Peoria State Hospital - The Man Who Cried at His Own Funeral

Destination Terror · Jul 29, 2026 · 34m

Four thousand people are buried on a hill outside Peoria, Illinois, and most of them don't have names — just numbers, pressed into small flat stones. For eight years, every time one of them went into the ground, a man was there to cry.

He couldn't speak. Nobody ever learned his real name. The staff called him Old Book, after the only thing anyone knew about his past, and they loved him. He dug the graves of strangers and then wept for them under an elm tree at the edge of the field, because no one else was coming.

Then in 1910 they buried him — and roughly four hundred people watched him cry…