by Terry Lidral
Vishnu Springs, Illinois has a colorful tale of haunting stemming from its duplicitous past. Located east of Macomb, the land, complete with a mineral spring, was bought in the 1840’s by an Ohio transplant named Ebeneezer Hicks. Seeing the spring as a potential source of easy income, Dr. A. W. Aiken, an opportunistic entrepreneur, engaged to rent the land with the spring from Hicks. Aiken’s “healing water” – that professed to cure ills and ailments ranging from baldness and headaches to stomach ulcers- proved to be a great financial success.
By 1889, Ebeneezer Hick’s son Darius had inherited the land containing Vishnu Springs. The adjacent LaMoine River also bore the reputation of having healing powers in its water. Seeing a way to expand the profit potential of the lucrative “healing” water of Vishnu Springs, the younger Hicks built a hotel and resort on the riverfront property that promoted the medicinal powers of the LaMoine. Several thousand visitors came annually to the remote resort in the town of Vishnu Springs that had grown to 30 homes, sports fields, a race track, a school and a horse driven carousel.
Bootleggers and gangsters used the out-of-the-way resort as a hideaway and there are rumors that it was frequented by the legendary Al Capone. Fights, stabbings and the death of a man crushed by the carousel muddied the resort’s reputation and when Darius Hicks married his stepdaughter after his wife Maude died in childbirth, scandal drove Hicks and his new wife out of town.
Darius Hicks was known for his womanizing. It is said his housekeeper, after being left in a shameful state of pregnancy by Hicks, terminated the pregnancy, ruining Hick’s reputation. Read more of the story here: http://www.ghosthuntergirls.com/places/il/vishnusprings.html
It is this scandalous chain of events surrounding Darius Hicks’ less that sterling morals that has produced what is said to be the ghostly hauntings of Vishnu Springs by his greatly wronged first wife, Maude. Because of its far removed location and criminal activity, the small town never thrived and in the 1920’s Vishnu Springs was all but abandoned.
A local resident by the name of Ira Post bought the property and revived the original hotel and resort in 1935. The business met with some financial success until the mid-1950’s. Post died in 1951 and his wife closed the hotel a few years after due to ongoing vandalism and crime.
In the 1970’s Vishnu Springs was once again opened as a resort, this time to college students who turned it into what was said to be a commune. But, like all previous ventures, the resort of Vishnu Springs was closed down.
Today, thanks to the generosity of the Post family who gifted the property to Western Illinois University (WIU), Vishnu Springs now serves as a wildlife sanctuary for ecology classes and research. The resort hotel has been renovated for use by the WIU students participating in ecology studies.
