Bradford Hein is a broad shouldered man in a dark suit, and looks like the kind of guy who would have been perfectly capable of putting a bolt in some beast's head back when Chicago was hog butcher to the world.We were in the basement of his workplace, in the town of Palatine, Illinois, just outside Chicago. Various pinball and video game machines hummed to life and drowned out the wind and spitting rain which had draped Palatine like a veil—yes, it was literally a dark and stormy night, with only a few more to go before Halloween. Hein turned his attention to the nine-hole miniature golf course, activating the water features, the sound effects, the castle defenses, and the windmill, naturally. Hein is something of a mini-golf fiend; he has shot a 9 on this very course, but not without spending a lot of time on the carpet.
Organ music and tinny screams, howls, yelps, and laughs—the usual ghoul chorale—provided an intermittent serenade, underscored by the grinding of the windmill and the clicking of the castle. He pointed out the score cards and the pens, then headed upstairs to leave me to my game. Hein told me that he'd be in the back room if I needed anything—he had to prepare a gentleman for his funeral tomorrow.
This funeral home has everything: video games, free coffee, a haunted mini-golf course… Photo by B. David Zarley
Here's how a funeral home ended up with a mini golf course—not to mention shuffleboard (both saloon and snowbird varieties), bumper and regular pool tables, and those pinball and video game cabinets—in the basement, according to the man who grew up with it.Doug Ahlgrim's family has been in the funeral business for over a century, and there are numerous Ahlgrim Family Funeral Services locations around Chicagoland. In 1963, his father, Roger, opened a new funeral home in Palatine."Business was very slow in the beginning," Doug told me over the phone the morning of my golfing trip. "So to keep himself busy—he always had loved miniature golf—we had this large community room underneath the business—large basement, shall we say—so he thought, 'Well, what the heck?' and started building himself a miniature golf course."It's not like Doug's father ever advertised his basement mini-golf course—it was born out of his passion for putt putt, not as a marketing device—and so the course stayed a family secret until Doug and his siblings were in elementary school.
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"We would invite our friends over, and it leaked out into the community," said Doug, who is now the owner and funeral director of Ahlgrim's Lake Zurich and Palatine locations. "We became involved in Cubs Scouts and then Boy Scouts and Indian Guides and church groups, so just by word of mouth it kind of spread out it was there."
The fun side of a funeral home. Photo by B. David Zarley
And so the Palatine Ahlgrim Family Funeral Home became the kind of place where Cub and Boy Scouts hold troop meetings and where kids throw birthday parties. The community room is available for play only when there are no funeral services going on; a round of mini golf is free (as are the pinball, video game, and coffee machines), but you do need to make reservations to play. People are roundly receptive of the community room. It does have a haunted theme—it has to!—which could have been insensitive or gauche but here perfectly walks the line between campy and earnest, perhaps thanks to the genuine love that built the course in the first place. There are T-shirts for sale, which feature a golf club wielding grim reaper and the slogan "Playing a round underground."Over time, the course has become quite famous, as far as handmade nine-hole putt-putt courses go; press clippings—from the _Chicago Tribune, Sports Illustrated, _Business Insider,_ National Enquirer—_litter the walls. ESPN practically overran the place with trucks and equipment, Hein, the Palatine funeral director, will tell you.
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Ahlgrim sees the community room as serving a deeper purpose than providing a unique place to party or putt, though."We get kids in there before they have to visit for a death," Ahlgrim said. "If they do have to come back and visit for a death, the place isn't so scary. The building isn't so big and scary. They've already met a funeral director; they know that we're people, too, and that's kind of nice. That's what I like about it."I appreciate Dad building it for his kids, and they enjoyed that, but it's nice to see the public get in there for not a death. To see the smiles."
Death Valley. Photo by B. David Zarley
Hole No. 1 is basically one long fairway, split up at the beginning by a wooden divider—the Ahlgrim course loves to make your life hard right from the tee—with the hole on a plateau on the far end, helpfully marked by a DEAD END sign. Between the tee and the hole is an honest to God sand trap, replete with sand, snakes, and a skull. Roger Ahlgrim used that skull in mortuary school, where he learned to apply muscle and flesh, ears, nose, and eyes, so that he may one day make someone whole again; it's perfect, you think, that the skull is now in its own little dry valley.Your ball leaps easily over the sand trap, although you do not quite manage to get it up on to the plateau first try. The obstacle on hole No. 2 is made from mortuary relics as well; to get to the hole—and not incur the one-stroke chicken penalty—you have to knock your ball through one of the openings in an enormous blue shipping box, the kind used to transport coffins on a train.
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You navigate the shipping box, with a skull and cross bones painted on its side, easily enough, but you can see that the real tests are coming. The course is small but technical, requiring a substantial amount of accuracy and a perfect application of power; it also demands some serious carpet time for memorization (ask Bradford Hein!).The third hole is where your real problems begin. Directly in front of the tee mat is a choke point guarded by a blood red castle; the door of the crimson keep is the only way to the hole, and it is blocked by a malicious little guillotine. The blade rests on the carpet for long stretches of time before snapping—click!—like an ambush predator; even after you count out the seconds that the castle sleeps before springing on you—about eight—your first meeting with Le Moulin à Silence goes about as well as Robespierre's.As if to lighten the mood, hole No. 4 features a massive game of cemetery skeeball between the tee and the cup: smack the ball up and into one of the holes, watch it shoot out of the respective pipe. You badly misjudge how hard you need the hit the ball the first time; the second attempt sends you careening down against the headstones, only to fall out of the worst possible pipe, landing you farther from the hole than if you had just putted around the obstacle in the first place. The windmill is next, which you batter against like a housefly before mercifully making it through.
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Attention to detail is important in the funeral-service and mini-golf industries. Photo by B. David Zarley
Your phone has no service down here, and for the first time on a dark and rainy night three days before Halloween in the basement of a funeral home you are slightly unnerved: you realize that your Snapchat story will never be told, and Holes 6 and 7 are, to you at least, the signature holes of the Ahlgrim course.Both prominently feature a "mystery box" of sorts, an imposing structure with a minimal aperture that you putt the ball into, at which point your ball is at the whims of unseen physical (and beyond?) forces before popping from one of the various mystery box exits. You cannot hope to overcome the hidden machinations on your first try; only experience can circumvent luck, as you learn how hard to hit the ball to determine which blind path it will take (you think!).The vast majority of the spooky sounds in the basement emanate from the haunted house of the sixth hole, thigh high and blanched like bone. The only way to the hole is through the house. A partially plucked doll's head hovers in the window. The carpet around the house bubbles and pulses as if possessed, each step causing gruesome swells in the ground; you are pretty sure this was done on purpose, because the hole is somehow creepy as fuck.It is your favorite hole.Making it through the miniature Amityville means you now get to face the Ahlgrim Cryptorium, an imposing, gray brutalist edifice featuring a miniature graveyard out front. There's a one-stroke penalty for entry, two for disturbing a grave. You somehow judge the lay of the course just enough to narrowly avoid both the graveyard and a hole in one; the two makes you feel pretty confident heading down the homestretch.After skirting the Beetlejuice-striped lighthouse, you look at Hole 9, a devious cliff with a severe ramp and a running stream. Up and over is the only way out, and the ramp's steepness, combined with its narrowness and it being your only escape, means you carom balls back into your boots or up and over the boundaries of the course, so that pretty soon the windmill is under attack by a pathetic cannonade.You are feeling quite sheepish—and quite like Sisyphus—by the time you roll up the hill, down the PVC piping, and into the little basket which holds the golf balls, somehow managing to avoid the water trap, even as you manage to hit at least two other holes. The score is tallied, and the results are … not good.Your number's come up, and in the basement of a funeral home!
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