BARTONVILLE — Many people have wondered if the former site of the Illinois Asylum for the Incurable Insane was haunted.

Those people will soon have a chance to discover if the Bowen Building, 4100 W. Pfeiffer Rd., Bartonville, one of the last remaining buildings on the grounds of the abandoned state hospital, really is haunted.
A not-for-profit organization called Save the Bowen, Inc. is renovating the 50,000 square-foot Bowen Building. To finance the renovation, they are booking ghost hunting tours in the building that has been abandoned for nearly 40 years.

Before Save the Bowen, Inc. can start providing tours, they will need to remove asbestos from the building.
During a meeting last month, the Bartonville Village Board agreed to use tax increment financing money to remove asbestos from the Bowen Building. They loaned Richard Weiss, the owner of the Bowen Building and executive director of Save the Bowen, Inc., $340,000 from a TIF account to finance the abatement that will allow the building to meet the standards set by the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency.
The abatement is expected to start within the next two weeks and last 4-6 weeks.
Starting in August, Save the Bowen, Inc. will start providing full-night tours from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. and half-night tours from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m.
Save the Bowen, Inc. is currently booking private group tours for August 25 through the end of the year on their website Peoria-Asylum.com. A full-night private group tour requires a minimum of 10 people. Each person will pay $100 for the full-night tour. A half-night private group tour requires a minimum of 20 people. Each person will pay $50 for the half-night tour.
“Our overnights are for ghost hunting,” said Weiss. “You spend the night with whatever equipment you wish to ghost hunt. It is not a hotel at this point in time.”
Daytime and early evening tours will also be provided at the Bowen Building.
“During the day and early evening we will host historic tours with stories of patients and things that the hospital is known for, including the history of George Zeller, the first superintendent of the hospital that is known worldwide for his visionary ideas regarding the mentally ill,” said Weiss.
Save the Bowen, Inc. is renovating the building with the hopes of enticing a developer who would develop commercial and residential space in the building.
“We are only stabilizing the structure and getting it to a revenue producing property to pay for the building and stabilization,” said Weiss. “We can then hopefully entice a developer for long-term plans.”
Eventually, Save the Bowen, Inc. would like to see artist lofts and offices on the first floor of the building, a haunted-theme bed and breakfast hotel on second and third floors of the building, loft-style apartments with banquet facilities for the hotel on the fourth floor of the building and a museum in the basement of the building.
The museum would include artifacts from the former hospital, including photos, a video library of interviews with past employees and patients and any other records that the not-for-profit organization can find.
Weiss thinks it will take 7-10 years for the renovation and commercial/residential development to be complete.
Once it is renovated, the building will look similar to the way it looked when it opened in 1896, said Weiss.
“We would like it to look as close to what it looked like back in the early 1900s,” said Weiss.
The producers of the Travel Channel show “Ghost Adventure” have been requesting access to the building for two years. They are expected to film the show in the building sometime after the abatement is finished.
A resident of Missouri, Weiss learned about the Bowen Building from an advertisement on eBay that was posted in 2005.
“It was listed on eBay back in 2005 and in the advertisement it said you could use the limestone to build something else,” said Weiss. “When I came to look at the building and drove up Pfeiffer Road and first seen the building, I knew I would have to find a way to save the building.”
Weiss later established Save the Bowen, Inc. for the sole purpose of saving the Bowen Building from being demolished. Save the Bowen, Inc. purchased the Bowen Building and three other buildings that were a part of the former hospital from the State of Illinois in July of 2008. They then invested around $15,000 to make the building suitable for temporary public tours.
On Halloween of 2008, Weiss started to provide two-hour and six-hour ghost hunting tours of the building on a temporary basis. Visitors were required to sign a liability waiver before those tours because the building did not meet the standards set in Village Municipal Code for the Village of Bartonville.
The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency and Illinois Department of Public Health closed the building in 2009.