A small 51-grave cemetery in Geneva's Fox Run subdivision, all that remains of the Illinois State Training School for Delinquent Girls (1894-1977), where former residents and infants were buried and where local legends of crying and apparitions persist.
Fox Run subdivision, off Crissey Avenue, Geneva, IL 60134
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Free; a small cemetery within a residential subdivision. Respect residents and visit by day.
Access
Limited Access
Small grassy cemetery plot within a residential neighborhood near the Fox River; level but informal footing.
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1894 · Only surviving remnant of the Illinois State Training School for Delinquent Girls (1894-1977) · Roughly 51 graves of former residents and infants connected to the institution · Documented site reflecting the harsh treatment of institutionalized young women and children
The Girls' School Cemetery in Geneva, Illinois, is the last physical remnant of the Illinois State Training School (ISTS), an institution for so-called 'wayward' or 'delinquent' girls that operated from 1894 until 1977. Known over the years by several names, including the State Industrial School for Delinquent Girls, the school occupied a 94-acre campus near the Fox River in Kane County. After the institution closed, most of the property was redeveloped as the Fox Run subdivision; the small cemetery of about 51 graves was preserved off Crissey Avenue.
Historical accounts collected by writers including Illinois folklorist Michael Kleen and journalist Marla Rose, and documented by Atlas Obscura, describe a harsh institution. Many former residents recalled it less as a school than as a prison, with locked doors, barred windows, solitary confinement, and corporal punishment for minor infractions. Some girls were committed for becoming pregnant outside marriage, and accounts allege that infants born at the institution were sometimes not returned to their mothers. The cemetery's graves include both residents and children connected to the school.
The site is treated with care in local historical writing precisely because of this difficult history. Rather than a sensational ghost attraction, it is documented as a sobering monument to the treatment of vulnerable young women and children in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, now quietly preserved within a modern neighborhood.
Sources
According to the Shadowlands Haunted Places Index and regional accounts, residents and visitors near the Girls' School Cemetery have reported a range of phenomena: the apparition of a young woman in a white dress moving through the trees behind the cemetery, the cries of infants heard near the graves, and a mysterious pair of glowing eyes in the adjacent woods. The lore connects these reports directly to the girls and children who lived and died at the Illinois State Training School.
Folklorist Michael Kleen and other writers present these stories within the context of the institution's documented suffering rather than as sensational ghost claims. No paranormal report here is independently verified, and the accounts are best understood as the community's way of remembering a painful chapter of local history. Out of respect for the real young women and children buried at the site, the legends are recorded here without embellishment.
Notable Entities
Visit the small surviving cemetery of the former Illinois State Training School for Girls, now preserved within Geneva's Fox Run subdivision. A sobering historic stop best done respectfully in daylight.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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