30 – Live from Alton, IL: An Interview with Luke Naliborski of Alton Hauntings

Wendy Lynn Staats • March 18, 2015

This episode is a See You On The Other Side first… a recording of a live event we did on location in Alton, Illinois, “one of the most haunted small towns in America”!

As an added bonus, it was a special day for us because our band Sunspot released our newest EP, El Chupacabra . The three songs in the EP were all inspired by episodes of “See You On The Other Side” and you can listen to them right here.

Our live event took place at Maeva’s Coffee , a delightful venue with some of the nicest baristas we have ever met (thank you Meredith and Tia!), delicious coffee, a warm atmosphere, and beautiful eclectic decor. If we lived in Alton, Maeva’s would surely be a place we’d hang out at regularly because it just had a good and welcoming vibe. Interestingly, the building in which the coffee shop resides is an old school house that was built in 1904. As such, it has its own folklore and tales of interest, which we discuss with our special guest, Luke Naliborski.

Luke is a tour guide for Alton Hauntings ghost tours and an author. He tells us about how he got into the whole paranormal investigation scene, and shares some fun stories about his encounters with the unknown during his tours and investigations in historically rich Alton:

Strange things he saw during his childhood at a neighborhood house
An apparition of a woman he and his friends saw at Mausalium Row at Greenwood Cemetery
Stories of apparitions seen in a local parking lot in town, located where the courtyard of a confederate prison had been
A haunted island in the river where duels were once faught, known as Bloody Island / Sunflower Island / Small Pox Island, and the story of James Shields challenging Abraham Lincoln to a duel there
On the same island, a reporter found two skulls and took one home for a souvenir
Legends of the Milton School House, the very building hosting in which our interview takes place
One of Luke’s favorite tour stops, the First Unitarian Church in Alton, where he has seen many curious things
How Luke began his career as an author
His experience on the television reality show “Mysterious Worlds: America’s Ghost Hunters” and the investigation of a secret passageway and storeroom beneath the First Unitarian Church
An experience he had with an apparition at a farmhouse where several deaths were known to have occurred