The Naked Man in the Haunted House

When I was growing up in Rock Island, the western edge of my world was Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and the eastern edge was Lasalle-Peru, about 90 miles away.  I knew Interstate 80 east to Chicago, of course, but we didn't stop at any of those farther towns.  We visited Lasalle-Peru quite often, for jump quizzes at the Nazarene Church and music contests at Lasalle High School, for orchestra concerts and drama club events at Illinois Valley Community College; and several times a year, usually on Saturdays in the summer, went to Starved Rock State Park.

It's named after a sandstone butte where the Illiniwek (after who Illinois is named) were besieged by the Ottawa and Potawatomie tribes until they starved to death.  The story is probably apocryphal, but there is archaeological evidence of human habitation since the Pleistocene Era.  There was a little museum, a trolley, and a lot of hiking trails down the canyon and to see the waterfalls.

On the way home, we drove into Lasalle for ice cream or hamburgers.  About a block from the Dairy Queen (now a gas station) was a  "haunted house," four stories, dark and spooky, with rotundas and staring windows and a light on in the tower.

My friends told rumors about the place:

At night you could see the image of an old man who hanged himself.

There were secret rooms where cultists performed human sacrifices.

And a tunnel that led directly to the cemetery next door.

One day in April 1973, when I was twelve years old, we came to LaSalle for an orchestra concert and stopped at the Dairy Queen afterwards.  It was about ten pm.  We wandered over to the haunted house, dark except for a porch light and a bright yellow light in a third floor window.

My friend dared me to walk up to the front door and knock.

"The porch light is on -- they're expecting you," he said.

Grinning to hide my fear, I approached the house.  But I only got a few feet.  Suddenly a figure appeared at that third floor window.  A young man, shirtless or maybe naked, with thick wavy hair, a broad face with a sharp chin, and a muscular torso.   He was glaring down at me.

A ghost!

We all ran back to the Dairy Queen.

I passed the house a few more times, but never at night, and I never saw another face in the window.

I didn't think anything of it for years.  Then, while researching my series on small-town beefcake for Boomer's Beefcake and Bonding, I thought it would be fun to do Lasalle-Peru.

And I discovered that the haunted house had a name.



It's the Hegler-Caron Mansion, built in 1876 by Edward C. Hegler, a chemist and engineer whose M&H Zinc Company was the biggest producer of zinc in the U.S.  He also founded Open Court Publishing for free and open discussion of Eastern Religions, especially Buddhism.

Daughter Marie (1861-1936), the first female graduate of the School of Mines in Frieburg, took over the family zinc business.  She married Paul Carus (1852-1919), the editor at Open Court Publishing and an author on religious matters, with 75 books (The Gospel of Buddha, published in 1894, introduced most Westerners to Buddhism). 

During the twentieth century, the family business expanded into the Carus Chemical Company, a major producer of potassium permanganate (a water purifier), and Open Court Publishing into philosophy and ethics (it does the pop culture and philosophy series: The Simpsons and Philosophy, Hannibal Lecter and Philosophy, The Walking Dead and Philosophy),  and into children's publishing (Marie's daughter-in-law Marianne runs a conglomerate of children's magazines named after insects: Cricket, Cicada, Muse, Ladybug, Babybug, Spider.)

Alwin (1901-2004), Marie's youngest son, lived in the house through his life.  He attended the University of Chicago, studied chemistry, and worked for the family company.  He also bought and developed farms across the state, and as far away as North Dakota.  His main leisure interests were astronomy (he traveled to view solar eclipses all over the world) and coin collecting.

At first the house was crowded with aunts, uncles, brothers and sisters, but by the 1930s it had emptied out, and Alwin was all alone -- although he entertained many distinguished guests, including Isaac Bashevis Singer, Carl Sandburg,  and Peter Mathiessen.  He worked out in the two-story home gymnasium, watched movies in the home theater, and wandered the rooms, remembering old times, thinking of the Buddhist precept of the impermeance of life.


In  1995 he moved into an apartment on the third floor and opened the Hegeler Carus Mansion as a museum  He died in 2004, just before his 103rd birthday.

Of course, I've been trying to figure out if Alwin was gay.

Evidence against: Open Court Publishing is not necessarily gay-friendly.  A 1984 article in their journal The Monist is about "Why Homosexuality is Abnormal."  Of course, he didn't write the article, but still....

And in the 1950s and 1960s, he supported the right-wing John Birch Society.

Evidence for:  no marriages, no women other than family members mentioned in his personal papers.

And who was the naked man at the window on that warm May evening in 1973?  Not Alwin -- he was over 70.  Maybe one of his nephews or grand-nephews -- but what would they be doing half-naked in Uncle Alwin's bedroom?

Maybe a boyfriend, or a pickup?