HauntBound archive · catalog record
Reported phenomena — as catalogued
An 1883 downtown Alton building that once housed a furniture store with a working basement morgue — now an arts center where visitors report cold spots and a disconnected intercom that still makes noise
208 State Street, Alton, IL 62002
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Gallery admission free or low-cost; check website for current exhibitions and event programming.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Downtown street-level entry; interior includes basement gallery accessible by stairs
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1883 · Built 1883 — Jacoby Furniture and Funeral operation for decades · Working morgue in basement; funeral chapel on upper floor · Now Jacoby Arts Center — active gallery and community arts space
The building at 208 State Street in Alton, Illinois, was constructed in 1883, placing it among the commercial brick blocks that defined downtown Alton's nineteenth-century business district. The structure housed Jacoby Furniture, a local firm that combined retail furniture sales with the ancillary funeral services common to the era — a pairing not unusual in the nineteenth-century Midwest, when furniture makers also supplied coffins and arranged burials.
Jacoby's operation included a funeral chapel on an upper floor and a fully functional morgue in the basement. The basement space served as the physical processing area for the dead before funeral arrangements were completed above. The combination of retail furniture, upper-floor chapel, and working basement morgue gave the building a layered use pattern concentrated around death-related commerce for what is believed to have been several decades.
The building eventually transitioned out of the furniture and funeral trade. It was subsequently repurposed as the Jacoby Arts Center, a nonprofit arts organization that operates gallery exhibitions, artist studios, and community programming. The center's documentation on its history page confirms the 1883 construction date and the former Jacoby Furniture and funeral operation.
The basement gallery — the former morgue space — is now an active exhibition area. The building's historical function has made it a point of interest on Alton's developed dark-tourism circuit, which the city actively cultivates as part of its tourism identity.
Sources
The paranormal accounts at the Jacoby Arts Center focus on the basement gallery, the space formerly occupied by the working morgue. Visitors have described cold spots in the basement and a generalized sense of unease or unseen presence — claims common to spaces with documented death-related histories.
The most distinctive account involves the building's old intercom system, which was disconnected and is no longer functional. Despite its non-operational status, staff and visitors have reported hearing sounds or communications from the intercom — an anomaly that has been noted specifically because there is no electrical explanation for it.
The disconnected-intercom detail appears in multiple accounts of the building documented by Alton ghost-tour sources and has become a defining element of the Jacoby Arts Center's paranormal reputation. The basement's documented history as an active morgue lends the cold-spot and presence reports a historical grounding that generic building haunting stories often lack.
The Jacoby Arts Center occupies an 1883 downtown Alton commercial building with a documented history as a furniture and funeral operation. The basement gallery, where the morgue formerly operated, is now an active exhibition space. Gallery visits include access to the full building.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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