public

Heavily Investigated

The corn stretches flat and silent around this three-story brick building, and something about the way it simply stands there — patient, attentive — sets visitors on edge before they've crossed the threshold. Inside, people swear they feel small fingers close around theirs in the dark: Elva, they call her, a child legend says never made it out. Down in the basement, something heavier paces — the restless shape of Joe Bloxom, a man reportedly struck by a train on the nearby tracks who dragged himself all the way back here to die. Ashmore keeps its dead close.

Built in 1916 as the second almshouse for the Coles County Poor Farm — itself dating to 1857 — this Neo-Georgian brick building housed the destitute, infirm, and mentally ill for decades. In 1959 it was sold and reborn as a private psychiatric facility; what followed was debt, closure, reopening, overcrowding, and final shutdown in 1986. Teenagers and vandals inherited it next. The documented record reads as a slow institutional tragedy. The legends that metastasized in the rubble read as something else entirely.