Ghosthunting Colorado. Kailyn Lamb

      Introduction

      “Jack stood in the dining room just outside the batwing doors leading into the Colorado Lounge, his head cocked, listening. He was smiling faintly. Around him, he could hear the Overlook Hotel coming to life.”

      — Stephen King, The Shining

      FOR 20 YEARS OF MY LIFE I have lived in Denver or in the metropolitan area surrounding it. Denver is an ideal city. It has all of the excitement that city life brings but is also a short and easy drive away from the beauty of the mountains. It is the Rocky Mountain State, forged on the blood and sweat of miners, and in some places unfortunately scarred by the angry battles between the American Indian tribes who called these lands home and the settlers who were trying to make it theirs.

      Probably the most surprising thing I found as I dove headfirst into the supposed haunted areas of Colorado is how much their stories were rooted in history. Some places were actually able to trace their ghostly stories to real events that happened there. This feeling was mirrored by Bryan Bonner, co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Paranormal Research Society. Bonner and the rest of the RMPRS make it their mission to search for ghosts using science and logic and, for them, the first step is almost always research.

      Research means being able to separate urban legends from what actually happened. Knowing the background of a location can help a researcher understand why any sort of paranormal activity might be happening there. Bonner used an old inn in Evergreen, Colorado, as an example. The ghost story was that the original owner’s son had died in the building as a child of a lung condition and has been running up and down the halls bouncing a ball as a spirit since then. After doing research at the Evergreen Library for a couple of years, they found an obituary from 1922 saying that the son died of pneumonia at the house.

      “It doesn’t prove that it’s a ghost, but it’s a huge piece of a puzzle to at least say, well, some of these stories we’re hearing are true. The original owner’s son did die of a lung condition,” Bonner said. The inn, which is now privately owned and will not let RMPRS come in for any more investigations, provides a good example of the importance of visiting sites multiple times if possible. While not every location will allow someone to investigate as many times as they might like, the more you visit, the more information you can collect.

      Before I ever knew about ghosthunting, I lived in Denver and interacted with many of these locations on a regular basis. Tivoli on the Auraria college campus was where I spent a large amount of time while working on Metropolitan State University of Denver’s student newspaper. Spending late nights in a dark brewery turned student union is enough to raise the hair on anyone’s neck. One of the strangest coincidences, however, was that I lived in an apartment directly across the street from the Croke-Patterson Mansion. For the first year I lived there, I was completely ignorant that the building across the street from me had a reputation for being one of the most haunted buildings in Denver. Despite not knowing, I definitely felt that the building had a presence, and I would often wonder what the inside of the massive red sandstone structure looked like. Once I began writing, I was quickly hooked on the mansion’s story, and it became hard to let it go.

      Croke-Patterson Mansion is far from being the only haunted hotel in Colorado; in fact, as many know, it is not even considered to be the most haunted one. That honor goes to the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park. I doubt that I have to tell many paranormal enthusiasts, but the Stanley is the location that inspired Stephen King’s The Shining. That book, which was King’s third novel, is only one of his works that is located in Colorado. While King typically writes about his home state of Maine, he occasionally branches out to the Centennial State. The Stanley is one of the few locations I know of that fully embraces its haunted reputation, and even profits from it.

      While all of the locations in this book are worth the visit, I have to say I have a personal favorite—yet another location I interacted with before knowing it was haunted. It is an unwritten rule that all true Coloradans must see a concert at Red Rocks Amphitheatre. But I try to get out there whenever I have the time, and not just for concerts. I never felt any malicious spirits, but the area certainly has magic of a different kind, and I never feel more at peace than when I am at Red Rocks surrounded by the mountains. The same can be said of many of the mountainous locations in this book, and the Rockies are simply beautiful to behold. Their giant presence in Colorado Springs inspired Katharine Lee Bates to write the poem “Pikes Peak,” more commonly known today as “America the Beautiful,” and the “purple mountain majesties” that she writes about stretch across the entire state.

      As a local Coloradan, I had no idea just how surrounded by ghost stories I was and, despite having written a book on the subject, I still consider myself to be a novice ghosthunter. There are many aspects to consider beyond researching a location and determining how much of its story is legend versus history. This is where the RMPRS, whose members have been investigating paranormal stories across the state of Colorado since 1999, comes in. In the times that I met with Bonner, I noticed something very important about his group’s philosophy: the RMPRS are not ghosthunters. They have created the term Paranormal Claim Investigators for themselves to better explain what they do. That means that instead of going to locations anticipating finding ghosts, the group tries to look at every possible scientific or logical explanation before looking to otherworldly explanations. Bonner says they use the rule of Ockham’s Razor, the scientific idea that, given all explanations, the simplest is usually the most accurate. Even if the simplest explanations fall through, they do not jump to ghostly conclusions and will simply state that they could not find any reason for the particular activity.

      “We investigate the claims; we don’t go in to find the ghost,” Bonner said. “We go ‘OK, what supposedly has happened here?’ and then we break each one of the claims down individually.” The group go out of their way to decipher urban legends to separate those from the true history of a location and investigate every possible explanation for the strange occurrences their clients bring to them.

      Depending on the location, the RMPRS may use any of several branches of science to look at what could be causing paranormal activity. The group has consulted physicists, geologists, psychologists, and many other experts depending on the question at hand. While the members of RMPRS have started to use some of these skills themselves in their investigations, Bonner said that their most important tool is critical thinking.

      “All this stuff doesn’t mean anything if you’re not applying it right,” Bonner said. He also mentioned that on occasion, aside from scientific experts, the group has been known to consult magicians for their ability to think outside the box.

      I learned a number of things about visiting haunted locations from my conversations with Bonner. First and foremost is to keep an open mind, which prevents you from going into an investigation either thinking the location is not haunted at all or “knowing” it is haunted. This helps prevent what Bonner likes to call “confirmation bias,” where a team goes in based on previously collected evidence and automatically decides a location is haunted. Bonner said that an example of confirmation bias is ghosthunters going to a location and recording electronic voice phenomena (EVP) sessions in which they begin asking questions of any ghosts that might be present. He explained that at that point, an investigator is no longer questioning whether there is something paranormal present.