The Mineral Springs Hotel and the Jasmine Lady

Brothers August and Herman Luer, meatpackers who arrived in Alton in 1881 and 1893 respectively, first planned an ice-storage plant on the site. While digging a well for the project, workers struck a sulfur-rich mineral spring. Hotel manager August Ratz persuaded the brothers to build a spa hotel instead, promoting the water as a “drunk cure.” Construction began in October 1913, and the hotel opened the following June with a grand opening in September 1914.

The finished structure was in an Italian Villa style with over 100 rooms, and the lavish hotel was five stories tall. At its opening it boasted the “largest swimming pool in Illinois.” Rooms were added in 1925; that same year a female guest fell to her death on a staircase, ruled an accident with no evidence of foul play. August Luer sold the hotel in 1926.

The building declined from the 1960s and closed, by most accounts in 1971, when it was condemned. Roger Schubert restored it in 1978 as an antique and shopping mall. A bar mural painted in 1932 was also restored at that time. Clarence Blair, a sheet metal worker from Granite City, drowned in the hotel pool while taking swimming lessons; Troy Taylor has called this one of the only recorded deaths during the hotel’s years of operation.

When the hotel was still operating, staff members and guests caught glimpses of a woman’s fall down a staircase near the former lobby, along with whiffs of a jasmine scent on and near the stairs. Former building owner Bob Love, who told Troy Taylor in 1998 that he did not believe in ghosts, said: “One morning I walked into the building and I smelled a strong, almost putrid, jasmine scent. It was strange.” A shopper told Taylor that after smelling the perfume at the bottom of the stairway she felt a cold chill “almost like a breeze blowing,” and of the signs that hang in front of the stores down the hallway, “all of the ones close to me start swinging back and forth.” A legend links this figure, the so-called Jasmine Lady, to the 1925 staircase fall; one tourism-bureau account names her Mary and says she fell after a quarrel with her husband, though the 1925 death was ruled an accident.

A 2002 employee heard water sounds from a dry pool and found wet footprints that vanished. Guests have reported seeing a figure at the pool’s edge, and visitors say they have been touched or tapped on the shoulder there. Troy Taylor spent a night in the swimming pool room, and he writes that three people present heard the sound of hard-soled shoes walking across the floor in the pitch dark; when they turned on a light, no one else was in the room.

In the bar, a figure called Charlie is said to be an artist who painted the mural; mall employees in the 1970s reported encountering a man who vanished when approached and smelled of a distillery. Lou or L.M. Harwood, said to have died at the hotel bar, is also said to haunt it. Investigators describe EMF readings and EVP recordings; the local tourism bureau says these reportedly captured words such as “Norman,” “assault,” “fall,” and “Mary.”

Taylor, who runs ghost tours and a museum from the building, acknowledges that “fiction mixes extensively with fact” at the hotel, and he calls the story of a man who drowned in the pool after an argument with his wife a great example of local “ghostlore” with no record behind it. The itinerant-artist origin for the mural has no record of support; Schubert suggested such a story more as a joke than anything else. Illinois Public Media notes that no murder has been proven to have occurred in the stairwell, and the 1925 death was ruled an accident. Dave Nunnally, who with his wife Donna manages the hotel day to day, separates “actual hauntings,” spirits of people who died there, from “folklore” hauntings, spirits he believes chose to come to the hotel in the afterlife.

Today the building houses an antique mall, including Troy Taylor’s shop and museum, which is the starting point for most of his guided ghost tours.