WHERE TO FIND GHOSTS IN DENVER

Capitol Building
A female apparition wearing a long dress is said to haunt the State Capitol, although no one knows what she’s doing there — she died years before women’s suffrage. She’s been spotted in the capitol and in the tunnels beneath the building.

Croke-Patterson Mansion
Thomas Croke built the castle-like building in the early 1890s. Croke didn’t own the mansion long before he sold it to Thomas Patterson, a legislator and publisher of the Rocky Mountain News, whose family enjoyed the residence for a longer period. Since the Pattersons vacated the place, it has been a boarding house, radio station, and office building. During renovation in the 1970s, workers noticed that things in the house had been moved overnight. They left two Doberman Pinschers to guard their work, but the dogs were found on the sidewalk the next day after jumping to their deaths from a third-story window. It’s said that a child ghost haunts the mansion, but sightings of Patterson have been reported from the courtyard. The mansion is now the Patterson Historic Inn, so go spend the night and see if you can find that dog-killing phantom kid.

Denver Public Library
The haunter in the DPL basement is apparently a bibliophobe and a jerk. This ghost likes to give people a violent shove, so keep to the upper floors.

Molly Brown House
If you can talk to the right person (Mary Van Meter), you can hear more than a few anecdotes of haunted goings-on in the house of this famous Denverite who survived the Titanic and several musicals. If you can’t visit the museum, at least watch an intensely creepy clip claiming to capture Molly Brown’s ghost in a nearby building. YouTube “Ghost of Molly Brown.”

Whitehead-Peabody Mansion
At least a dozen ghosts and many disturbances — from chandeliers flickering to falling books — have been spotted at this old house, which was (for a short time) a gay bar called Spirits. During the 1970s, one ghost is said to have poured a beer down the shirt of a homophobic cook. You can find allies in the unlikeliest of places!

Fitzsimons Army Medical Center
Originally christened Army Hospital 21 in 1918, Fitzsimons was the premier military hospital for most of the twentieth century before it was closed in 1999 and renovated to become part of Anschutz Medical Center. Building 500, which still stands today, is a particularly haunted corner, with sightings of reportedly angry soldier ghosts.

Cheesman Park and Denver Botanic Gardens
Millennials may flock to Cheesman today for its spikeball- and acroyoga-friendly fields, but at the dawn of Denver in 1858, William Larimer set the land aside as a graveyard for elites. The public part of the cemetery filled up over the next few decades and fell into disrepair, and when the city ordered the graveyard to be emptied in 1893, thousands of bodies were left unclaimed. See Mike Yost’s story on page 28 for more.

Sand Creek National Monument
On November 29, 1864, staving off an imagined attack, Colonel John Chivington and 675 men slaughtered a group of Cheyenne and Arapahoe natives killing an estimated 163 people, two-thirds of which were women and children, and proudly displayed mutilated body parts as trophies in the Denver Theater. One year later, December 2, 1865, bison hunter Kipling Brightwater charged into Fort Lyons having witnessed a large camp of Cheyenne, but dispatched soldiers found no one. These sightings continued throughout the 20th century, and most visitors today comment on the heavy emotions they experience at the site. Many believe these spirits will linger until the US Government delivers on its 1865 promise for reparations.

Lumber Baron Inn
Scottish immigrant John Mouat made a fortune in the lumber industry and he built many of the structures that formed early Denver, including his mansion in the Highlands. The huge house had many owners over the decades, but it eventually stood unoccupied in the 1970s. Two runaway teenage girls were inexplicably murdered in the empty mansion, and their cases were never solved. The building was restored and now serves as an inn with resident ghosts whose disembodied footsteps sometimes unsettle the guests.

Many of these sites have ghost tours for the Halloween season. For many more haunted sites in Denver, check out local historian Phil Goldstein’s books and ghost tours.