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Sunset Haven
Carbondale, IL
By Michael Kleen
Up until around the mid 1950s, people who couldn’t take care of themselves; orphans, the elderly and infirm, epileptics, and alcoholics, often found themselves on a county farm known as a “poor farm.” A superintendent and his family would look after the residents while the residents earned their keep by farming the land, if they were able. Most of these institutions closed down when our modern welfare system came into maturity. The land was sold and the buildings were often turned into psychiatric hospitals or homes for the developmentally disabled. Sometimes poorly managed, and not very profitable, those institutions frequently closed their doors and were taken over by vandals and thrill seekers. Sunset Haven, or “Building 207” as it’s known today, is one such place.The Jackson County Poor Farm (its original name) has a somewhat unique history. According to Troy Taylor’s Haunted Illinois (2004), it became known as Sunset Haven during the 1940s before it was converted into a nursing home. It was finally closed in 1957 when Southern Illinois University purchased the property to expand its agricultural program (p.42). It then became known as the Museum Research Corporation.
During the 1970s, the research corporation made an effort to locate all the unmarked graves of the dead that had been buried during Sunset Haven’s years as a poor farm. The graves are supposedly located in a grove of trees behind the building.Sometime later the name was changed again, this time to the “Vivarium Annex,” where, according to Taylor, SIU used it for animal research. The building is currently abandoned, although the university occasionally stages emergency drills on the property to test its medical students.The building’s final closure and decay inevitably led to stories of ghosts and other horrors. The atmosphere inside the structure lent itself to rumors of medical experiments gone awry. According to Troy Taylor, “stainless steel cages and medical equipment are scattered throughout the place, giving it the ominous feel of some mad scientist’s lair (p.43).”Those who ventured down the long driveway at night for a look inside the notorious building got more than they bargained for. “Rumors about the place get bigger and bigger each year when some brave crowd of teenagers gather up the courage to walk the 2.5 miles all the way down the back drive in absolute darkness,” Courtney Cruse wrote in her high school newspaper, the Terrier Times (October 2005). “The ones who do stay… are almost mesmerized at how many scary artifacts are left in the eerie building.”Visitors today will not find very much worth seeing inside those halls. Most of the aforementioned equipment has been stolen or removed by the university, and the walls are covered with graffiti. Sunset Haven is a shell of its former self.Sorry guys, this page is copyright Black Oak Press, Illinois, 2008.
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