Hometown Horror: Villa Park, Illinois
Villa Park is one of my hometowns. I grew up about a block away on Myrtle Avenue, close enough to the old Ovaltine Factory that it became part of the mental landscape. When something massive and industrial exists that near you for long enough, you stop seeing it as abandoned. You start seeing it as unaddressed.
In the early ’90s, I got a telescope for Christmas. The kind of gift that’s supposed to open the universe to a kid. I couldn’t see stars—light pollution, cheap optics—but I did see something else: lights on inside the factory. Regular lights. On multiple floors. This was a building everyone agreed was abandoned. My parents didn’t debate it. They called the police. The response we got was unsettlingly casual: there were possibly homeless individuals inside, maybe starting fires. That explanation didn’t fit what I saw. Fires flicker. These were lights—deliberate, consistent, architectural.
A few months later, Villa Park residents received a community alert. Satanic rituals were reportedly being performed in the building. Police followed up through different channels over time, confirming arrests and prosecutions involving people bringing animals into the factory for sacrifice. This wasn’t a single rumor mutating online—this was law enforcement, repeatedly, saying yes, something is happening in there. Around the same time, the town’s underground mythology surfaced again: stories of rituals, symbols, and a ghost said to belong to a boy stabbed in the underground catacombs rumored to run from the Ovaltine Factory to York High School in Elmhurst.
I don’t pretend to know how much of that is literally true. I do know how memory works. I know how communities behave when something doesn’t fit the model they’re comfortable with. The factory didn’t decay theatrically. It endured. People who explored it later reported shadows moving where light couldn’t reach, footsteps echoing through sealed sections, and a low mechanical hum long after power was officially dead. No screams. No pleading apparitions. Just motion without permission. Activity without a narrative.
What makes the Ovaltine Factory disturbing isn’t the idea of ritual or ghosts—it’s the pattern. Lights where there shouldn’t be lights. Stories that didn’t come from one source but many. Police involvement that never fully resolved the situation, just contained it. Growing up that close, you don’t romanticize it. You internalize it. You learn early that some places persist beyond purpose, and when they do, they don’t go away—they get used.
Villa Park likes order. Predictability. Clean explanations. The factory never offered one. It just stood there, adjacent to normal life, daring everyone to keep walking past it. And most people did. That’s the real lesson. Not that something evil lived there—but that everyone learned how not to look.
New haunted hometowns arrive every Wednesday.
If you want me to examine your town the same way, say the word.
What we normalize is usually the problem. —F.
