In 1994, Sharyn Luedke’s daughter was taking a summer school class, and the family kept driving past the McPike Mansion in Alton, Illinois. There was an auction sign out front. On the day of the auction, Sharyn called her husband George at work and told him to come home — she wanted to go to the auction. What George did not know, as Sharyn told it on Weird Frequencies Sunday night, is that his wife had every intention of bidding.
She had a number in her head. The bid on the 1869 mansion — a house on the National Register of Historic Places — dropped to $25,000, and Sharyn started raising her hand. When the gavel came down, the Luedkes owned one of the most haunted houses in America for $42,000. Her daughter’s reaction deserves to be carved over the front door: “Mom, do you realize what you just did? We’re going to eat bread and water for the next ten years and I won’t get to go to college.” Sharyn’s update, three decades later: her daughter finished college, and they only eat bread and water on Wednesdays now.
Here’s the part nobody expects. Sharyn will tell you straight out that she is, in her own words, basically a very big chicken. She did not buy the McPike Mansion because she wanted ghosts. She didn’t even know about the house’s reputation when she bought it — and she wasn’t thrilled when she found out.
The house introduced itself soon enough. Working in the double parlor one day, she tripped over boards and bricks and felt a tug on the side of her warm-up jacket — with nobody there to tug it. Another day she came up to water the plants, caught a chill walking between two trees, looked up, and saw a man standing in an upstairs window, dressed in a shirt and tie. She walked to the bird feeder and looked again. Still there. She believes it was Paul, one of the home’s former residents — a man she had never seen a photograph of at that point.
The mansion had a negative reputation in those early days, and the Luedkes answered it the practical way: a house cleansing, a blessing, a purifying. Then they got to work restoring the place — Henry McPike lived there for 40 years, until 1910, and the house passed through other owners, a boarding-house era, and even a stint as Brown’s Business College before it landed, half-forgotten, on that auction block.
Thirty-one years after the bid nobody planned, Sharyn’s goal for the house is simple. She wants people to feel welcome there. Families, skeptics, investigators, wedding parties — she wants it to be a safe, comfortable place where people can enjoy a piece of Alton’s history. “It’s Alton’s history,” she told us. “It’s not my history.”
The tours are done for this season, but the mansion has one more night in it this week — Edgar Allan Poe at the McPike Mansion, this Thursday, October 29 at 7 PM, with Howard Hirshfield performing as Poe. Twenty dollars at the door, or register online through Ticketleap. After that, the 2027 tour schedule goes up at McPikeMansion.com around February, with tours starting in April.
Not bad for a $42,000 accident.