The more I delve into the history of this place the stranger it becomes. There is a prison here, out in the east end of town. It was originally built and functioned as an insane asylum. At some point in the early 1980's it became a prison. There was a cemetery on the property when it was an asylum. When the asylum became a prison the graveyard was moved (and word around Rock Island County Courthouse is that it is now considered a pauper's cemetery). What I gather from the local news and such is that the grave markers were moved, no one is quite certain if the bodies were moved or not. Here is a shot of the entrance to the cemetery. There are very few actual grave markers here, as you can see.
Most of the markers look like the one below, the grass is over growing the grave markers and there don't appear to be any relatively fresh graves here. There are some very out of place looking more modern markers in the very back.
When my boyfriend and I got out of the car to check out the cemetery we heard strange noises. There wasn't a soul in sight but it sounded like voices were coming from the corn field across the street. There was also a mangy looking cat in the bushes near our car who yowled at us the entire time we were there. We tried to check on him, but he didn't appear to be hurt, just angry that we were in his cemetery. There was an eerie feeling permeating the place and so we only stayed about 20 minutes. We read that the borders of the land belonging to the asylum were the nearby hills surrounding the area. We tried to drive the boarders and ended up on a service road behind the prison. We found a small grassy area near what appeared to be a firing range that was chained off with a sign reading "Resthaven". There were no grave markers, I suspect the bodies may still be there while the markers were moved to the place in the photo above, about a mile away. More research confirmed that the bodies were buried just behind the infirmary in the asylum, not sure what part of the prison this correlates too. Interesting, none the less. A great place to visit for Halloween kicks.
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