No ghosts of Mary Lincoln in Batavia

The seldom-used stairwell leading to the fourth-floor attic of this 19th-century mental sanitarium in Batavia reveals secrets.

Halfway up the steep and narrow climb, a woman named Nellie Anderson stopped to ink her signature and the date on the wall to prove she was here on June 16, 1905. Other names and dates written on the walls have faded through the centuries.

But there are no overt signs of the sanitarium's most famous resident: Mary Todd Lincoln.

The wife of President Abraham Lincoln endured a lifetime of horrors and sorrows before she arrived at Bellevue Place on May 20, 1875. She had seen two young sons die. She was holding her husband's hand at the theater when he was fatally shot in the head in 1865. A third son died six years after Abraham Lincoln's assassination.

Concerned about her mental state, her only surviving son, Chicago attorney Robert Todd Lincoln, won a court case to have his mother placed in Bellevue against her will.

She lived on the second floor, where building manager Chris Johnson, 59, has occupied apartment 2-B at 333 S. Jefferson St. for the past decade.

"I looked at the apartment in the dark and said, 'I'll take it,'" Johnson remembers. "I knew that she lived here, but I didn't give it a second thought. I grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska. I drive a Lincoln and have the Lincoln apartment. There's no escaping it."

It took Mary Todd Lincoln nearly four months and another legal battle before she won the right to escape Bellevue on Sept. 11, 1875. A court declared her sane on June 15, 1876, and she spent her last years at her sister's home in Springfield.

Forty-nine-year-old Mary Montavon knew that Lincoln story before she moved into Bellevue Place in May, and she couldn't wait to find out more.

"I did a research paper, actually," says Montavon, who works for a marketing agency in Naperville. Gathering information and photographs from biographies, medical journals and historical societies, Montavon compiled a wonderful history of the building for her dad, a history buff.

But she wanted more.

"So," Montavon said as she sidled up to longtime residents, "are there any great, dark stories?"

She wanted a ghostly figure, spooky wailing or something going bump in the night.

"I'm pretty tapped into that," Montavon says. "But nothing. There's nothing going on."

The only fear she has in this building is that cooking bacon might set off the smoke detectors.

"When I first heard that Mary Todd Lincoln lived here, I wondered if it would be spooky," admits Dan Musielski, 45, a home inspector who has lived in the building during two stretches of the last decade.

Checking out the apartment at night, Musielski was wary.

"I hadn't signed my lease yet, so when I first moved in, I brought my mom in," he says.

Mom gave her blessing, and Musielski says he has been very happy in his scenic third-floor apartment, from where he can watch the Batavia fireworks.

Even if the ghost of Mary Todd Lincoln were roaming the halls at night, residents probably wouldn't hear her.

"Some of the walls are 3 feet thick," says John Jaeschke, 50, a dentist who bought the apartment building in 2004. "I love limestone buildings. You could park an airplane on top of it, this thing is so solid. I love it."

Having researched the Kennedy and Lincoln assassinations during college, Jaeschke, who lives in Wheaton, appreciates the history of his building.

"It was a great find," says Jaeschke, whose dentist office in Naperville was built in the 1880s. "I love that history. But more than anything, I love the aspect that it's a unique building."

The massive beams of wood in the attic, the vast labyrinth of a basement, even scraps of wallpaper he found probably were there when Lincoln was, but no ghost stories.

"I hadn't heard of anyone with any of those tales, and some of my tenants have been in there for 18, 19 years," Jaeschke says.

"She didn't leave anything," Johnson says of Mary Todd Lincoln. He has his desk on a sleeping porch, with windows on three sides, where he suspects Lincoln kept her bed.

"Today, I was eating lunch and looking out the window, watching traffic on (Route) 31, and I thought, 'When Mary Todd Lincoln was living here that maple tree was only half as tall, and she probably couldn't see the traffic on Batavia Avenue,'" Johnson says. But his only physical reminder of Lincoln is when he lets a local second-grade class inside to see the Abraham Lincoln portrait in the lobby, or when "somebody writing a book about Lincoln or Mary Lincoln stumbles up on the porch about twice a year."

He notes the building, made from the same limestone as the Chicago water tower, was built in the early 1850s as a private school. When Lincoln lived in the sanitarium, it was advertised as a "restful" and "homelike" treatment facility "for nervous and mental diseases of women only."

Lincoln was free to visit friends in the community and roam the grounds. Historians still debate about what mental illness, if any, she might have had.

The sanitarium closed in 1965, giving way to homes and schools for adolescent girls and unwed mothers. It was converted to apartments in the 1980s.

"The rooms have a very graceful and elegant shape to them," Johnson says of the six one-bedroom and nine two-bedroom apartments with large windows, unique spaces and ceilings 10 to 12 feet tall. "I really like it here. It's a wonderful place to live. It's a very peaceful and serene place."

Constable: Batavia sanitarium once hosted Mrs. Lincoln