Mortuary’s Golf Layout Is Par for the Course if You Enjoy the Macabre

A guillotine and a metal skull with blinking red eyes greet visitors to the basement of this funeral home.

But it’s no torture chamber: The owner has installed a nine-hole miniature golf course.

And though some people ask if their children can play during services, owner Roger Ahlgrim has one strict rule: no golfing during wakes.

“They ask to, but we can’t let them. The noise from the basement goes right up the ducts,” said Ahlgrim, 54, who began building the miniature golf course when he moved the family’s funeral home to suburban Palatine 26 years ago.

Ahlgrim swiped the metal skull at the first hole from the mortuary school he attended more than 30 years ago. Spider webs, a haunted house, a casket shipping box and tombstones decorate other holes on the underground course.

Rotary and Kiwanis clubs now throw social events there. and people book the basement for birthday parties, Ahlgrim said.

“I just did it for ourselves. But our kids got into Indian Guides and Boy Scouts, and their packs started using it, and then the word spread,” Ahlgrim said.

The underground playground’s entrance is downstairs beside a smoking lounge, so those unfamiliar with the golf course don’t know that it is there.

Stories of the macabre golf course have spread so far that people ask to see the basement even if they have come to make funeral arrangements.