411 North Carroll St.
Mount Carroll, Illinois 61053
1-815-244-GRIN (4746)
Open 360 nights a year
Admission: $10/ person
www.hauntedravensgrin.com
Mon.-Fri. 7 pm-12 am and Sat.-Sun. 2 pm-5pm/7 pm-12 am
Tour lasts 60-90 minutes
“Hyde and Shriek” parties for ten or more by reservation
If you plan to make the trip to Mount Carroll and the Raven’s Grin Inn, please call first

In the quiet little town of Mount Carroll, Illinois, on the steep slopes of the Waukarusa River, sets a large property known as the Raven’s Grin Inn. Only a block off of the cities town square, the 3 story Italianate residence is literally in the alley behind the hardware store. What at first appears to be a junkyard slowly begins to materialize into a collection of macabre artworks purposely arranged around the building. There are nuclear submarines partially submerged in the yard, monsters and an alien space ship on the roof, (under a tarp marked “Top Secret.”). Some of these entertaining sculptures are merely twisted whimsical art while others actually cap sub-terrainian passageways dug into the property to lengthen the tour.

“Customized” or should I say, “altered” automobiles, which are both works of art and promotional vehicles, are parked at the entrance of the attraction. Bizarre signage tells visitors to ring the doorbell, which summons the owner, creator, tour guide and head bottle washer, Jim Warfield, who unsuspectingly pops up from behind the door of a taxi cab built right into the side of the house. This is where you buy your $10 ticket. “These are ‘Sticker-tickets,’ they don’t stick well to leather or vinyl, so don’t put them on your underwear!” Jim says. When asked if children are $10 admission also, Jim replies, “Yes they are, but they should be more!” Most parents chuckle at this, because they know their kids, and they know Jim is right! “I sometimes learn a lot about how the tour is going to go from the act of selling them their tickets,” explains Jim. People who are negative, or obviously don’t want to be there are the toughest audiences. Jim changes the routine for each group. He also tries to pick up names of the patrons, or if they are in a church group, or they mention something that happened to them the last time they went to a haunt. Jim then uses this information in his shtick to the delight of his guests. The show is true performance art.

After purchasing admission through the inventive and functional ticket window, you wait anxiously to be let inside. Strange little details of the décor catch your nervous attention, such as the entrance door knob that is actually the barrel of a shotgun. Suddenly, with a creaking and groaning noise of metal, the front door which you presumed would hinge open in a normal fashion starts to swing down like a drawbridge! You begin to wonder what you have gotten yourself into as you enter the dark opening with the sounds of chain clanking the door shut. For the last 17 years, the Raven’s Grin has been a labor of love for the talented Warfield. If you have visited any of the many industry message boards, you have most certainly witnessed one of the hundreds of Jim’s off the wall sometimes inspirational, mostly frantic, but always bizarre posts, (or at least one from Jim’s cat and partner in crime and Raven’s Grin co-host, Mr. Tuxedo)

Jim was born and raised in Mount Carroll and has spent most of his life there. Raised the son of a hardworking sheet metal, plumbing, and metal duct worker, Jim followed in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps in working for the family business. Jim’s hard work ethic has served him well throughout his tenure at the Raven’s Grin, as he has mostly done all of the work on the place himself. “I have never believed that two people can outwork one motivated person” explains Jim. “Just the time it takes to communicate what the one person wants the other one to do, sucks away the time that could be spent actually doing.”

As a youth, Jim and his friends haunted the dark coal storage in his parent’s basement. They would tell each other scary ghost stories, making up tales based on influences of Vincent Price and the classic Hammer films. Growing up, many people complimented

Jim on how creatively talented and artistically insightful he was with comments like, “Jim, yer Crazy, Yer Nuts!” Then in 1975, as a member of the Mount Carroll Jaycees, Jim handled most of the design, building, and operation of their first annual Haunted House. It was held in an old run down house not far down the street from the current Raven’s Grin Inn. While they did not have a large budget to work with, they managed to get good results with what they had by using a little ingenuity. Not much more than a large shack, the building had holes rotted through it from top to bottom, but is actually still standing. After some issues dealing with the property owner, Jim and the Jaycees decided to look for a different location for the second annual Haunt.

For the 1978 Mount Carroll Jaycees Haunted House, Jim and other volunteers set up their haunt in a portion of the basement and the entire wine cellar of the an old building next to a cemetery with an assorted past, and an even more questionable future. The upper levels of the building were occupied residential rental units. It was the perfect location for a Haunted Attraction, as rumors and legends of supernatural occurrences from the basement wine cellar has been circulating amongst town members for years.

The structure had been many businesses over its dreary history. In the mid-late 1800s it was a tavern, then school classrooms, a brewing company, and at one point it was even an Oldsmobile dealership. Jim’s great, great grandfather Ely Warfield actually worked in the old house as a bartender in 1908. Many owners tried to improve the property, but they continually lost money on the building as the tenants were frightened away by unexplainable voices and happenings.

The following season, the Jaycees Haunt moved again, and for the next few years Jim continued to work with the Jaycees on their Haunted Houses. Soon Jim tired of the work required to motivate others, “The prodding it required to get anyone else to come work nights or to help clean up and truck it all away after it was over was a real pain”, recalls Jim who decided to set his sights on purchasing property himself and put together his own unique style of entertainment. Not just an October fund raiser, but a year round Haunted Attraction complete with a bed and breakfast, where you could stay the night in a real Haunted House!

The key problem was the same as many haunters have encountered; money. Finding financing through the typical routes was going nowhere, then one day he had an idea. He decided he would look for someone who had made a lot of money from an idea that nobody else thought would ever work. They had been in Jim’s position and would be able to relate to his frustration. As luck would have it, that person happened to call Jim to fix a faucet. The relationship that formed from that need of a handyman provided Jim with a loan to pursue his dream, and with $3000 he bought the old building that the Jaycees once haunted the basement and wine cellar. The one that was rumored to be really Haunted.

“The city graveyard and all of my relatives are outside my westerly windows on the next hill across the parking lot,” states Jim, “The tallest stone up there has my last name on it, because it belongs to my Great-great-Grandfather,” to which Jim ads, “That is where he spent all of his money, on that stone!” Jim spent the first year working on saving the building, improving the building’s interior and exterior. It had been vacant for a few years and was in dire need of repair. Word spreads quickly in a small town, and soon everyone knew of Jim new business venture. As he started working on the building people with various ties to the place began to approach Jim with different ghost stories that he would later use as tales to work into his show. “When we had our JC-house down there we had one instance of a teenage girl claiming ‘someone’ had kissed her, fully upon the mouth when in the pitch black wine cellar,” recalls Jim, “I was positive it was none of our doing, considering the personnel who were in the room that night...”

In less than a year Jim opened the Raven’s Grin Inn with not much more than his now-famous “bad dream” bed-slide, but Jim stall managed to pull in enough people to repay the investment. At the time, bed and breakfast businesses were still in the experimental phase, and became a short lived part of the Raven’s Grin Inn. “Some people came here expecting a Victorian palace, wrong! I would take them through for a complete tour of the house then show them their bedroom, Jim recalls. At this point about a third of the people would say something like, “We are going up the street for a beer, we will be back in a little while,” never to be seen again! They never even slept in the bed, “Easy money,” jokes Jim. One room if the Gin is set up as a guestroom. If you are brave enough! Adding to the show frequently, it was three or four years before Jim really had something he felt was worth promoting more widespread. He contacted the Chicago Tribune and drew comparisons between the Raven’s Grin and the seven floor urban legend haunted house, that you get your money back if you get out in under a time limit. After all, the likenesses were compelling. The Grin has seven physical levels, a slide, a guaranteed money back scare (which only 2 people have tried to collect on) and a mysterious remote location on a dead end street right next to the city graveyard.

The paper gave Raven’s Gin Inn a much larger spread than the other local Halloween events that year and the following media frenzy left Jim’s phone ringing off the hook. That season, business boomed, and Jim became the local hero to small businesspeople of Mount Carroll, from the quickie mart to the town’s hotels and restaurants. In the years that would follow, The Raven’s Grin became somewhat of a media magnet, annually drawing reporters from the local newspapers and television news stations. Jim and the Raven’s Grin have been seen on the Comedy Central show Travel Sick, the Home and Garden Network show Extreme Homes, the show Wild Chicago, and has even been on the cover of the magazine National Geographic World. He was also featured in the book Odd-Ball Illinois (for some strange reason).This constant free publicity has made the Grin into a legend while Jim’s more expensive purchases of advertising have yielded little success.

The following March, Jim was working on his next creation when and some people who claimed they were in the “Haunted Attraction Industry” happened to stop by for tours of his Haunted abode. Jim had no idea that there was a Haunted Industry, but they told him about a Halloween show that was underway in Chicago and invited him to check it out. Jim was delighted to discover that there were others who shared his passion for scaring people, and as the years went buy many more Haunters would make the two plus hour trek to Mount Carroll from Rosemont every March.

His house is so full of artistic details and ingenious frightful inventions, that it is impossible to soak it all up with only one visit. He combines elements of vaudeville, haunted history, storytelling, humor, artwork, and imaginative thrills to create a one of a kind environment unlike any other haunted attraction. During the 60 to 90 minute tour, you will encounter “wondrous things!” You will find a time machine, coffin shaped tunnels, crawl tubes, a refrigerator that “comes from someplace else,” secret passage ways hidden in shelving and fireplaces, Nazi Babes on a World War II tank, nooks and crannies with poor “souls” still in them, a presents in the corner of the wine cellar, mazes, the world’s smallest chainsaw, the path of doorways and what the inside of a 60 foot tower looks like. Even going up the stairs of the house becomes a sensory overload of wall art, there are unexpected things everywhere.

With his dim little flashlight in hand, Jim uses his storytelling ability to lure customers into a false sense of security, setting them up for the big scare when they least expect it. Jim never gives the exact same tour twice so you will undoubtedly have a unique experience at his show. “I wanted to be and remain as ‘original’ as possible, so anyone coming here for the tour wouldn’t be saying ‘Seen that, done that before,’ or ‘Oh you copied this.’ Jim states, “Stimulation usually comes from experiencing something our brain doesn’t recognize, something considered new or different.”

Haunted History
In the first floor bedroom on the southeast corner of the house, voices have been known to call people’s names awakening residents from a sound sleep. In the very same bedroom, a woman once witnessed a ghostlike glowing apparition materialize out of the bedroom wall, then travel up the wall and across the ceiling. As she watched this happen, terrified in her bed, she thought to herself that she had to be dreaming. Just then, she happened to notice that her dog which had been sleeping on the floor of the bedroom was awake, and was tracking the ghost’s movement across the ceiling as well! Jim says, “Maybe they were both having the same dream?”

The lowest level of the Raven’s Grin Inn attraction is the wine cellar, 24 feet underground. Below the basement of the house, the cellar is the last stop for the bad dream bed slide and supernatural events have been happening there on a regular basis for as long as anyone can remember. “Not long after opening the house for tours,” recalls Jim, “people began telling me about ‘A Lady-In-White’ appearing in the northeast corner of the wine cellar.”

Sometimes she just appears and disappears, sometimes she comes floating out of her corner about three or four feet above the ground and goes flying up through an 11 by 11 inch vent hole in the ceiling! Some photographs of the wall that the Lady-In-White materializes from have captured a white glow in the appropriate spot in the photo, (I tried this myself, with no luck). The earthly visitors would often ask Jim how he created the ghost illusion, to which Jim replies, “If I could make real ghosts appear like that on command, I would be selling my services at the Halloween Show in Rosemutt, and not living in this one haunt town answering silly questions!”

Over the years, Jim has been able to piece together who he thinks is the ghost really is. The story goes like this…

During prohibition in the early 1900’s, the Raven’s Grin Inn was used as speakeasy and legend has it that the owner of the tavern paid the boat fare of a young German immigrant girl named Eileen. To pay back this debt, Eileen would have to work for the bar owner for three years. Eileen had decided not to fulfill this requirement, perhaps because of the cruelty of the speakeasy owner, or because she had fallen in love and wanted to marry one of the patrons. The owner, hearing rumors of the planned escape, chained the girl to the wall in the wine cellar. Passersby heard screams coming from the vent holes of the cellar and entered the building to investigate, but the girl had mysteriously vanished, never to be seen alive again. (Actually Jim has no idea who the ghost is and this story has little basis in fact.)

A former tenant of the building did claim that everything would be normal until her husband would leave for work each morning. Then she would hear knocking or scratching noises coming from behind the basement door in their apartment. Investigation of the sounds would yield no answers.

Jim has also had his share of strange happenings in the cellar. “The light in the wine cellar couldn't be kept turned off, it would be shut off and 20 minutes later with no one in the basement, it would be found to be on again whenever someone eventually returned to the room sometimes days later,” recalls Jim who rewired the whole room with new wire and a new switch, but the light would still not stay off. After hearing that the same thing had been going on for years, Jim explains “I started leaving a small light on all of the time. To, I guess please, placate, somebody?”

Within the last few years, the supernatural activity at the Raven’s Grin has seen a sharp increase, which has led to Jim conducting a “Ghost-Seeker’s” night for the last two years on the night of October 31st. With activities centering in the 31’x16’ solid rock wine cellar with the 12’ tall arched ceiling, they have had strange and unexplainable results. “The rock (in the wine cellar) is "Dolomite," a 300 million year old rock containing a lot of magnesium. Some students of the supernatural think that a hard rock like this can absorb and hold a supernatural "charge." It may be a scientific fact that when a small amount of water runs over such a rock, a small amount of some kind of electricity is either created or released. If ghosts are some kind of electricity, then that might explain the unexplained occurrences in the cellar. “In the 17 years that I've had this house, on at least three separate occasions a local TV crew would show up to film a little October blurb about the place, one of their guys would enter the house with 100 pounds of fully charged batteries hanging on him, 15 minutes later, the batteries are all dead, time to go home!” Jim explains of the ghosts, “They like that electrical ‘stuff,’ sometimes.....it doesn't happen all the time, but it does happen.”

Operating a year round Haunted House in Illinois is not without its difficulties, but Jim take then in stride. He has to shovels snow off of the outdoor potion of his tour every time it snows, in case customers show up. Yes, even in the cold of winter people make the trip out to Raven’s Grin Inn for a scare. On one occasion, Jim did not get the snow removed in time for the first tour, and had to walk backwards through the path to hide his location before the patrons got there. Even then he had to make sure his breath, visible due to the cold, did not give him away.

If you have not visited the Raven’s Grin Inn lately, you will be in for a delight. Not only does the show change constantly, but there have been some major renovations. Most recently Jim has torn out a suspended ceiling in the kitchen and built five flying buttresses connecting the cabinets to the ceiling. New shelves with additional bizarre bric-a-brac, and a new “fortress” home for Mr. Tuxedo. Each buttress has a mid-evil face, and a there is a new scare in the room, but Jim swore me to secrecy.

So if you ever find yourself in the middle of know where Illinois, with a hankerin’ for an original one of a kind Haunted House. Check out evil genius of Jim Warfield and the Raven’s Grin Inn. You can even spend the night!

Dan Faupel is the production manager and primary artist for Creative Visions, a St. Louis based company specializing in animations and theming for amusement parks and haunted attractions worldwide. See some of his work at www.CreativeVisionsOnline.com.