preface to a feature on Geneva’s youth prison

Of course, my fascination with Geneva and its ghosts began with a girl. “There’s this cemetery,” my friend Logan texted me, “in the middle of a subdivision.” The Atlas Obscura article she sent me showed pictures of gray headstones stained by moss, wet with yellow autumn leaves. A chain-link fence snaked around the background of the pictures. The cemetery had once been part of Geneva’s Illinois State Training School for Girls, which ran from the 1890s through the 1970s, but the article said that many who went there described it not as a school, “but rather as a cruel prison.” According to the article, “this cemetery is all that remains of a school for ‘wayward’ girls.”

That word got our blood up. Logan and I were Chicago journalists, and a bit wayward ourselves. Between us, we had one arrest, a history of trespassing, an enjoyment of illegal drugs, various mental disorders, and a brief but sincere love affair in our 20s that had made the friendship between us only more precious and essential. 

Every year, we leave Chicago on our bikes for a day or a few, and that year, we made the Geneva cemetery our destination. We didn’t know it then, but below the path we rode were the train tracks used to guide hundreds of runaway Geneva girls back to Chicago. Some even died there, electrocuted by third rails or hit by trains as they risked everything for their freedom.

We didn’t make it all the way to the cemetery that day, but I eventually did, and kept going back. In truth, I was afraid. Behind my ribs, I could feel the iron clicking and pulling of a story that wanted all of me. Some stories are like that: they grab me by the wrist and pull me with a cold grip deep into their forest. It takes me years to find my way out. It took almost four years to research and write this story. The more I learned about these girls, the more real they became; “The ghosts of Geneva’s ‘home for wayward girls’” is dedicated to them, and to the 187 children incarcerated in Illinois today. No one, wayward or not, should have to risk death in order to be free.

More stories by Katie Prout . . .

🏹 The ghosts of Geneva’s “home for wayward girls”

🏠 “They’re cleaning to get rid of us.” Seven days before Christmas, 30 unhoused Chicagoans were forced to leave their temporary shelters.

📗Consume or be consumed: a Q&A with Emily Mester, author of American Bulk: Essays on Excess