McPike Mansion: Alton's Victorian Time Capsule

The brick Victorian structure rising on Alby Street is the McPike Mansion, begun in eighteen sixty-nine and widely regarded as one of the most significant historic properties in Illinois , and, depending on who you ask, one of the most haunted.

Henry Guest McPike commissioned the house at the height of his civic prominence. A successful businessman, real estate developer, and dedicated horticulturist, McPike had become one of Alton's most influential figures. He hired the local architect Lucas Pfeiffenberger to design a sixteen-room Italianate Victorian home with a full basement and a vaulted wine cellar beneath the grounds. Pfeiffenberger was one of the most prolific builders in Alton's history, responsible for numerous commercial and institutional structures across the region.

McPike's real passion, however, was his land. He cultivated an extensive grove of fruit trees across the surrounding property and grew grapes, including a Rulander that won praise at an eighteen sixty-nine grape growers exhibition. He entertained widely, and the house became a center of Alton's social life in the final decades of the nineteenth century. McPike died in nineteen ten of a brief illness, in the house he had occupied for four decades.

Afterward, the property passed through a succession of owners and eventually fell into abandonment. For decades, the mansion sat empty, its windows broken, its plaster cracking, its grounds overtaken by vegetation. It became one of those buildings that a town notices only for its slow disappearance.

In nineteen ninety-four, new owners purchased the property with a commitment to restore it. Conservation and stabilization work has continued for more than thirty years, and the mansion is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The stories of supernatural activity are unavoidable. Ghost-hunting television programs have filmed here multiple times. The current owners report the persistent scent of lilac perfume in the upper rooms , said to belong to a former domestic servant named Sarah Wells. A later owner named Paul Laichinger, who rented out rooms in the house, is also frequently named in accounts of the property.

What is undeniable is the building's architecture. The Italianate bracketing, the tall narrow windows, the projecting cornice, the heavy stone foundation , it is an artifact of a particular moment in American prosperity. Alton was once a significant river port and commercial city, and the McPike Mansion is a remnant of that wealth, still standing despite everything.