“I’ve had officers leave the department because of this house.” It was an ominous statement to make 30 minutes into a job interview, Ken Hoffman thought. He had applied to become a part-time officer at the Bull Valley Police Department, which serves a small village about an hour north of Chicago, 16 years ago. Then-Chief Norbert Sauer pulled out a three-ring binder and let Hoffman look through it.
“This house is haunted,” Sauer told him.
Policing and the paranormal are an unlikely pairing; officers are focused on finding solutions to problems using concrete evidence to solve mysteries. It’s a mindset that’s at odds with the inexplicable world of the supernatural.
Unfortunately, no one told the ghosts, some of whom would rather hang around police stations than shuffle off to the great beyond. So with Halloween lurking around the corner, OFFICER Magazine takes a look at a few police stations with haunted histories.
George Stickeny House, Illinois
Before becoming the headquarters for the Bull Valley Police Department, the George Stickney House had another, fascinating life. The massive home was built in 1865 by George and Sylvia Stickney, who practiced Spiritualism and performed séances to talk to their dead children. To supposedly facilitate this, the house was designed with rounded corners and no right angles.
Current Police Chief Tracy Dickens feels lucky to work in such a unique piece of local history, and as a carpenter by trade, he appreciates the craftsmanship that went into the building’s construction. Originally from nearby Chicago, Dickens had been unaware of the house’s macabre origins and eerier aspects. In fact, his wife—a Bull Valley native who he was dating just before joining the department—had to fill him in on the ghostly gossip about the house.
It wasn’t long, however, before Dickens had his own paranormal experience at the house. While working as an officer on the night shift, Dickens made a traffic arrest and brought the driver into the station. Because he was the only officer in the building, Dickens handcuffed the driver to a bench and began doing the booking paperwork.
As he wrapped up his work, Dickens shared the history of the Stickeny house while his arrestee waited for his wife to come pick him up. That’s when they heard three distinctive knocks at the front door. Thinking it was the driver’s wife, Dickens quickly opened it, but found no one on the other side.
“I look out to the parking lot, but no one’s there,” he says. “At this point, this guy’s ghost white and he tells me, ‘If you run out that door, you better throw me your handcuff keys at me, so I can get the hell out of here.’”
Since then, Dickens, who joined the force in 2016, rose through the ranks to become chief last year without any additional run-ins with the house’s poltergeist-like elements. But in the past year, he’s had two similar experiences he can’t explain. In both instances, the top drawer of a large file cabinet would pop open when no one was in the building.
“I know they say some people are more susceptible to seeing things or having things happen, (but) I don’t believe I’ve ever been one of those people, because up until the Stickney house I’ve never experienced or had anything happen to me I thought was just odd,” says Dickens. “Nothing had ever happened to me until I started working there.”
Like Dickens, Hoffman is naturally skeptical when it comes to the paranormal, and he laughed at Chief Sauer when he said the house was haunted. But like Dickens, Hoffman found the paranormal intruding into his life once he joined the force. In his 16 years with the department, he’s had five supernatural encounters in the building. They’ve ranged from metal chairs and office furniture moving in his presence to seeing a female figure that quickly disappears. He’s heard another officer talk about seeing a soldier walking outside the house, and from the late Chief Sauer, he inherited photos showing a rearranged room with a water bottle stood upside down and chairs stacked on top of one another, the work of an ectoplasmic prankster.
Despite the strange goings-on, Hoffman hasn’t had the urge to turn in his badge. “I know this house,” he says. “I don’t have any bad vibes here.”
The unusual happenings at Bull Valley police headquarters haven’t scared off Dickens, either. None of the bizarre events at the house have seemed menacing or threatening, and Dickens says he doesn’t feel unsafe in the house.
“I’m very comfortable working there,” he says. “But when I see something that’s very out of the ordinary, I’m not surprised to see it that’s for sure. Initially, it grabs your attention a little bit, but that just goes away … That’s just where I work. This is normal here.”
The days of ghostly visitors and fidgety furniture might be coming to an end. The village is considering relocating the police department to turn the home into a museum.
Maxwell Street Station, Chicago
In 1907, a Chicago Tribune article—complete with a lurid illustration—claimed the city had six haunted police stations. Ghosts of a soldier, a Polish laborer and tramps were said to have wandered the halls of these buildings.
“In every station one or more persons has died or have committed suicide and these facts give rise to the numerous accounts of ghosts with which the officers entertain themselves while waiting at the station on reserve duty,” the article states.
One of Chicago’s most infamous stations is known for its horrors, both human and supernatural. The 7th District Police Station was built in 1888 in response to violence and crime in an area known for its harsh living conditions. Soon, the police force began earning a reputation for being as brutal as the neighborhood the officers were tasked with protecting. Over the years, the station and the district collected a variety of foreboding nicknames: The Maxwell Street Station. The Old Red Fortress. Bloody Maxwell. The Wickedest Police District in the World. If negative emotions and psychic energy attract spirits, then the 7th District Police Station might be considered a spectral lighthouse.
According to Ursula Bielski, Chicago Hauntings tour guide and host of WYCC-TV’’s The Hauntings of Chicago, the cries of prisoners who once occupied cells in the Maxwell Street Station have been heard over the years. And a woman dressed in black, turn-of-the-century clothing has been sighted by police and civilians around Maxwell Street.
The Chicago Police Department moved out of the station in 1998, and it currently houses the University of Illinois Chicago Police Department. The building might be known as a haunted landmark to residents, but people of a certain age outside of the city might recognize it as the station seen during the opening credits of the TV series Hill Street Blues.
Alapai Headquarters, Honolulu
Hawaii doesn’t seem like the natural backdrop for hauntings, with its sunshine and lush, tropical surroundings. But the Honolulu Police Department has had its share of unexplained experiences, and it hasn’t been shy about them.
For the past several years around Halloween, the department has released videos that let their officers tell and reenact their own on-the-job, real-life ghost stories. Some of the tales take place on calls. Others, however, have been set in stations, with one location—its Alapai Headquarters— having more than its share of eerie experiences.
Opened in 1992, the Alapai Headquarters was built near a cemetery—a combination that screams for ghost encounters to top it off. “As a relatively new guy, I used to laugh at the senior officers who would tell us stories of the cell blocks being haunted,” says Officer Ben Lloyd in the 2014 installment about the main police station. “I mean, seriously, how could the building be haunted?”
Lloyd got the answer straight from the station itself.
Working the graveyard shift, Lloyd was checking the holding cells and doing a head count. That’s when he came across an open cell door, which normally meant the cell was empty. But when he checked inside, he spotted someone sleeping. Lloyd quickly shut and locked the cell door and went to alert the turnkey officer.
“When I told her what I saw, she laughed at me and said I was hallucinating.” he says, “She said she just did a head count a few minutes earlier and everything checked out.”
Lloyd went back to the cell, the turnkey officer in tow. The door was still locked, like Lloyd had left it. But when he opened it, he discovered it was empty, and he had no way to explain it.
And Lloyd isn’t alone when it comes to uncomfortable moments at the headquarters. Another officer working in the cell block heard someone calling her despite all the cells being empty. Away from the holding cells, a veteran dispatcher believed she had a spectral—but familiar—office mate while she was training at the station.
In a 2020 video, Lani Faumunia, who has been a dispatcher with the department for over 30 years, explained how she felt different working there one day. Then she started to hear typing in the office, even thought she was alone. She peered over into the next cubicle. Empty.
Faumunia returned to her work, but still had the feeling that she wasn’t the only one in the office. That’s when the spooky shoe finally dropped. “So I continued working and I could literally feel, like, this breath almost against my cheek, and you know, I was freaked out at that point.
After a few more freaky incidents, she asked a couple coworkers if they had experienced similar strangeness. Not only did her colleagues share their own stories, but they had a name for the strangeness: Sweetie. That was how they referred to a dispatcher who also worked with Faumunia.
“She passed away, and it was kind of sad. A lot of us missed her. But now that I think about it, that makes sense. She would be the one who kind of picked up after us and check on us and make sure we’re OK. … Other days, when I would have to be working by myself and I’d hear some typing in the background, I figure it’s just Sweetie helping.”
