Haunted House Chicago - Behind the Screams with Ravens Grin Inn

JW: This is the perfect house for what I'm doing here. No other structure (still standing) would even come close. With its haunted reputation, its size, its wine cellar, its location, already in an area zoned "commercial", at the end of a dead end street, all by itself, across from the graveyard. There was a very old house right next to the graveyard that no one had lived in for the last 50 years. It would have been quite "something", but it's gone now. Parking would have been an incredible problem there, whereas it is "Cemetery Hill", a very steep street to get up there.

JW: My inspiration probably mostly originates from the high moral ground seen in the old issues of MAD Magazine. Nobody and nothing was immune from their humor (because everything and everyone has ego and the faults that go with it!)

HHC: How many years has it taken you to get Raven's Grin Inn to its current state?

JW: "Illinois" was a state before this house was built! I've owned the house for 16 years and I work on it everyday doing something. When I got this house it had been a severely neglected property for many years. No one had even lived in for two years before I got it, so about half of the windows were broken out, the roof had softball-sized holes in it, the heating plant was junk (a huge boiler and pipes all over the basement to remove), the wiring was total junk and unusable, the plumbing froze up every winter because the sewer pipe from the house was only buried 1/2 inch under the ground (Mount Carroll held the distinction as being "The Coldest Town in Illinois for many years!) The house hadn't been painted in at least 20 years. Numerous beams in the basement were rotted through because the water always standing in the wine cellar created a situation of nonstop molding as the air currents would circulate this moist air. Turning on the sump pump would have cured this. The house was full of junk furniture and every water heater and water softener ever installed here, but the real "winner" was the pile of tree limbs and brush about 20 feet from the house that was almost as big as the house! (Just throw a match in this and walk away! Sure!) I tore down an old farmhouse to get some lumber before I officially owned this place and I have been given a lot of other wood throughout the years and it's always helped, along with other things people have given me, dumped off in my yard, but now people, it's TIME TO STOP DUMPING IN MY YARD! Please! This house is surrounded by the old downtown city dump, here at the edge of the bluff. I have found most of the really old car parts here that I have used as display pieces, so I'm way ahead of the average dumpster-diving haunter in this respect! When I have antique car club groups here for a tour I ask them if they would rather forego the tour and I'll just rent them shovels instead! Every time I dig a hole here for anything (my last two wives just seemed to "vanish"), I always hit car parts, or wagon parts, "Parts is Parts!"

HHC: A trip through Raven's Grin Inn is like none other. What are some of the comments you get as your patrons leave your house?

JW: Well, they almost all say that they have never experienced anything even close to it before. I like to hear this. I see this as "Job-Security" and it is in the long run the best advertising, to get your customers to sing your praises!
Some adults express wonder at the time and effort I put in on the house and their tour, but why would someone drive 3 hours and spend the time and money to see this (and thereby keep me in business), if it was just a 15 minute walk-through? I am my own worst enemy in this regard. I have trouble not giving every tour a tremendous amount of effort and attention. I run through the tour making sure that all of these "little things" are just "SO", certain little props in the right place, certain switches in the right position and as I'm narrating the tour. I'm listening to how my voice sounds, the word choices the inflections, most of all the timing of what is said to achieve the maximum reactions from the people.
One night as it was about time to open, I discovered that a tremendous canker sore had developed inside my mouth. it was so painful I put myself in pain just to say anything. I found if I could keep my tongue totally away from it, I could talk with little pain. So I bit down hard on my tongue to hold it where it had to be and I did two tours talking this way (with no explanation to the customers of course! ha ha!) I sounded like a combination of the characters "Gym Shorts", a Kevin Mathew's radio voice and "Crazy Guggenheim" from the old Jackie Gleason TV show. " Wheezing, whining, slobbering, gasping" would sort of tell you what it sounded like. The looks of utter amazement on the faces of the couple of people that where bringing their friends back here for tours that night were priceless, especially when I talked like this for about 3 hours straight!

JW: I really like the wine cellar. It mystifies me, the labor it required to construct such an underground "vessel", a room 16 by 31 with a 16 ft. high stone arch ceiling with large portions of it carved from the solid bluff cliff, like for instance, the entire floor! It is also the most haunted room of the house. Although lately some other rooms have become "active" that never were to my knowledge. I also like the spook house front room because I have entertained and introduced so many people to the house in this room, seen their reactions and laughed an awful lot here! "You never get a second chance to make a first impression", and I have really had a lot of wildly funny things go on in the living room, over the last year and a half I have even scared the "crap" out of a lot of them in there. I get them so worked up that they won't get out of their seat to just walk to the front of the room to see if I'm real or a ghost! What could be better or more fantastic than to get a tour of a real haunted house being given by a real ghost? This is the kind of entertainment and story and mood-setting that requires time to communicate with the people. This "time " factor is important to me and I wouldn't try it any other way. It limits the "throughput" but certainly not the "experience" and free word of mouth is positive "P R". I need people to come back here to Mount Carroll, Illinois, "Middle-Of-Nowhere", come back and make this all keep happening!

HHC: Some may not know it, but you actually live inside Raven's Grin Inn. How is it residing in the haunted house?

JW: My ex-wife tolerated it for seven years, since you live in the place of business, you're "Always at Work" and some people think that even if it's 3 am and they are drunk and they only have $1.98 in their pocket (the bartender got the rest) that they have the right to beat your door down and demand a tour! I learned to handle it by telling them to go down the block to the 24 hour Wal-Mart Spook house (Mount Carroll, pop. 1,700, middle of nowhere, remember!) They shuffle off mumbling and looking... My ex-wife also was picked on and given special shows by the supernatural here. She didn't appreciate their efforts. My experiences here have not so much as frightened me as intrigued me. I guess I'm just a lot more curious than skittish, and remember, my own Great-grandfather worked here, I feel comfortable here, mostly.
The first night I owned the house I slept in the basement looking at the dark wine cellar (no electricity yet), waiting for those burning, glowing red, floating eyes to come up out of there at me, they didn't. When we would hear what sounded like a whole roomful of people talking and laughing, with a little music playing in the background just on the other side of the wall at 2 am, I would go over and find a totally empty, quiet room, with no source for the sounds outside the house either (dead-end street, quiet little rural town). I just hope someday I can be invited to this party, it sounds like fun!, oh, wait, I forgot, I was going to live forever! Cancel that!

HHC: You have mentioned some true hauntings at your place, want to share some stories?

JW: The first two weeks I owned this house many former tenets of the five apartments came down here to tell me about the things that they had experienced while trying to live here, which I found interesting since the house had sat empty for two years, and I'd never told these people that I bought the house or that I was trying to create a "Haunted House" business? Groups of people coming through the house during the first few years would tell me about a "Lady-In-White" that would appear from the northeast corner of the wine cellar! They always thought that I was doing this as a special effect!? (I would be a very wealthy person if I knew how to do this!) She would sometimes appear, float about three feet above the floor, then travel almost halfway across the room, then fly upward and disappear through a small vent hole in the ceiling! Then six years ago I was told that she's been appearing since at least 1925! She ruined a fellow's "Speakeasy" business he tried to have down there, and all that she had to do was just show up! A little more than a week ago there was a small group of five here in my front room, one guy, four girls, all college students. One girl asked, "How often do supernatural things happen here?" I said, "It seems to happen every other month around the beginning or end of the full moon." Just then a very strange sound/noise came from behind me. I had touched nor bumped anything, and my flashlight wasn't helping me find what had made that noise. The guy said, "I think that something fell off of you television set." The little (child-sized) paper mache skull (like you can buy almost anywhere) was gone from it's high "perch" and was now 12 feet away at the feet of the girl who had just asked the "Supernatural Frequency" question!
I have "test-dropped" this skull several times, it never rolls this far! When I tell people about this, I hold the skull on the floor in the position it was in that night, looking up at this girl, at a 45 degree angle, I take my hand off of the skull and it rolls to another position because of its center of gravity won't normally allow it to rest this way, at this angle! If I had tried and knew how to do this for a trick or effect, I couldn't have done it or timed it any better! It's a Haunted house!
To tell of all the ghostly, strange things that have happened here takes a lot of time and I type pretty slow; maybe someday it will be a book, available at the Ravens Grin INN!? Former employees and wives can vouch for the events that have happened here, of course none of them want to be standing in front of a documentary camera that would be down in the wine cellar, they won't go in that room again! Especially my "ex", she had her hair pulled three times rather forcefully one night as she got herself all "brave" and went down there to help me on a busy September night.

HHC: From Chicago, Raven's Grin Inn is about 3 hours away (and well worth the trip.) What is the greatest distance that someone has traveled to see your house?

JW: Just a few weeks ago six middle-aged men drove here from Fort Wayne, Indiana, just to see my house, they said, two of them had been here before. A little boy saw the house on the cover of National Geographic World Magazine and even though he lives in Arizona, he talked his grandfather into bringing him here when he was visiting Grandpa in Chicago. I have has haunters from around the country, one drove 1200 miles from Texas just to see the place, more of them come here during the Transworld show in March, I try to make it the "high point" of their week, but I always tell them the "Bad News" at the tour's conclusion, they got the same tour that I give to everyone else!

JW: Besides turning on the panel switches, and picking up any tools that I was using that day, sometimes I have to wake up Mr. Tuxedo, the spook house cat for his part of the show (Yes, he's a real cat!) I might have to give him a squeeze for more free complimentary sticky-moustaches for the customers to put on their upper lips as disguises, a very unique product to the Ravens Grin Inn!

JW: My third wife drank something called "Red"? I don't drink any alcohol, I've never done any drugs, so if you like things you see here that I've done or if you don't like them, IT'S ALL ME! No excuses, or all the credit, whichever way it is! Good or not! I take the responsibility.

JW: This haunted house business is pretty all-consuming of time / energy / thoughts, but I draw and write sometimes, usually just totally politically crackpot stuff trying to draw sniper fire from the government. No. I assembled a lot of plastic model kits for awhile, but I always find myself just thinking and doing stuff directly related to this house and business enterprise, it requires a lot of time, phone and e-mailing potential customers with information they want and need, I do my own artwork for signs, and brochures, I detest "Clip-art", for my house, whereas I want to be and look like I want it to look, efforts from me of mine, I'm not selling cans of beans here or hamburgers, but if I don't realize this and promote this, who will?

HHC: Spiderman is the talk of the town right now. If you could have any superpower, what would it be?

JW: I would like the power to levitate myself more than just 18 inches off of the ground, I'm not getting any younger and it is sort of discouraging after all this practice to still be below the two foot range in this skill!

JW: It would have to be "Grabstein Feinsmuckker".
About 18 years ago there was a Halloween costume contest in which they printed the rules and criteria as being that they would give the $300.oo first place prize to the most original costume. I told my wife that I would build a costume to win that contest. I sewed and messed with latex for a month in my spare time, I went to the contest. Later when I got home, I was excitedly telling my wife about all the neat entries and who got 4th place, who / what got 3rd place, and who got 2nd place! Then she finally asked, "Well, who got first place?' "Why I did, of course!" I felt as if I was actually scaring people at the costume contest when they had all the lights turned up, maybe I was? Some people think "Grabstein" sort of resembles "Predator", only thing is, I made my costume a whole year before that movie came out! But then, I don't know? My huge skeleton costume was pretty gratifying too. I used tree limbs that were laying in the gutter in front of my old house to make the arm bones, I built some crude platforms for my shoes so I was a foot and a half taller, then his head was huge and way above mine, I was looking out from the chest moving the arms with steel control rods (just like everyone has sticking out of their bodies!) neighborhood kids asked me what I was going to be this Halloween, I said, "I'll be the guy that you will be running down the street to get away from!" And I was! People "Gave Me Hell" for days after the parade for scaring their kids, I never was within 80 feet of some of them! "We had to take our kid home from the parade you frightened him so bad!" "Sorry!" The next year a rather small woman really wanted to rent this skeleton costume from me, so I let her, she discovered that as a costume maker, my costumes turn out to be more torture devices for the person wearing it than just costumes! It adds to that "Monster Personality" coming from inside the burlap!

JW: I marvel at those old silent horror movies, the images they created are more disturbing and horrific than anything since, maybe it's the black and white bad-dream quality to them? Nosferatu, Phantom Of the Opera, Cabinet of Dr. Caligary, (Metropolis) My favorite movie made after 1930 is Vincent Price in "House On Haunted Hill", I will always remember in the theater when the girl's face covers half the movie screen and suddenly the other half of the screen shows us the blind-witchy-looking caretaker's wife! Wow! Everybody jumped right up in their seats!

JW: Bela Lugoosey, he was always a lot of fun, he always played "Bela"no matter what the part, and that's just the way we liked it! Menacing with every action, with each word, each nuance.

JW: Rammstein, and not because of the pyrotechnics ("Hey Body, got a light?" you mean "Buddy?" No", Body"! At my age I gave up trying to understand lyrics in music long ago, with Rammstein I don't even have that option, so it saves me time and debate.

HHC: Finally, what would like to say to all your fans and everyone that is reading this interview and considering making the trip to visit your house?

JW: I really appreciate everyone that has supported this "experience", and I know that some people think that the fall is the time to see "Haunted Houses", and some people will never be convinced otherwise, but to come here in the other seasons of the year you will see a different house and tour than October can provide, it might prove to be a lot more basically frightening (and entertaining) than you would ever expect! My past patrons have told me (and even complained about) how they or someone they are close to have become nuisances concerning my house, telling everyone they know about it, fixating upon it, dwelling about their experiences here and eventually boring everyone they know to death!
Learn to pace yourself if this is you, refocus this energy into being more quiet, quietly drive the unsuspecting to my door, then tell then, "No, it's not a restaurant nor outpatient clinic, but we ARE GOING INSIDE and going inside NOW!"

Jim Warfield is the owner and director of Raven's Grin Inn Haunted House, located in Mt. Carroll, Illinois. This interview was originally posted on Haunted House Chicago during July of 2002.