Creede Hotel - Our Para Investigation

Our latest paranormal investigation took place at the Creede Hotel & Restaurant in Creede, CO.

 WILD WEST GHOSTS:
an amateur ghost hunting guide
to Haunted Hotels
in southwest Colorado.

Available now as a trade paperback from Amazon and Barnes&Noble. Also available as a Kindle e-book.


(This is Part Two of a two-part series. If you missed our previous account of the wild history and ghostly legends for this hotel and frontier mining town, click here.)

But first a S/O to proprietor/chef David Toole and hotel manager Leslie Heller, who both welcomed us and made the whole facility available to our investigation. Thanks, you two!

Since we visited before the hotel opened for its summer season, David and Leslie left the premises and gave us the run of the place to conduct our investigation. This arrangement worked for us because that eliminated external noise and the possibility of contaminated EVPs. (EVP stands for Electronic Voice Phenomenon, an audio effect through either a digital recorder or a spirit box as a means for ghosts to communicate.)

They recommended the Calamity Jane Room and the Poker Alice Room – the two guestrooms with the most reported paranormal activity. We headed up the narrow staircase and started with an EMF sweep of these two rooms and the hallway. (EMF stands for Electromagnetic Field, and EM field strengths may indicate ghosts are present or trying to communicate.) At the mouth of the stairwell, the meter showed 380mG and climbed to a steady 460mG near the bathroom at the other end of the hall. The EM field in the Calamity Jane Room registered 400mG on the east side, 530 over the bed, and mid 600s by the balcony. These readings were our baseline measurements to compare against any anomalies.

Calamity Jane Room

 We set up our camcorder, digital recorder, flashlight, and spirit box to start our first session.  We introduced ourselves, explained our equipment to any invisible presences, and invited them to speak with us or manipulate the flashlight. The light remained steady throughout the time in this room, and we’d have to wait until we returned home to analyze the digital audio recordings. We observed EMF fluctuations from 530mG to 570mG while we asked for interaction.

However, the spirit box managed to produce a number of EVPs we could hear at the time. We asked if any spirits were here to talk to us and heard a quick response of “Here?” We weren’t alone in the hotel after all. So we asked again how many spirits shared the room with us and heard twice, “Eight” – standing room only. Then we queried their names. The first reply was “Myrtle.” (We would later research that name for the vicinity and found several possibilities. Myrtle was common during the era, and a number of them lived and died in Creede.) We also heard the names “Liz” and “Fes” as well as a man’s voice saying, “Death.”

An EVP conversation we captured

During our later analysis, we discovered we’d captured a woman’s voice declaring, “I think I’m going to shoot you.” That unexpected announcement followed a less intelligible statement by a man, and we think we recorded an exchange between the two of them rather than a threat aimed at us.

Bob Ford

During the real-time session, Kym heard a voice coming from just beyond the open room door, so we checked the hallway expecting to see Leslie. No one in the hallway – at least, no one we could see since we were locked down and alone on the premises. But when we asked who was in the hall, a woman’s voice told us, “Bob.” Bob Ford? He’d died in 1892, assassinated in his nearby tent-saloon while he boarded at this establishment.

We struck camp and moved across the hall to the Poker Alice Room. On the way we noticed the slight odor of smoke – but only for a moment (a whiff of Alice’s famous stogie?) Since the building displayed a no-smoking sign, we mentioned this to David in a later follow-up interview. He told us that end of the hotel was closest to the buildings that burned when fires swept through early-day Creede. Make of that what you will.

Poker Alice Stubs

In the Poker Alice Room, we followed the same routine for the next session. We recorded 500mG throughout the room and 550mG over the bed (metal bed springs may have elevated these stable readings.)

Again, no interaction with the flashlight. But the spirit box captured multiple names and phrases. Most intriguing was “Alice” – given the room bore her name, and we know she boarded in this facility. We also recorded the name “David” and the word “Brave.” Other phrases proved more perplexing, including some clear and some garbled words but each delivered by separate voices. One asked the question, “You have the two (boys?)?” Another proclaimed, “Bless you,” and still another said, “Come to (me?).”

We decided to run an experiment on the dresser where a spirit had knocked over seven consecutive glasses. We set up two coffee mugs near the edge and invited the spirit to repeat the event. After ten minutes, the mugs remained in place. In later analysis, we discovered on the digital audio recording a response to our question, “Did you knock the glasses over?” (in front of the former guest). The immediate answer was a whispered “Yes.”

Poker Alice Room where seven
glasses tumbled from this dresser

All we needed to crown our investigation. Audio-only EVPs are some of the most convincing types of evidence ghost hunters capture.

 * * *

In the next article, we share the history and ghostly legends surrounding the Bross Hotel in Paonia, CO, where we witnessed a fanny print on a freshly made bed  -- a common paranormal occurrence reported by others as well in this very haunted B&B.

Colorado Haunted Hotels - Creede Hotel

We're sharing the history and haunted legends associated with each of the hotels and B&Bs included in our forthcoming book in early June,  

WILD WEST GHOSTS:
an amateur ghost hunting guide
to Haunted Hotels
in southwest Colorado.

This week, we feature the Creede Hotel in Creede, Colo. (This is Part I of a two-part series. Next week, we'll share our own investigation of the hotel, including EVPs clips and sample video from our findings.)

* * *

Historical Context

Hopeful prospectors worked the canyons surrounding Creede after the first silver strike in 1869, but the region remained too remote to make mining profitable for years. Ranching and homesteading followed when stage stations reached the area by the 1870s, but the three tiny communities of Stringtown, Jimtown, and Amethyst remained small and struggling until a miner named Nicholas Creede discovered a rich vein of silver in nearby East Willow Creek Canyon in 1889.

Legend has it Creede declared, “Holy Moses, I’ve struck it rich!” and his Holy Moses Mine launched Colorado’s last great silver boomtown. Over the next two years, the communities swelled from 600 locals to well over 10,000, spilling over six miles and consuming the other settlements under the name of Creede. Soon the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad began serving the area’s mines. Life was good.

Bob Ford

The boomtown days were wild times, drawing notorious figures such as gambler Robert Ford, who’d killed Jesse James. A disgruntled gamer named O’Kelley later shot Ford in the back inside a tent-saloon, but he was pardoned for ridding the town of Ford’s monopoly on gambling. Still, organized graft soon fell to the wiles of Soapy Smith, who operated an extortion racket from the Orleans Club, taking a cut from saloons, brothels, and gaming houses throughout the town.

Other infamous individuals drawn to Creede included Bat Masterson and William Sidney "Cap" Light (the town’s first deputy sheriff, also the brother-in-law of Soapy Smith).

Creede boasted a hundred lodging establishments at the time, and the Creede Hotel, then Zang's Hotel (after its owner), was hailed as one of the town's finest. John Zang, a Denver brewer, had come to Creede to distribute his beer, building
the hotel along with a saloon and brothel.

Calamity Jane

Poker Alice

No structure in Creede was ever grand or elaborate – buildings were thrown up as quickly as possible – and Zang’s Hotel was no exception. Still, the hotel was the fanciest place in town to stay, and Smith, Ford, Poker Alice Tubbs, and Calamity Jane all boarded there at one time or another.

Poker Alice worked gambling rooms throughout mining towns in Colorado, usually puffing on a black stogie. She became a well-known figure at Bob Ford’s Creede Exchange. She once remarked, “I’d rather play poker with five or six experts than eat.”

Known for her wild tales, Calamity Jane (Martha Jane Canary) also played cards like a pro, wore only men’s clothing, and had the reputation of out-drinking any man at the bar. She lived in Creede for a time, playing poker at local saloons.

Fires ravaged Creede twice around the turn of the century, both times sparing Zang’s Hotel. 

When silver prices fell in 1893, Soapy Smith headed north to the Klondike. With anti-gaming reforms lifted in Denver the previous year, many others drifted away from town also following the silver price panic. Creede’s boom days were over.

Zang's tombstone

After operating the hotel for a number of years, Zang met with an unfortunate end. In June of 1911, Zang broke into a home, made unwanted advances, and attacked a woman who shot and killed him. Mrs. Zang retained and operated the hotel until 1919.

The town survived on lead and zinc in the local ores through much of the 20th Century, but the last railroad run ended in 1973. These days, the town continues as a tourist and outdoor recreation center. 

The Creede Hotel remains the town’s oldest lodging and dining establishment, and visitors can overnight in restored guestrooms that once served as home to many of Creede’s colorful and notorious characters.

The current owner, David Toole, has operated the business since 2000, and he lives in the building’s quarters that once served as the brothel. The bar still attracts celebrities, including politicians and at one point western icon John Wayne, who owned property nearby.

Legends, Stories, and Guest Experiences

Most who’ve worked at The Creede Hotel have a ghost story to tell. Leslie Heller, hotel manager for a decade, finds the pictures running the length of hall next to the bar askew every morning. She also feels an invisible presence on a regular basis. Only a few days before we interviewed her, she heard a whistled tune coming from the bar, which was empty. She didn’t recognize the song, and when she whistled for us the few bars she could remember, we didn’t either.

Note registration desk to right,
where apparition vanished

She often sees movement out of the corner of her eye in the morning before other staffers arrive. That may well be: The former manager saw an apparition of a woman approach the front desk in the restaurant and carried on a brief conversation with the manager before the figure disappeared before his eyes.

One evening, a restaurant waitperson headed toward the kitchen with trays full of dishes, wondering how she would manage the door. She needn’t have worried. An unseen hand opened the door for her and closed it politely behind.

During the summer of 2014, an intern staffer from Europe captured with a camera the image of a Victorian-dressed woman in the antique mirror in the Western Room. The photo revealed a figure with a rather long neck twisted awkwardly to the side in a pose resembling someone dangling from a hangman’s noose.

Staffer captured camera image
in mirror of apparition

Sometimes, upstairs guests experience their own share of ghostly encounters. Each guestroom contains a journal to record impressions of their stay. One entry in the Poker Alice Room states, “Besides the ghost presence on our last night … the glasses on the nightstand were falling off one by one. When I picked them up this morning, there were seven on the floor.”

Other guests have reported footsteps walking up and down the stairwell.

Although David seldom encounters ghostly activity himself, he said he occasionally senses  unseen presences: “I feel like they appreciate me taking care of the place and leave me alone.”

* * *

Watch next weekend for the second part of this account: when we'll share possible EVPs communications with "Bob" (Bob Ford?) and "Alice" (Poker Alice?) as well as intriguing video-clip excerpts from our investigation.

In the meantime, join us for the countdown of the release of  WILD WEST GHOSTS in only seven weeks!

Colorado Haunted Hotels - the Beaumont in Ouray

Between now and late spring, we're sharing the history and haunted legends associated with each of the hotels and B&Bs included in our forthcoming book, 

Beaumont Hotel & Spa

WILD WEST GHOSTS:
an amateur ghost hunting guide
to Haunted Hotels
in southwest Colorado.

This week, we feature the Beaumont Hotel in Ouray, Colo. (If you missed -- or want to revisit -- the paranormal investigation we conducted at this hotel, you can click here, as well as link to YouTube clips from our actual investigations.)

* * *

Historical Context

Downtown Ouray

The San Juan range is one of the most highly mineralized sections in Colorado, drawing minors to Ouray as early as the 1850s in search of silver and gold. Although the serious rush began in the 1870s, the area’s mining heyday peaked for a decade starting in 1883. Horses, burros, mules, and carriages brought the first prospectors, and the population began to soar with reported silver strikes. The railroad made it to the valley in 1891, and Ouray grew from a miners' camp to a flourishing frontier community. Queen Anne Victorian storefronts and hotels popped up throughout the fledgling town, including the Beaumont Hotel, built in 1886 of bricks fired from the mud of local hot springs.

"unescorted ladies"
staircase

The hotel began as an enterprise to entertain railroad and mining investors to the area and claims thedistinction as one of the first in the country wired for AC current. Like many Old West towns, soiled doves frequented the local lodging establishments. A private staircase at the Beaumont provided “unescorted ladies” access to their clients – it still exists, though now used primarily by staff.

Most mines in the region closed by 1923, followed by the train’s closure in 1936. Because of diminishing tourism in this area during the mid-twentieth century, the Beaumont Hotel shut down in 1964. For nearly forty years the building stood vacant and fell into disrepair. The hotel sold in 1998 and new owners remodeled and reconfigured the rooms. After reopening in 2003, the hotel received the Governor's Award for Historic Preservation. A year later, it earned one of the first Preserve America Presidential Awards for historic preservation.

Most of Ouray’s permanent buildings constructed between 1880-1900 still stand, skillfully restored.

Lobby staircase

The hotel’s lounge is named after Luella Huey, the last know prostitute practicing out of the Beaumont. According to a plaque next to the bar, “As young children, her daughter Judy and her two younger cousins would search for Luella in hopes of finding her entertaining one of her many local miner friends. If the pursuit was successful, each child was rewarded a silver dollar…. If all else failed, the three determined children would climb the staircase of the Beaumont Hotel and gingerly tap on the door of Luella’s room. Sometimes their knocks were rewarded – more times not. Years took their toll on the beautiful Luella, and she died at the young age of 40.”

At least one murder occurred on the premises through the early years, involving a hotel waitress named Eller Day in 1887. A jealous pastry chef shot her four times in the Luella Lounge. Authorities incarcerated him for a pending trial, but the jail burned down at the hands of enraged vigilantes that very night with the chef still inside.

The Beaumont boasts through the years such famous guests as presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover, King Leopold of Belgium, Chipeta (widow of Ute chief Ouray), actresses Sarah Bernhardt, Angie Dickinson and, more recently, Oprah Winfrey.

Current owners Chad and Jennifer Leaver bought the hotel in 2010.

Today, recreationists can enjoy many of the high-country routes that miners developed over a century ago, still leading to nearby ghost towns and abandoned mines.

Legends, Stories, and Guest Experiences

When we asked Jen about the hotel’s paranormal hotspots, she seemed hard-pressed to identify any location that didn’t hold such reports.

Luella Lounge

All of the rooms harbor paranormal activity, with doors locking and unlocking on their own. Guests and staff have also detected the smell of perfume and tobacco smoke in every room and all the hallways – even though the entire facility is nonsmoking.

During renovation of the lounge, workers would gather their tools and put them up for the night, locking the door behind them. The next morning, they always found the tools scattered about, thus dubbing the room the “Voodoo Lounge.”

We talked to a staffer who began working when the hotel reopened. He said one specific area in the dining room frequently plummeted 23 degrees in a matter of moments. He also reported seeing a figure behind him reflected in the bar mirror out of the corner of his eye. He’d turn around and no one would be there. The experience recurred two or three times a week, and he always had the impression the figure was a woman. Someone working in the spa told him she often found the beauty products displayed on the table by the door transposed to the floor in the exact same arrangement the next morning. The night person regularly received complaints that guestroom door knobs rattled during the night.

Other regular poltergeist activity includes lamps turning on and off and the presence of inexplicable fog in the hallway. One curious event took place during a couple’s first night in Room 304. The man offered to draw a bath for his wife in the antique claw-foot bathtub. She declined, saying she’d wait until morning. To their surprise the next day, the tub had filled with water awaiting her.

In a different room, a guest woke up to a “nurse ghost” sitting next to the bed, and another guest witnessed a full-body apparition wearing a long white dress on the third-floor atrium.

One source relates the story of a ghostly woman said to walk the halls at 2:15 a.m. on every quarter of the moon. Some say her husband murdered her, and she continues to look for him. Supposedly the ghostly scene replays, but only with her and not her killer husband.

An apparition wearing a long white
dress was seen on this balcony

According to area author MaryJoy Martin, one of her acquaintances had visited the hotel and found her way to a guestroom she’d stayed in years before.  She took a photograph of an old picture hanging on the wall and, after developing it, found the reflection of two gentlemen standing in period clothing. The figures had the appearance of people engaged in conversation but stopping just long enough to look her way as she snapped the photo.

“Our ghosts are just pranksters,” Jen told us. “None are ever threatening.”

* * *

Soon after uploading this post, we head over to Creede for the final investigation we'll include in the forthcoming book. The Creede Hotel has a long history of haunted activity in this historic 1880s building, once home to notorious boarders like Calamity Jane, Bob Ford (who killed Jesse James), Soapy Smith, and Bat Masterson during this boomtown's frontier mining days. You can join us for live tweets starting Saturday at noon (Mtn Time) on Twitter @WriteintheThick

Stay tuned next week for the full account of our investigation there!

Para Investigation - Back to Cripple Creek, Part 2

The swirling of orbs of an angry ghost, the voice of a famous dead astrologer, and invisible touches in front of a portal to another dimension -- this investigation had it all.

This is Part 2 of our paranormal investigation in Cripple Creek, Colo., at the Outlaws and Lawmen Jail Museum followed by our same-night return investigation to Linda Goodman's Miracle Inn/Last Dollar Inn. (If you missed Part 1's account, click here.)

When Hector Zeferino of Hotchkiss Paranormal Investigators (HPI) invited us to participate in their fourth investigation in Cripple Creek, we jumped at the opportunity to work alongside a seasoned professional team.

Cripple Creek's old jail house

After we'd encountered the spirit of "Amy" on the jail's third floor (see previous account), we shifted our portion of the investigation to the main cell block, where one of the more notorious spirits resided, an entity known as "Joe." His most concentrated presence was in the confinement cell where he spent a great deal of time before his death, and he'd previously attacked HPI investigator Seth Davis, who was determined to confront the spirit again. We served as his back up when the three of us took our turn in Joe's cell during a lock-down with lights off.

That cell would provide one of several memorable experiences that evening.

Until that night, we'd made the calculated decision to conduct all the previous investigations for our Colorado haunted hotels book during the day. Our assumption was that ghosts didn't necessarily operate on an earthly 24-hour clock and, besides, we figured it was better to see what we were doing. Still, we wondered how our nerve would hold up in the presence of a known hostile spirit. And in the dark.

As it turned out, we were too busy recording the experience to over-think what happened next.

Multiple flying orbs sail around 

HPI investigator Seth Davis

Seth put on prison garb to goad Joe, and we bravely trooped in and set up our equipment just as we normally would. The atmosphere seemed oppressive in the cell, but this time no violence occurred. However, Joe was definitely present. Although our digital recorder captured no EVPs of Joe, we did record to video a whole series of flying orbs sailing around Seth as he taunted the angry spirit. In fact, we captured 28 flying orbs over the next 15 minutes.

It was a new kind of evidence for us, and we were so delighted with our documentation it never occurred to us to feel scared.

Astrologer Linda Goodman

After an hour in the cell -- and three hours total at the jail -- we moved our investigation to the next locale, Linda Goodman's Miracle Inn. We'd arranged to conduct an experiment at this B&B with an e-quaintance we'd met, a psychic and medium who'd known the famous astrologer-author Linda Goodman, who died in 1995. Though a thousand miles away, the psychic tried to contact Goodman while we were there and to have Goodman contact us.

Using our audio-only digital recorder, our EchoVox spirit box, and our camcorder, we conducted two sessions aimed at Goodman -- one in her former bedroom and the other in the living room where she herself had encountered a full-bodied apparition of Nikola Tesla while she lived there. We captured several clear, intriguing EVPs during those sessions, one on the recorder and others when we turned on the box.

A voice immediately said, "Look at the machine" (referring, we assume, to the EchoVox), followed by "Spirit box" and "That's it." Then we heard, "We come." The lines of communication seemed plenty open.

One clear EVP in a woman's voice said, "I can solve that." When we later shared this recording with our new psychic friend, she confirmed the voice was Goodman's.

 Linda Goodman speaks 

to us through our EchoVox

We also conducted flashlight experiments to establish communication, asking spirits to respond by winking the flashlight once for yes and twice for no. This means of instrumental trans-communication established  Tesla was, indeed, still present in the B&B, and we also made contact with one of the shadow people reported to walk through walls in second-floor bedrooms.(For more on that, click to see our account of the earlier investigation this past October.) We recorded our flashlight queries and responses to video as well.

One unexpected encounter at the Miracle Inn was meeting still another paranormal investigator, Shaun Crusha, who decided to come over from Colorado Springs when he heard we were coming. The more the merrier! Shaun turned out to be generous in sharing both expertise and advice, which we much appreciated. We also loved seeing first-hand his array of ghost-hunting gizmos, which rivaled those of Zac Bagans on  Travel Channel's Ghost Adventures. 

One of Sofia's portal paintings

More exciting was Shaun's offer to collaborate with us by using his equipment in our own investigation of the reported spirit portal in the Miracle Inn's basement, normally off-limits to visitors. B&B co-owner and artist Sofia Balas had begun painting a series of pictures depicting portals a year before she and her partner bought and moved to the inn. Only when she arrived did she learn that other investigators had detected the presence of the portal in their basement.

We could hardly wait to set up our equipment (and Shaun's).

It was close to 1:30 a.m. by the time everything was in place. Shaun arranged a series of instruments attached to to two long platforms and then pointed an array of laser grids at the region where the portal was reported. Then we waited.

Investigator Shaun Crusha's laser array

But not for long.

As we all stood at the mouth of the portal, both Shaun and Mark soon noticed disturbances in several of the laser points of light, and the flickering seemed to advance toward us. At the same time, several of Shaun's motion detectors klaxoned, followed by spikes in all of our EMF meters. (EMF stands for Electromagetic Field, and spirits are said to disturb or even use such fields to signal their presence.)

The disturbance seemed to settle down, but within moments Kym felt something tug the hair on the top of her head. The tug felt like someone (or something) had firmly grasped a handful of hair and pulled straight up hard enough to get her attention. Mission accomplished. The same thing happened to the other B&B co-owner, Jason Barton, shortly afterwards.

We continued to monitor the portal for another 45 minutes, but nothing as dramatic transpired after that. Just as well -- it had been a long night. Memorable, but long.

We packed up everything and headed back upstairs. By 3 a.m., we finally turned in, sleeping that night in Linda Goodman's former bedroom. She could have bounced up and down on the mattress for all we cared.

We slept like the dead -- or next to them -- until mid-morning.

* * *

The book featuring our investigations at 14 lodgings in Colorado is now out!

Miracle Inn

 WILD WEST GHOSTS:
an amateur ghost hunting guide
to Haunted Hotels
in southwest Colorado.

Available as a trade paperback from Amazon and Barnes&Noble. Also available as a Kindle e-book.