially in Cemetery 2, where the poor people were buried, they don't have headstones. They just have a simple marker, and it's a concrete marker with a number on it. That bothers a lot of people. It bothered me, too, until I figured out why. Illinois law says that you cannot put a name on a headstone unless it's the person's legal name. And a lot of these people came to us unable to tell us their names. They were just known by nicknames. And it's also a privacy issue. If your Aunt Joan died in the asylum and he's buried on the grounds, maybe cousin Kenny doesn't want everyone to know about where Aunt Joan is buried. So it's really a privacy issue just to have the patient's numbers on the tombstones. But we have records going back all the way to the days of Dr. Zeller that tell what names go to which numbers. and we have about a 75% success rate of if somebody stops into the museum, says, hey, I'm looking for my relative that I think might be buried up here. We have a 75% success rate of finding that person in the cemetery and we'll say, oh, she's in cemetery one way back by the tree line or whatever. so there have been people in this area who have come to the cemeteries looking for their loved one and have been able to find their loved one's grave with the help of our historians now as to whether the paranormal crosses over into that historical part or into that very personal part I really haven't heard any tales of that nature. I hope someone shares a story with me like that someday, because that would be just extraordinary. You're exactly right. I mean, I would love, love to know about anything that anyone that came on the property, what they may have experienced while they were there. So, OK, so let's I've got a couple more questions I want to ask you. I'm really interested in the pictures that have been taken over the year, over the years that may have captured spirits lurking around. Can you tell us about those? Oh, I sure can. One of my favorites is a picture that was captured at the field next to the Bowen building, right by the tree line there. The Bowen building was the administration building. It's the one that was investigated by the TAPS crew when they came and did the Ghost Hunters episode Prescription for Fear. They made it out to be a lot scarier than it actually is. there were only three deaths recorded in that building. Dr. Zeller and Sophie both died in that building and there was a housekeeper that passed away too. What happened to Dr. Zeller? What happened to him? He died of old age. He had, gosh, what was his diagnosis? He had some sort of old age type disease. I don't think it was cancer. I don't remember exactly what it was. that he died from. But he had round-the-clock care because he was in one of the apartments in the Bowen building and he had nurses caring for him. And somebody asked him at one point, he said, why don't you go to the hospital in Peoria? And he said, I'm surrounded by the prettiest nurses who give the best care that they can because I trained them. Why on earth would I wanna go to a hospital in Peoria? I'm fine right here. So, yeah, he was darn committed to staying right where he was. I'm sorry, I don't have an answer for you on that. I'm not sure exactly what he died of. I don't think it was one of the biggies or anything. No, that's fine. I just had to ask you. Yeah. So that's the Bowen building. It was the administration building. It was the nurses' classrooms for a very long time. It was the finest nurses college in the country from 1902 to 1936. So it was a really prime institution for the training and education of nurses. The nurses were allowed to, and the other staff members too, were allowed to bring their children to work with them. And the other thing about the asylum, especially in the very early days, was that Dr. Zeller and his staff adored children. They thought children were just the most precious, wonderful thing, which is great. A lot of our very early patients, the female patients, came to us from almshouses where there was not a lot of supervision. A lot of them came to us pregnant. They were allowed to give birth at the hospital, and they were allowed to keep their children with them at the asylum until they were the age of two years old. And at that point, the child would be placed with relatives or taken to Peoria to be put up for adoption if the mother just was unable to care for it. So there were a lot of kids running around, a lot of kids running around. And this picture, oh, yeah, yeah, this was an astounding place. This is completely cutting edge. This picture is in Fractured Souls, and it is a capture that a ghost hunting team made and shared the picture with me. It's a little girl, probably about six years old, and she's got blonde hair. She's facing away from you, so you see the back of her head, and she's wearing a little white pinafore, and she's just standing by the tree line. So we don't know whether this is the child of one of the patients or the child of one of the staff members, and that's the thing. There was no us and them. These kids all played together on the grounds while their parents were working or while their parents were being cared for. There was no distinction between us and them. They all played together. So did children die on a property since there were so many there? I mean, did anything ever happen to them? There were some child deaths, yes. There were, I can't give you exact numbers right now because I don't have them in front of me. But there were deaths in the asylum situation, and some of them were children that were quite young. The asylum actually cared for children as young as five years old. In the 1940s, there was a building set up specifically for the care of psychotic and pre-psychotic children called the Grace Abbott Center. And that was at the very edge of the asylum property in the building that used to house the Alpha Park Library. The library actually moved across the street to a new building, but the old library building used to be the Grace Abbott Center for the care of children who had psychiatric problems. So, yeah, we've been caring for everybody. Wow. Very, very interesting. Okay, so my last question to you is if someone wants to find out the history of these asylums, how would you suggest that they go about doing that? I mean, how are you finding out about the history of events that occurred at Peoria? Well, there are several really good resources. If you can find it, Dr. Zeller wrote a couple of autobiographies. He wrote Befriending the Bereft, and he wrote another book that was simply called The Autobiography of Dr. Zeller. and Peoria Library has those and someone was telling me the other day that they don't circulate that they're just in the historical collection but I got a circulating copy so they are out there there is a wonderful resource in the Peoria State Hospital Museum they have got a wealth of primary material they've got newspaper articles they've got patient newsletters they've got journals of of nurses who used to work there they've got the roster of nurses duties all sorts of things that tell you the daily life of the asylum when it was a going concern. So that's why it's so fascinating to be able to share the history of these places, as well as the hauntings. I really believe that you can't understand the hauntings of a place without knowing the history behind it, because that's why the ghosts are there. They lived through these events. And sometimes they're repeating them, even decades later after their deaths but that's the place where they were most comfortable right um yeah and there are two books about oh there are two books about the history of the asylum uh they are called bittersweet memories and asylum light and those are just straight histories available on amazon Fractured, yep. The two history books are available on Amazon, I believe. I don't think they're out of print. And then my books have both history and hauntings. There's Fractured Spirits, there's Fractured Souls, and there's 44 Years in Darkness, which is about one of the patients at the Peoria State Hospital, a woman named Rhoda Derry. Yes, and I'm going to bring you back to talk about that specifically. And Sylvia's website is sylviaschultz.wordpress.com. I will also have that linked in the show notes. Before you go, Sylvia, are you researching any other asylums in the country? I tell you what, I have been so spoiled by the Peoria State Hospital because they had such high priorities of duty of care to their patients that it's just heart-wrenching to me to visit any other asylum. It's just not the same. I did get to visit Pennhurst. Very, very haunted. And that is going to be an upcoming episode of Lights Out, my podcast. So I will be telling you about my experiences at Pennhurst. And I also did get to visit Waverly Sanatorium, which is a circulosis ward. Tell us about your podcast. Tell us about your podcast. Well, my podcast is called Lights Out. Sometimes you can find out. There are a couple of Lights Out, but if you type in Lights Out with Sylvia Schultz, you're absolutely guaranteed to get the right one. It is available on Audible. You can tell Alexa to play it, and it's available wherever you find good podcasts, Stitcher, Apple Radio, iHeart Radio, iTunes, Spotify. Bye. And you can also, if you just feel like listening to it, you can go to sylviashultz.wordpress.com. There is a tab that is just lights out episodes. I'm also, there's also a lights out page on Facebook. Those are the YouTube links. So if you want to listen to a podcast, that's fine, but it's also on YouTube so you can see pretty pictures. that's awesome sylvia i really enjoyed having you on the show many blessings and i really appreciate your time it was my pleasure thank you so very much for inviting me to find out more about our guest and all others please visit our website at mysteriousradio.com