Lee County’s ghost of a druggist, spooky children and a Bible salesman’s bloody murder

Editor’s note: Whether or not you believe in ghosts and hauntings, this is one of several spooky tales of local lore that Shaw Local News Network will be sharing with readers in the spirit of Halloween.

DIXON – Ghosts, hobgoblins and ghouls don’t often advertise their ectoplasmic existence, such as it might be, in Lee County.

There are a few spots, however, where denizens of the dark have been said to congregate.

Take, for instance, a former pharmacy turned thrift store in Amboy.

Back in October 2020, the late Don Stebbins was the new owner of the three-story building at 202 E. Main St. in Dixon, which had been home to a drugstore most of its long life.

While a visiting psychic once claimed to tune in to at least seven potential phantasms in the circa-1860s structure, most local folks believe that the main haunt is the former owner, who’s banging around the building, shoving the help around and sending donated items crashing off shelves.

Once, a person appeared in the old drugstore in a white coat.

“When the soda fountain was still here, there were some people sitting there, and somebody came out from the back in a white jacket, like a drugstore person would wear,” Stebbins said previously. “Everybody turned, and she just disappeared. She wasn’t really here, but everybody saw that.”

A former upstairs tenant also told Stebbins of some unexplainable noises.

“There’s a stairway between the main level and the second story, and during the night, it was like kids running up and down those stairs all of the time. She’d yell at them, ‘Calm down,’ and they’d settle down for a while.”

Stebbins, who died in November 2021, said at the time that many times he had seen shadows when no object or person was there to cast them, and he once got pretty spooked by a basement encounter.

“I went into the basement, did some things down there, came up, turned the lights out, and before I left the store, the lights were back on again,” he said. “This has happened a number of times. It’s not an electrical thing. The switch was actually flipped, and I did not leave the premises. Something is doing that.”

He was spooked enough to ask the Rock River Paranormal Society to check out the shop.

“There was a group in the basement, and I was sitting here in my little office, and I was completely quiet,” Stebbins said. “I knew if I was moving around, they would wonder.

“When they came upstairs, they mentioned something about me moving around. I said, ‘No, I didn’t make a move or a sound.’ They said, ‘Well, somebody was moving around up there,’ but it wasn’t me.”

Amboy depot

Then there’s the old 1876 train depot in Amboy, which is now a museum complex.

The original depot and hotel was built in 1854, but that burned to the ground in 1875.

Visitors and museum staff alike have reported experiencing some eerie happenings in the restored depot: the sound of travelers’ voices and footsteps, the unmistakable ticking of a clock and of tickets being punched for a train that no longer runs.

In the early 1990s, the Palmer School, a one-room schoolhouse built west of town in 1924, was moved to the site. It was the second school built at that location – the first also was destroyed by fire.

There have been reports of the sound of rulers slapping on desks, the faint ringing of a school bell, and ghostly children’s voices and apparitions. Some have said they’ve seen books fly off shelves.

Bloody Gulch

If any place in Lee County is likely to be haunted, it’s the cursed ground at a ravine on Dixon’s southern edge, where a 17-year-old traveling Bible salesman was slaughtered, and where some have claimed he remains to this day.

The body of Frank Thiel of Elgin was found Sept. 18, 1885, in a hastily dug grave near a stream at the bottom of the gulch. His throat was slit so badly that his head was almost detached, his head was crushed and his arms were covered in defensive wounds.

The smell was said to be so bad that it spooked cattle crossing nearby, which is how the teen was found.

The road was renamed Bloody Gulch after the horror.

Joseph Mosse, a 21-year-old French-Canadian who was working as a farmhand not far from where Theil’s body was found, was arrested and sentenced to life in prison but was released from the Joliet Penitentiary in 1911 after saving a guard’s life when an inmate attacked him with a knife.

More on the Bloody Gulch murder

“Death of a Colporteur: The Story of the Murder at Bloody Gulch Road” is written by the victim’s great-nephew, John C. Thiel.

Dixon author A.K. Thompson, who believes the convicted killer was innocent, also covers the tale in her book, “Relentless, Envious Death: The Biographies of Katherine Shaw Bethea and Solomon Hicks Bethea.”

Both are available through Amazon and other online book sources.

“The Bloody Gulch Murder: The Crime in Which Dumb Beasts Were the Accusers” is available through the Lee County Historical and Genealogical Society at leecountyhgs.org or 815-284-1134.