Chicago Tribune Article by Wes Smith I Go U Go Travel Journal by Carole Soldat Dubuque Telegraph Herald by Kylie Greene Quad City Times by Bill Wundram

Chicago Tribune Mt. Carroll, Ill- A pair of legs wearing ice skates dangles through the ceiling tile of Jim Warfield's kitchen, but you hardly notice because of the 7 feet of nuked hamster emerging from the "urban myth microwave" and the eerie voice shrieking from deep within the refridgerator: "The leftovers are killing me! The leftovers are killing me!" Halloween may be long over at your house, but it never ends here at the Ravens Grin Inn, says Warfield, a former plumber who twisted one too many pipes and now runs merrily amok with a Halloween attraction that closes nevermore in this tiny village in northwestern Illinois. "People come through my haunted house, and it hits them that here's this guy living in this nice little town, making a living and having all this fun...I feel bad for all you other people. I really do," Warfield says. If you take Chicago's North Avenue (U.S. 64) 120 miles west, you will come upon Warfield's haunting grounds, Mr. Carroll, a picturesque viallge of 1,800 that bills itself "a little bit of New England." With its wooded and hilly terrain, brick streets and well-preserved downtown, Mt. Carroll may lull the visitor into Victorian reveries, until you look up on a hillside and see a ghostly old cemetery that reminds you: New England has been home to witches, warlocks and Stephen King. Within view of the cemetery and just around a downtown corner lies confirmation that Mt. Carroll may be the bit of New England that went bad. There on the high bank of Wakarusa River sits the wonderous monstrosity that Warfield has wrought: a 120-year-old 5,000-square-foot Italianate mansion that has been transmorgrified into something resembling The House on the Rock as remodeled by Beetlejuice. "Hey, I was doing Beetlejuice before there was a Beetlejuice," says Warfield, whose artful and ingenious haunted house relies more upon tortured humor than heartstopping stunts. The front of The Ravens Grin Inn features a slide emerging from the mouth of a 10-foot skull. A black and white "Poe-Lease" car protrudes from the second story. A "Yellow-Streak" cab is impaled near the front door drawbridge. A two-story pterodactyl skeleton adorns the street side of the house. Inside, the inn is decorated with furnishings from the "Far Side" Collection. Its groaning floors feature the Nazi Babes on a Tank Room, the Last Elvis Impersonator Room, and The Nasal Passage ("Be careful picking your way through," Warfield says). Few haunted houses offer such diverse scares as a four-story, 60-foot long, Bad Dream Bed-Slide that ends in the Torture Chamber Wine Cellar, and a simple button stuck in the wall bearing the message, "Quayle, A Heartbeat Away." Warfield says The Raven's Grin Inn is his wicked last laugh on the haunted house craze. "This is a parody of a haunted house, and it always has been. A lot of haunted houses take themselves too seriously," he says. Not that Warfield can't be dead serious. Though he lists his occupation as "village idiot", he offers an earnest recitation of the "moralistic" influences that infuse his creation, including of course, Mad Magazine. "Mad Magazine is more or less where I am coming from. It is an incredibly moral document," Warfield says of the low-brow lampoon. "[It's writers] teach by bad example, crude example." Wherever Warfield draws his zany ideas from, his haunted house draws a crowd. In its 17 years, the inn has become the major tourist attraction in this quaint, out-of-the-way town. Thousands descend upon Mt. Carroll for the Halloween season, when the often line up from 7p.m. until dawn, forcing Warfield to insist on reservations at peak times (call 815-244-4746). Because of its popularity and Warfield's whacky inventiveness, The Raven's Grin Inn also has become and underground legend among haunted house connoisseurs across the U.S. "I had heard stories and rumors about this haunted house outside Chicago, and I had to see it," says Leonard Pickel, a haunted house owner and designer whose South Carolina company, Elm Street Hauntepreneurs, has built attractions for the Universal Studios and Six Flags amusement parks, amon otehr clients. "I have seen haundreds of haunted houses, and The Ravens Grin Inn is so bizarre and so far from the old haunted house cliches....It is very refreshing," Pickel says. "It is just amazing how much stuff is crammed into that house." Pickel, owner of Mayhem Manor in Myrtle Beach, S.C., is among an increasing number of business people who make a year-round living amoung the ghouls. Many of the larger haunts have as many as 70,000 visitors annually. Some are building franchise haunted houses in other parts of the country and nearly all are high-tech operations near major metropolitan areas. The Raven's Grin Inn has nothing in common with what Warfield disdains as "Wal-Mart spook houses." "The other haunted houses have a lot of money and high-tech; I've got some fishing line and whatever," says Warfield, who finds a lot of his rawest materials buried in the former city dump between his house and the river. The inn stands out as the work of one creative lost soul and also because it is located "out in the middle of nowhere," says Pickel, whose wonder is shared by most of Mt. Carroll. "It's remarkable, and real macabre--that's the word Jim uses," City Clerk Julie Cuckler says of the village's wildest sight and most popular attraction. Built in 1870, the mansion that became The Raven's Grin Inn had served the village variously and infamously over the decades as a hotel, tavern, boardinghouse, bordello and apartment building. In the 1890's its stone walled cellar sheltered most of the village residents during a tornado. The mansion had been vacant for several years and in danger of tumbling over the bank into the river by 1987 when Warfield made a bid to buy it. It fit his childhood affinity for all things creepy or catacomb-like. The son of a plumber, he was 8 years old and already a fan of Christopher Lee horror movies when he staged his first haunted house in the basement of his parents home. "All the neighborhood kids would come in for a penny," recalls his mother, Dona, who once found a glassy eyed group of children standing around a candle with her son in the darkened basement. "Jim had a medallion and he was trying to hypnotize the other kids. It scared me to death," she says. "He was always drawing and thinking up things. He has been creative from the word go." And wherever Warfield went, weirdness followed. In the grocery store where he worked, a delivery man went into a walk-in cooler and walked into a water ballon booby trap. "He never knew who did it," Warfield cackles. "Whenever I quit a job, people would say, "what are we going to do for fun now?" Even in school, he was studiously strange. As a high school sophmore, Warfield put his own twist to Shakespeare while reciting a passage infront of the class. "When I got to, 'Friends, Romans and countrymen, lend me your ears,' I opened up my hand and unrolled a rubber ear," he says. "Even the teacher cracked up. All humor is risk, and fortunately it worked that time." Upon his release from high school, Warfield joined his father's business, but he continued to also plumb the dark recesses of his fertile and fevered imagination. A bird house appeared one day atop a heap of muck outside his father's shop, and with it a sign, "House of Sludge," it read. With his equally zany mother and grandmother accompanying him, Warfield made annual appearances in elaborate homemade costumes in the village's Halloween parade. But it wasn't until the early 1970's, when he helped the local Jaycees stage their first haunted house in the cavernous cellar of the old mansion on the edge of downtown, that Warfield found his muse. "I wanted to turn it into a year round haunted house then, but I didn't have the money," he says. Fifteen years later, when the village was beginning to think the empty old mansion might have to be torn down before it fell down, Warfield still didn't have the money, but by then, he was haunted by the house. "I talked to 120 people in town looking for financial support before I realized that I should be looking for someone who had done something that everybody else said wouldn't work," he says. "I found a man who 45 years earlier had built a lake on his farm and turned it into a camp ground. Everybody said he was nuts, but he made alot of money." The campground owner chipped in, as did a local banker who wanted to keep the old mansion from falling down. Warfield paid them both back with profits from his first year of operation, he says. Visitors to The Raven's Grin Inn now pay $10 each, but they get their money's worth and sometimes more than they bargained for. Except during the busiest times, Warfield personally leads tours that last over an hour. He customizes each tour according to the composition - and alcoholic content- of the crowd. "If I've got a group of goosey, giggling teenagers, I say one thing. If it's a church group I'll say another," he says. "The tour can be a lot of fun even if the group is half drunk." On those occasions when a visitor appears to have overimbibed, Warfield has a special tour that takes the offender up a short flight of stairs and promptly down a slide that spits him out into the parking lot of The Raven's Grin Inn-through the mouth of the skull on the front of the house. "I've been known to lead some very short tours," he says. The occasionally boisterous crowd and the inn's decidedly audacious exterior have inspired a few critics to complain to local authorities or to dash off letters to the local newspapers. But as a hometown horror-monger, Warfield has plenty of allies among the villagers, who generally accept his eccentricities and consider him a local boy who made good. Strange, but good. Warfield's haunted house may be the only one in America in which the local boyscouts go through to earn points toward their art merit badges. "People here are clear thinking, good American people, and they have enough sense to see what is good for their town," said Mayor Marilyn Magill, who confesses that she is among those who call the haunted house just to listen to answering machine messages that Warfield performes in sepulchral tones. "Jim is no idiot; he is tremendously talented artistically, and I think people are content to have him here and for him to do his thing as long as somebody isn't getting hurt by it," she adds. When one local critic wrote a letter to the local paper disparaging the aesthetics of the haunted house, denigrating Warfieold's artistic talents and pompously scolding that "no man is an island," the owner of The Raven's Grin Inn struck back with a two-pronged counterattack. The first was a well reasoned, passionate and lucid defense of his creation in a letter to the editor of the weekly Mt. Carroll Mirror Democrat. "I am my own gallery, nothing is for sale. I rent the experience, a concept not promoted within your worm-infested library of stagnant thought...In basic concepts, I am an island visited frequently and repeatedly by those unregimented by creative timidness. Just call me Gilligan." His second response was done on videotape. Warfield dressed up like his critic and parodied his speech and mannerisms while reading the critic's letter to the editor. He then gave the videotape to the local video store which rented it for $2 to its customers. Rentals were reported to be brisk. "They said it was real popular," Warfield notes gleefully. Warfield offers that even if he were tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail, strange things would still occur at the old house on the hill in Mt. Carroll. Former occupents have told him that several people have reported being awakend in a back bedroom of the house by some unseen presence calling their names. Warfield also notes that scores of customers have claimed to have seen a ghostly "lady in white" hovering in the stone cellar of the house. "People say, "that was really neat, how did you do that?" but I'm not doing anything with a lady in white in the cellar," Warfield says. "I get credit for all kinds of things that happen in this house that I have absolutely no control over." TOP

Online Journal Review Set off a side street, this is a popular spot during the Halloween season, though it is open year-round. Tours last 1-1 ½ hours, and are commenced on a fairly ad hoc basis. I called the day before and Jim Warfield, owner of Ravens Grin, told me that since I was "solo", I could just show up and they’d fit me in. Otherwise, reservations are the order of the day in "haunting season". The tour begins in the living room, where Warfield talks about the history of the house. This is done in complete darkness; even on a sunny October day, very little light penetrated the gloom. While Ravens Grin has its quota of the usual fuax-scary fake skeletons, phony blood splatters and the like, it nonetheless caused more than a tingle of fear, at least in this writer. (The 10-year-old boy in front of me was undaunted; he happily opened closed doors, and poked around places I couldn’t wait to get past.) Ravens Grin also offers some thrills in navigation on the tour: there are several places where visitors slide down steep slides from one part of the house to the next. Patrons are cautioned that these slides can be dangerous; alternative stairway routes are available for those who prefer their bones in one piece. The house has been the site of numerous supernatural events and sightings; one psychic reportedly identified over 30 separate spirits that roamed the house. Supernatural events have included ghost sightings, hair pulling, touches, and voices. The wine cellar, many feet beneath the ground, is by far the most haunted place, with more incidents there than any other location in the house. Again, whether due to things I’d heard previously or whether I actually felt something, I couldn’t wait to leave this room. I’ve been to a few haunted houses in my day, and this might be the scariest yet. Sure, people may pooh-pooh the idea of ghosts or evil spirits, but I felt a presence in this place that was not benign, and I felt it as soon as I’d crossed the threshold. (The threshold in this case is a drawbridge-like door that is lowered to let visitors inside.) Did I feel uncomfortable because something was really lurking in a corner, perhaps just outside my vision, or was I allowing what I’d heard about the place to influence me? I don’t know, but I will say that I had to strongly fight my impulse to leave the house as quickly as possible. This feeling persisted throughout the entire tour. On Halloween, Warfield offers a special event for a limited number of participants, who are invited to bring night vision cameras and other equipment to possibly capture a ghostly appearance. The tour is taken through the dark house with no employees on site performing their usual shenanigans. At dinner before the tour, Jim talks about the haunted history of Ravens Grin. TOP

Favorite Haunt Raven's Grin: Owner of former Mount Carroll inn hosts year-round scares MOUNT CARROLL, Ill. - They crept slowly down the dimly lit passageway, as cob webs hung overhead.With each careful step, the air in the cave-like corridor seemed to get colder. The group weaved its way through the narrow tunnel, passing a creaky door and posters of horror movies. Finally, there was a well-lit room at the end of the passageway. The members of the group spread out and listened to their guide tell the tales of the haunted wine cellar. Several black coffins stood in the center of the room alongside a large wooden slide. "This is the bad dream bed slide," guide Jessica Hubbs said as she stood by the contraption. The 60-foot slide starts on the second-floor of the house and drops 30-feet to the wine cellar, she explained. Hubbs then pointed to one corner of the cellar. "That's where the lady in white has been seen," she said. Although she's never noticed the ghost, others have told her they've seen the figure The room went dark. Then, just as quickly, the lights came back on. Hubbs laughed when she saw her boyfriend, Jim Warfield, playing with the light switch. "It's time to go," Warfield, the inn's owner, told the elderly visitors as he led them up a winding set of steps to the kitchen. Warfield and Hubbs had just spent the morning giving the busload a shortened tour of the Raven's Grin Inn, a year-round haunted house in Mount Carroll. When Warfield bought the inn 16 years ago, he wanted to create a haunted house. "From the time I was a little, tiny kid people told me I was artistic, creative and weird," Warfield said. In the time he has lived there, he has added an attic, artwork, mazes, a tunnel and other contraptions to the seven-level house. It was built in 1870. In 1910, before it was used as a speakeasy, Warfield's great-grandfather worked there as a bartender. Warfield, 47, now makes a living giving tours of his creation. His is not a typical haunted house with blood and guts. "I don't do chain saws; I don't do the butcher shop routine," he said. "I try to entertain people just by being goofy and funny." Since Warfield gives most of the tours, he tries to fit his routine to each audience. When guests enter the Raven's Grin, they're given a history of the house in the front room, which is filled with worn-out couches, old trinkets, various artwork and an old movie projector. A sign promises humor, excitement and premature death on the tour. Physical and mental risk also are endured, according to the sign. Warfield tells his customers about the haunted happenings, which he said have become more frequent in the last two years. Some guests have seen the lady in white in the wine cellar. And four employees were scared away permanently after they observed strange things at Raven's Grin. In August while Warfield was alone in the wine cellar a loud, distinct voice called his name. "I looked back and said, 'At least after 16 years you finally know my name,'" Warfield said while laughing. To help shed light on some of the supernatural events, Warfield is hosting his first supernatural expedition on Halloween night. Only 20 people, along with Warfield and Hubbs, will be allowed to roam the inn. "When I first started, it was a real uphill battle," he said. "People didn't know where I was." Now, Warfield has visitors from all over the United States and even some foreign countries. His house has caught the eye of national haunted house designers and even Hollywood filmmakers. For $10 per person, he takes guests through about an hour-long tour. Each room is filled with posters, trinkets and other gadgets Warfield has collected or built. Outside the eclectic inn, a maze of old doors bends through the backyard and into a wooded area. Warfield pointed to rusted fans, old computer parts and hub caps that lined the path. "It's mostly junk, but I try to do something with it," he said. A crunched up car also sits in the crowded yard. Last summer, while Warfield was stopped on the highway, a semi rammed into the backend of his car, which advertised the Raven's Grin Inn on the side. He has since designed another vehicle that interestingly advertises the haunted house. A skeleton pops out of the roof of the station wagon and long, skinny arms stick up from the hood. The license plate reads Raven G1. "You don't ride in there if you don't like catching attention," Warfield said in his usual joking manner. From the looks of his house - inside and out - Warfield doesn't mind the Raven's Grin catching people's attention. TOP

Hide and seek in spookiest ‘house’ By Bill Wundram There was no front door that I could see, so we stood shivering in the October cold until a deep, hollow voice called to us, "Stand back, back-k-k-k," and then a hunk of wall creaked down - on thick chains like the entrance to a castle - to bid us entry into Ravens Grin. Here we are, at the edge of the dump, a block from the cemetery in downtown Mount Carroll, Ill., about to creep into what is claimed to be the spookiest haunted house in all of Illinois. Chicago Tribune once did a whole page on the ghostly/nutty place. National Geographic World magazine did a spread on Ravens Grin. Midwest Living did a story. Dwyer and Michaels - our ubiquitous duo of the airways - have an obsession with the weird old inn. I have explored a lot of haunted houses and can spot a good spook when I see one. Ravens Grin is the craziest place that has ever given me the heebie-jeebies. It scared the hell out of me. It’s at its supernatural best at Halloween, though Ravens Grin is open 301 days of the year. Haunted by an apparition of a woman in the domed, rock-walled wine cellar? Spooked by the giggles of a little girl in an empty room? Regularly visited by disembodied spirits? Unaccounted-for screams and bumps in the night? .This is not to say this old Mount Carroll inn actually is haunted. The owner, Jim Warfield, has made it that way, though legends claim that strange things have happened here ever since it was built 132 years ago. At first I thought it was all a mistake. It looked like Frankenstein’s junk yard, with giant hands grasping at cars on the roof, a church steeple in the weedy backyard alongside what appeared to be a hunk of a rusty submarine. Eerily, I assure you: There is nothing like it in this Quad-City region. It makes Haunted Mansion at Disney World a child’s playhouse. It takes up to two hours to navigate the labyrinth of grungy rooms and tunnels, pitch-dark passages and a 60-foot slide from the haunted mansion’s peak into the wine cellar’s massive sponge, said to be regularly softened with "blood". Small groups are admitted for escorted tours, and we weren’t into the place two minutes - seated in the parlor on decrepit sofas and chairs - when it went dark as a coal bin at midnight. The ghoulish voice of the owner assured us not to worry about the sense of something crawling at our feet (it was some strange electronic effect). "Friendly mice and rats", he said, and then a pinpoint of light from the chandelier and t he room was engulfed in ghostly ectoplasm (dry ice). "I want to get out of here," my scared wife said. A voice called to her, "The kiss of death ... once inside, no one leaves." (She stayed, shakily.) While creeping through junk and rooms, Warfield laughed fiendishly to tell how his last wife, was once walking through a room when her hair was grasped and nearly ripped from the roots. He has a staff for this nutty place and while bent over - picking through a passage - I discovered openings from where human hands would grasp at legs or arms and gleefully yell, "I’m going to bite your hand off." My head still has a lump where a guide told me to bump it against a brick wall. I did, and the wall collapsed. No illusion. It was on hinges. Floors shuddered; lights blazed on and off. This guy Warfield is an electronic genius. "I’ve allowed tours of my house (he actually lives there) for 15 years," he said, while selling admissions through a beat-up car door window sliced into one side of the house. His chief assistant ghoul is his girlfriend, Jessica, who says, "Jim’s not crazy; he’s worse." .By way of mention, there were 12 in our tour group. When we got outside, all of us could count (honest!) only 10. The other two may still be in the place. If you go: Ravens Grin is 73 miles north of the Quad-Cities. Hours are 7 p.m. to midnight daily; 2-5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Reservations are not necessary, but it’s a good idea to call (815) 244-4746. TOP

All artwork and photos contained on this site is property of Jim Warfield and may not be duplicated without his permission. If you wish to use anything from this site please contact him at ravensgrin@grics.net.