In 1979, Bob Brewer and his new bride moved into their first home at 1631 N. 24th in Quincy, Illinois. Initially, things were fine at their rental home, but it wasn’t long before they started to hear a basketball bouncing on the slab floor downstairs about 3:00 every morning. This kept on for quite a while. Eventually, Bob started sleeping with knife under his pillow.

When the next month’s rent was due, Bob asked the landlord about the noises, and was told not to “pay attention to what people say about that house.

One night when his wife came home from a late meeting, her husband was sleeping upstairs. She found he had placed a Bible on the bottom step in an attempt to prevent whatever was downstairs from coming up.

At Christmastime, Bob took a picture of his wife. After waiting the required time before peeling off the back of the Polaroid photograph, he saw the image of a figure looking down at his wife over her left shoulder.

“The face was slightly stretched, where you could see through the face, but it had this big fog around it,” said Bob.

Bob started showing the picture around town, and started hearing the story of what had taken place in the house. Years later, he visited the archive at the Quincy Library and saw a picture of Stanley Goodside, and “it was obviously the same guy,” said Bob. “One we found out what happened in that house, and the speculation that he had been cut up in the bathtub, the chips in the pink bathtub started taking on a lot heavier meaning and it was kind of scary living in that house when we knew what happened. We moved out the month after that.”

What happened in the house had centered around a lover’s triangle of former flower children. Lani and Rodger Aldridge lived in the house with Phillip Stanley Goodside. The three were good friends…until Rodger discovered his wife was pregnant by Goodside.

Lani and Rodger separated, and Rodger moved to Burlington, Iowa with their 8 year old son, Jan. Upon returning from a visit to see Jan at an aunt and uncle’s home, Lani found that Stan had disappeared.

Soon after her return, she noticed some fresh trash bags at the dump behind the home near Calvary Cemetery where she was walking.

Lani picked one up and felt the handle of a saw through the plastic. She then found a thumb wrapped up in a bloody washcloth, and immediately called the police. Fingerprint technology confirmed that the hands, feet and head recovered at the scene belonged to Goodside. A torso found a couple of days previously at a rest stop area near Rodger’s hometown of Sullivan, Illinois was found to be that of Goodside as well.

Although evidence, including a witness’s testimony that Rodger had told her he wanted to “decapitate Goodside,” indicated Rodger was the murderer of Stanley Goodside, the man wase was acquitted due to lack of DNA testing available at that time. If the murder had taken place in today’s time, Bob Nall, the investigating sheriff at the time, believes he would have been found guilty in an open and shut case.

Hopefully, Goodside’s restless spirit has found his way to the other side by now. I have found no additional reports of the residence at 1624 N. 24th Street in Quincy being haunted since the 1970s.

References and additional information: http://www.whig.com/global/video/flash/popupplayer.asp?ClipID1=6803711&h1=Unsettled+spirit%3A+Goodside+murder+video&vt1=v&at1=News&d1=906867&LaunchPageAdTag=Homepage&activePane=info&rnd=32228847

Quincy Herald Whig archives, accessed through ancestry.com