Walk or drive past 1717 31st Street this month and you'll notice the wrought iron gate at Mayslake Peabody Estate is closed to the public in a way it hasn't been in years. Scaffolding wraps sections of the Tudor Revival mansion. The retreat wing behind it, the one most residents never paid much attention to, is partway through demolition. If you were counting on the estate's usual October lineup of ghost tours and lantern-lit programming, that plan needs a rewrite.
Mayslake Hall closed to the public on March 1, 2026, and it isn't reopening this year. The Forest Preserve District of DuPage County has the mansion and its Portiuncula Chapel shut down for an $8.3 million renovation, with completion expected in early 2027. For a building that has quietly organized a chunk of Oak Brook's fall calendar for the better part of a decade, that's not a footnote. It's the reason this season looks different than the one you remember, and it's worth understanding exactly what changed and what's actually filling the gap.
What Closed, and Why It's Not a Quick Fix
The scope here goes past a fresh coat of paint. According to reporting on the project, crews are installing new heating and cooling plants for both the mansion and the Franciscan retreat building, work driven by an HVAC system that had become too costly and labor-intensive to keep patched together. Air conditioning had never even been extended to the event hall, which limited how the space could be used to begin with.
The more visible change is structural. Crews are removing a portion of the retreat wing, the E-shaped addition built onto the mansion in the 1950s, and closing the resulting opening. Ellen Stoner, principal at the historic preservation architecture firm AltusWorks, described the thinking behind that demolition plainly:
"In taking this wing down, it creates a lot of opportunities for engagement with the natural world."
That's a reasonable long-term goal for the estate. It's also a project with a timeline that runs through this Halloween, next spring, and into 2027, which means anyone building an October plan around indoor tours or hall-based events at Mayslake needs a different address this year.
Why This Particular Building Sitting Dark Matters
Mayslake isn't just another closed building in a county with a lot of forest preserve real estate. Benjamin Marshall, the Chicago architect behind the Drake Hotel, designed the mansion in 1919 for coal magnate Francis Stuyvesant Peabody. It's been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1994. And it almost didn't survive to see that designation: in 1991, a developer had plans to raze the buildings and put up 130 luxury homes on the property. DuPage County voters stopped that by approving a $17.5 million referendum in 1992 that let the Forest Preserve District buy the estate outright.
That history is part of why the current closure registers as more than routine maintenance. This is the building the county's own residents voted to save from a subdivision, now closed for the most invasive work it's seen since that purchase.
The good news, if you're a regular at the property rather than a mansion tourist, is that the closure has a boundary. The surrounding Mayslake Forest Preserve, including the off-leash dog area, remains open daily from one hour after sunrise until one hour after sunset. Dogs still can't go inside the hall, but that's been the rule for years and has nothing to do with construction. If your fall routine at Mayslake was really about the trails and not the tours, nothing there has actually changed.
Where the Season Actually Moved
With the mansion out of rotation, three other Oak Brook addresses are doing the work that Mayslake used to handle on its own.
- Bronswood Cemetery, on Madison Street, hosts its Historic Cemetery Walk for a second year this October. The Oak Brook Historical Society partners with GreenMan Theatre Troupe actors, who play the roles of the founders and pioneers buried on the grounds, along a lantern-lit half-mile path. A midway rest stop offers cider. Ticket proceeds go toward accessibility improvements at the Oak Brook Heritage Center, which gives the event a purpose beyond the seasonal theatrics.
- Fullersburg Woods Nature Education Center on Spring Road runs its family pumpkin hikes in the evening, a flashlight-guided walk that's become one of the more dependable fall fixtures for families who want something less staged than a mall event and less formal than a museum tour.
- The Oak Brook Park District has its own Halloween-season programming spread across Central Park and Swim Central. A costumed Spooky Walk in the park runs alongside a Pumpkin Swim at Swim Central on October 16, from 6:00 to 8:45 p.m., which the district bills less as a traditional pumpkin patch and more as an indoor pool hunt for pumpkins and prizes. During the week of October 20, the district also fills two dozen Halloween eggs and hides them in residents' front yards, a small, hyperlocal touch that has nothing to do with any single venue being open or closed.
Worth noting separately: Wonderverse, the Ghostbusters themed entertainment space that opened inside the former Sears at Oakbrook Center in January 2024, closed permanently on December 22, 2025. Its Ghost Trap speakeasy, a fixture in a lot of older "things to do in Oak Brook" write-ups, is gone along with it. Between that closure and Mayslake's, two of the venues that used to anchor Halloween season here are simply not part of this year's calendar. The Oak Brook Park District and Bronswood Cemetery aren't backup options this fall. They're the actual headliners.
The Season Opens Before Halloween Does
If you're mapping out the next several weekends, the calendar doesn't actually start with pumpkins. The Healing Field returns to the Oak Brook Sports Core September 9 through 13, a display that's become the village's early September marker before the Halloween-adjacent programming takes over in October. It's a good reminder that Oak Brook's fall isn't a single month of events clustered around one theme. It's a sequence, and this year that sequence runs through a different set of addresses than it has in past Octobers.
None of this means the season is thinner. It means it's redistributed. A cemetery walk with paid actors and a charitable angle, a nature center's evening hikes, a park district running its own costume and pumpkin programming across two venues, and a village-wide flag display to open it all. If you've been defaulting to the same mental map of where fall happens in Oak Brook, this is the year to update it.
For those of you who've lived here long enough to remember touring Mayslake Hall on a Saturday afternoon or catching a Gothic ghost story session inside its walls, the wait for that to come back runs into 2027. Everything else on this list is happening now, within walking or short driving distance of most Oak Brook addresses, and none of it requires the mansion to be open.
If you're weighing what any of this means for your own plans in Oak Brook, whether that's understanding how the neighborhood is trending or just wanting a candid local read from people who actually live the calendar rather than Google it, the team at JLG Group is easy to reach. We're a phone call or a visit to our Oak Brook neighborhood page away, and we're always glad to talk about the village, mansion renovations included.
