The Mineral Springs Hotel stands at 301 East Broadway in Alton, Illinois, a river town on the Mississippi bluffs above St. Louis. It opened in 1914 as a spa, closed as a worn-out hotel, and came back as a shopping mall with an antique trade, a museum of oddities and a year-round schedule of ghost tours. Most of what is said about its ghosts is said by the people who run the tours.
What happened
August and Herman Luer were German-born meatpackers who had expanded from St. Louis into Alton. Around 1909 they began digging on East Broadway for a cold-storage and ice plant, and the excavation hit a spring of strongly sulfurous water. Mineral water was still being sold as medicine, and according to the account the building’s owners give today, a hotel manager named August Ratz talked the brothers into building a spa instead. A bottling plant went in at the bottom of the excavation, several levels below the street, and the hotel rose on top of it in an Italian villa style: five stories, more than a hundred rooms, terrazzo floors, marble stairs and art glass. Advertising claimed the largest swimming pool in Illinois, and the bottled water went to a dozen states with claims that it could cure most things and sober a drunk on the spot.
The hotel did well through the 1920s. Rooms were added in 1925, an orchestra played on Sunday afternoons, and the pool is said to have drawn more than 3,000 bathers in a season. August Luer sold it in 1926. It kept going on a declining trade until the 1960s, when the building was run down and the spa idea long dead; the mall’s own history gives 1971 as the year it finally closed. In 1978 a developer, Roger Schubert, restored the building and reopened it as a shopping complex. The pool was left empty in the basement, and it is still there.
The investigation
No historical society or academic has investigated the ghost claims. The record consists of the mall’s own history, local television features, and the tours run from the building since the 2000s by Troy Taylor, an author of ghost books who keeps a shop and the American Oddities Museum there. Illinois Public Media’s Prairie Fire program has visited, and KMOV in St. Louis has sent reporters on the tour more than once, most recently in October 2025. What they bring back is a set of stories, each tied to a death in the hotel.
The best-known is the Jasmine Lady. Shoppers and tour guests describe a woman glimpsed on one of the staircases late in the day and a sweet floral scent in the halls, and for years the story attached to her was a murder on the stairs. No such murder has ever been found in the record. Taylor now connects her to Pearl Sons, who in 1965 checked into a room, ordered room service and took a fatal overdose of pills; he says a nephew told him she wore jasmine perfume so heavily it gave his mother headaches. The pool has Clarence Blair, an eighteen-year-old sheet-metal worker from Granite City who drowned there during a swimming lesson and was not found for several hours; guests say they have seen a man in tan trousers, a white shirt and a tie at the deep end before he vanished, and some report being tapped on the shoulder. The bar is assigned to L. M. Harwood, a drinker who shot himself there on the morning he was due to check out; in the 1970s shop staff reported a man who smelled of liquor and disappeared when approached. A 2023 KMOV piece adds a girl called Cassie who sits at the edge of the pool with her feet dangling.
The explanations
The deaths are plausible for a hotel that operated for half a century, and the drowning in particular is consistently described as one of the few recorded deaths on the premises. But the ghost stories are not fixed. The Jasmine Lady has been a murder victim and a suicide; the drowned swimmer has been eighteen and twenty-one; the stairwell has been given to Pearl Sons in one telling and to a woman called Mary who fell after a quarrel in another; the name of the pool ghost changes with the guide. None of the sightings has been reported to anyone except the tour operators, who have a shop in the building and a business built on the stories.
The physical setting does the rest. The building is more than a century old, built down into limestone over a spring, with an empty tiled pool in a basement that is damp, echoing and dim. Drafts, moving air from old ductwork and a hundred years of scent in plaster account for a great deal, and the tours are run at night with the lights down.
Where it stands
The Luer brothers’ spa, the bottling works and the biggest pool in Illinois are real and well documented. The deaths that anchor the ghosts are stated by the tour operator rather than from newspaper or coroner’s records that have been published, and the ghosts themselves rest on impressions gathered in the dark. The Mineral Springs is a fine old building with a good story attached to it, and the story is doing well: the mall’s tours sell out every October.