Ghost Tales Straight Out of the Wild West

c 2022 by Jan MacKell Collins

Why do histories from the Wild West include so many haunting tales of ghosts? For one thing, the average life expectancy between 1865 to 1895 was between 35 and 46 years old. In rough and tumble towns like Dodge City, Tombstone, Canyon Diablo and other places, citizens faced a one in 61 chance of being murdered between 1876 and 1885. And what with the absence of penicillin, aspirin and the plethora of meds we see on the market today, it’s no wonder that death came easily in the 1800s. In a day of unsanitary conditions, lack of indoor plumbing and general dirtiness, the three biggest killers of folks in the west were diarrhea, pneumonia and tuberculosis. On the other end of the spectrum were the gamblers, gunfighters and other miscreants who could easily die from “lead poisoning.”

It’s really no wonder that the spirits of the past linger today, hoping to share their sad tales of an untimely demise with us. For those who don’t believe in ghosts, even scientists suppose that a person’s spirit can indeed outlast their physical bodies once they die. Especially if one dies with some sort of unfinished business in their life, or is murdered, or dies so suddenly they don’t even know they are dead, their ghost could hang around until it is somehow set free. That is where oodles and oodles of intriguing ghost stories are born.

Take Sarah Winchester and her “Mystery House” in San Jose, California. Born Sarah Lockwood Pardee, the lady married William Wirt Winchester in 1862. Sarah gave birth to only one child, Annie Pardee Winchester, who only lived for about a month. Then William died too, in 1881, from tuberculosis, just three months after inheriting his father’s Winchester Repeating Arms Company. The grieving Sarah relocated to San Jose in 1885, and purchased a farmhouse she lovingly called Llanada Villa. She also began consulting with a psychic.

At the medium’s urging beginning in 1890, Sarah began building onto Llanada Villa. There was no rhyme or reason to her design, and the house would eventually grow into a towering seven-story structure spanning 24,000 square feet. Why would Sarah undertake such a project at the advice of a psychic? Because she had been told that the ghosts of those killed by the Winchester rifle needed a home in order to protect Sarah. Furthermore, the psychic claimed, Sarah would live forever as long as she kept building onto the house.

Frantic to stay alive, Sarah hired workers who toiled 24/7 to keep the construction going. This resulted in a literal, odd structure with secret passages, staircases leading nowhere, trap doors, and even a one-way mirror wherein Sarah could keep an eye on her servants – but was installed so instead, her servants could observe her instead. Work finally ceased when Sarah did die, in 1922, but the thousands of people who have visited famed Winchester Mystery House, including staff, have reported hearing footsteps and voices on numerous occasions – as well as the ghostly image of a carpenter identified as a man named Clyde.

Further south, on Coronado Island off of the San Diego coast, the spirit of Kate Morgan lingers at the opulent Hotel del Coronado. On Thanksgiving Day in 1892, the young, rather melancholy woman checked into the five-star hotel. Five days into her stay, Kate inexplicably shot herself and died. A police investigation revealed that Kate had told a housekeeper that she had stomach cancer. But it was also discovered that she was perhaps not who she seemed; several items in the lady’s room contained the names of other women. Police hoped someone would come forward and claim her body, but they never did. After several days at the morgue, Kate’s body was finally identified, as Kate Morgan but also Lottie A. Bernard. She was, it was revealed, the unhappy wife of an Iowa gambler who, for reasons of her own, decided to end her life.

Kate’s body was buried, under both of her names, at the local Mt. Hope Cemetery. But her spirit stayed on at the hotel, and remains there still. Guests in her room on the third floor have reported that the lights and the television flicker on and off. Items move on their own at random, chilly breezes blow through, and the sounds of voices and footsteps echo across the floor. Occasionally, shadows are seen moving through the room. Kate indeed remains at the Hotel del Coronado, her unhappiness having no cure.

East of California, in far-off Deadwood, South Dakota, are numerous ghosts who wander the once busy and often violent city. One of them is Seth Bullock, a Canadian-born Seth Bullock frontiersman who eventually became a member of the Montana legislature, married, had three children, and ran a successful hardware and supply business. After the Bullocks moved to Deadwood in 1876, Seth became a sheriff and served in the Spanish American War. But his favorite career of all seems to have been master of his own Bullock Hotel, a luxurious, three-story building which opened for business in 1896. The hotel featured a large restaurant, fine furnishings throughout, a real bathroom, a library and parlor on each floor, and sixty-three suites.

Bullock died in 1919, but he couldn’t resist staying on at the hotel. Dozens of visitors over the years have reported the man’s ghost staring at them rather malevolently as he wanders around the upstairs hallways. Guests have felt someone tapping on their shoulder when no one is there. They have also heard their names being called, as well as whistling and footsteps along empty corridors. Apparitions have been known to appear in various mirrors as lights and appliances are turned on and off by an unseen hand. There’s even the ghost of a cowboy hanging around in the basement. The Bullock remains a ghostly hotspot hotel even today, complete with a nice bar where you can have a cocktail—if you can keep your glass from moving around by itself.

Then there is the ghost of Jesse James, who has been reported numerous times since he was killed by Bob Ford as a dusted some pictures on the wall in his own living room. Ford shot him in the back of the head, and that was the end of the famous outlaw—or was it? Soon after James was laid to rest, the locals started seeing what they claimed was his ghost, wandering around the family homestead in Kearney, Missouri. Even today, unseen voices and weird photographs captured at the farm are attributed to the spirit of Jesse James.

Not all ghosts, of course, are well-known figures. One ghost at the historic Congress Hotel in Tucson, Arizona is only known as a young woman who shot herself to death in room 242. Alternatively, says one source, the gal was a young barmaid who had just broken up with some important official. A gunfight broke out soon after, during which the girl somehow died in a hail of 29 bullets in room 242 – but her death was ruled a suicide. Supposedly the bullet holes can be seen in the closet, but the girl’s name, and official news stories about her death, remain unknown. Naturally the room has an ethereal quality about it today, and is commonly called “The Suicide Room.” There are other spirits in the hotel as well, who can be seen and heard walking the halls and the lobby dressed in clothing of another era.

Wicked South Dakota isn’t the only old west state where ghosts of the past can find no rest. Some of Colorado’s earliest spirits are the ghosts of the Sand Creek Massacre. It was here in the early morning hours of November 29, 1864 that Colonel John Chivington of the U.S. Army and his soldiers viciously slaughtered group of Cheyenne and Arapaho Natives as they slept in their village. The victims were mostly women and children, 163 in all, whose bodies were then mutilated before Chivington and his men were honored with a parade in Denver. But the callous colonel was later believed to have “fabricated a reason for the attack.”

The grounds were made a national historic site in 2007, but in the years before and after, visitors to the massacre site have seen and heard some mighty interesting things. They say that even today, in the silence of the remote massacre site, the voices of those killed will whisper on the wind. Others who have camped near the site have claimed to have seen the spirits of the victims wandering in the area, and sometimes screaming has been heard.

Further west, in the once wild town of Buckskin Joe, Colorado is a spirit with a most determined wish. In a day when finding a lady to court among hundreds of miners wasn’t easy, one J. Dawson Hidgepath was among the lovelorn. A miner by trade, Hidgepath doggedly pursued about every woman in town, without success. The man was downright bothersome, and when he fell off a cliff in 1865 while picking flowers for his newest crush, the ladies of Buckskin perhaps breathed a sigh of relief. But Hidgepath remained a hopeless romantic, even in death.

Shortly after he was buried in Buckskin’s cemetery, Hidgepath’s skeleton began showing up in the most unusual places, namely at the homes of the ladies he loved. The boney would-be boyfriend first showed up in a heap on the porch of a woman who had spurred his advances in life. The poor lady fainted. No woman was safe; from the bed of a young dance hall girl to an old woman who mistook the skeleton for soup bones, Hidgepath, made his ethereal self known all over town. Each time the bones appeared, they were reburied, only to show up again.

At last, the wise men of the town found a solution. Surely not even a skeleton would court women smelling like an outhouse, and that is where the bones eventually wound up. The ploy seemed to work, until years later when an unsuspecting woman was using the outhouse. As she hovered in the partial darkness, she heard Hidgepath’s signature greeting, whispered in his most tender Mississippi monotone: “Will you be my own?”

Colorado is also one of many places where mysterious lights appear in the local cemeteries. Westcliffe’s historic graveyard has long been known for its intriguing lights, which vary in color, size and speed as they flit among the tombstones. The later the evening, bigger and more numerous they get. From a certain hill in the high-altitude city of Cripple Creek, lights can also be seen glowing at Mt. Pisgah Cemetery. Certain scientists maintain that such lights are really two gasses, phosphane and diphosphane, which are emitted from the intestines of dead bodies and can ignite when they meet air. But that doesn’t begin to explain those who have remained six feet under for a century or more.

While Cripple Creek is certainly famous in its own right as the site of the last big gold boom in Colorado, other, more famous places have their own population of residents from the past. In Tombstone, Arizona, they say, if you walk down Allen Street at night, you just might see the ghost of  Virgil Earp who was seriously wounded following the famed shoot-out at the O.K. Corral, in 1881, or Billy Claiborne who was killed by Buckskin Frank Leslie in 1882, or even the ghost of a lady in her white nightie as she floats across the street. Inside haunts include the infamous Bird Cage Theater, where ghostly prostitutes and their men are often spotted wandering around. The nearby Burford House bed and breakfast has the spirit of George Daves, a groom who was left at the alter and next spotted his would-be bride in the arms of another man. Daves shot the woman to death before taking his own life. Ladies beware: George not only wanders the halls and appears in the mirrors, but also favors smacking the fannies of female guests and, sometimes, yanking their covers down in the night.

Another haunted state? Nevada, whose Yellow Jacket Mine was staked clear back in 1859. Early on, the mine was fraught with disputes over the claim, and in 1872 the Yellow Jacket suffered one of the worst mining accidents in Nevada history. At the 800-foot level below ground a fire started, trapping some miners as the timbers collapsed and toxic gasses filled the shaft. Over 35 bodies were eventually retrieved, but others of the dead were left underground as the fire remained burning for quite some time.

Soon after, ghostly happenings at the Yellow Jacket scared investors into pulling out or selling their shares. One of many mine employees who was frightened half to death on the job was W.P. Bennett, who was working alone when he heard “heavy footsteps coming tramping over the planks directly toward him.” The startled man called out “Who’s there?” The answer came in two shovels Bennett held, which were suddenly yanked from his hands and thrown about twelve feet.

New Mexico also has a ghost story or two. One of them surrounds the famously St. James Hotel in Cimarron, which was built by a French chef named Henri Lambert in 1872. Anybody who was anybody stayed there, including such notables as Annie Oakley, Black Jack Ketchum, Buffalo Bill Cody, Wyatt Earp, Jesse James and author Zane Grey. As one might guess, there were numerous violent incidents over time—like the murder of T.J. Wright, who was shot in the back on the way to his room after winning big in a poker game. Lambert’s own son, Johnnie, died after some unknown accident at the hotel. As a result, the St. James has its own special set of specters who never quite got around to checking out.

Aside from the usual cold spots, electrical energy and items moving around, several psychics over time have identified various spirits at the hotel. They include T.J. Wright, little Johnnie, the ghosts of two other children, a “gnome-like man,” and even a “pleasant-looking cowboy.” Most prominent is Lambert’s wife Mary, who died in 1926 in room 17. Mary’s presence is indicated by tapping on the window when it is open, the smell of flowers, touching guests as they sleep, and in at lease one case, a hideous scream in the dead of night. Sweet dreams.

Pasadena: A Ghost Story

c 2022 by Jan MacKell Collins

Cruise through certain neighborhoods in Pasadena, California, and you can still find quaint bungalows and Craftsman homes of the 1930’s. They seem as perfect as they always were, with neatly kept lawns and two-track driveways made with old cement, just big enough for a coupe or even a Model-T to make it into a funny little garage in the back. In the early 1960’s, when I lived there, my parents struggled to pay $100 a month in rent. The same house we lived in is now worth a cool $1.7 million.

We moved to Pasadena when I was about three years old. My parents rented our house from a family named Reynolds, who had probably lived there since it was first built in 1923. It came fully furnished, from the wonderfully big dining room table and its matching sideboard to the beds, dressers. Somewhere in that time my father acquired his Aunt Myrtle’s old couch, and I believe that is the only piece of furniture we actually owned.

When we moved in, our neighborhood was filled with elderly residents who had lived there for a long time. There was a nice couple named Sears, and the Mrs. made us wigs out of her old pantyhose, which we delighted in wearing as we bobbed around the neighborhood and imagined we were princesses in need of rescue. Up the street was a family with six kids, just enough for us to play “Gilligan’s Island” so we had a full crew. Mrs. Milligan was across the street, and was forever “shushing” us if we played too loudly. Then there were the Squire sisters, two spinsters who still dressed in 1920’s gothic dresses, tended their rose garden religiously, and did not like children at all. The one time we were robbed, one of the Squire sisters gave my mom a little pill to calm her down. She zonked out and slept for five hours.

Our house had a Spanish bungalow design, with a big shaded concrete patio in front of an ample front lawn, and a huge backyard that went all the way back to the alley. The driveway led to a garage in back, and we had great fun riding our trikes as fast we could on the slope of the drive, picking up our feet, and “Weeeeee,” careening uncontrollably right into the street. Of course my mother put an immediate stop to that once she caught us. Sometimes, we contented ourselves with playing on a side porch, created in the days to receive visitors through beautiful French doors from the driveway.

The backyard had two avocado trees and several others, plus a little garden full of Naked Ladies. I liked them because they were beautiful and pink, but also because I could say the word “naked” when addressing them, without getting in trouble. At the back gate was a gigantic eucalyptus tree towering over the alley. At some point, someone had spray-painted the words “snake tree” on its massive trunk, inspiring all sorts of scary stories and dark imaginings about what snake might live in the tree. That yard always scared me a little anyway, since in the days of the nearby Mansion murders and the racial riots in Los Angeles, my mother constantly warned us of “stranger danger.”

It did not help that Mr. Reynolds, who occasionally came to collect the rent, would pull up very fast into the driveway, leap out of his car, and walk purposefully towards the house. On more than one occasion his sudden arrival sent me running across the yard and bellowing in fear. Worse was that Mr. Reynold’s senile mother occasionally escaped from the home he’d put her in. On those occasions, she would come “home,” walk right into the house, and upon seeing my mother, would presume she was one of the neighbor kids. Then she would bustle around the kitchen, looking for cookies and pouring a glass of milk for my mom, who placated her until she could get to the phone and call Mr. Reynolds to come retrieve his mother.

The occasional appearance of Mr. Reynolds’ mother was nothing to what else went inside our house. The place was not only full of the Reynolds’ furnishings, but also some of their belongings. Among the things they left were some books, encased on some shelves on either side of the fireplace. One time I was playing with the books and found a tiny matchbox behind them. Inside of it was a little wooden, jointed monkey. I decided to keep my find a secret, only taking him out when I was home alone with my mom, and carefully putting him back. One day, I went to look for my little monkey. He, and his matchbox, were inexplicably missing, and I never saw him again.

The monkey’s mysterious disappearance didn’t begin to match what else happened. I won’t say it was a malicious spirit, but something was definitely there. Being the earliest riser in the house, I remember waking up to voices talking clearly in our living room. I would get up, careful to not disturb the hopeless bully I called my sister, wander down the hall, and go into the room, only to find it empty. My parents were still asleep in their bed. I was small enough that I didn’t really think much of it, until the day I had a fight with one of the six kids up the street and marched home in a huff. Nobody was home, but I disobeyed my mom’s order to stay with the neighbor until she came back and went inside. As I squatted on the floor in the living room, idly playing with my toys, I heard men’s voices speaking clearly in the kitchen. I grew nervous, went back to the neighbors, and never stayed alone in the house again.

There was more. The room I shared with my sister was at the back of the house. A U-shaped hallway ran between our room and my parent’s room. It is true that a big bush grew over our bedroom window, and that all sorts of critters rambled around back there at night. I would awaken and listen to them in growing terror, but when something started moving in our closet, which already scared the hell out of me, I would sit bolt upright and start screaming. Then my sister would wake up and start screaming too, sometimes pulling the blanket over her head in an effort to keep whatever the monster was from finding her. Down at the other end of the hall my parents would leap out of bed and come running, sometimes forgetting to make a right out of their bedroom door and running smack into the wall right in front of them. The second I heard that familiar thud, I knew help was coming.

Then there was the strange room built onto the back of our bedroom, connected by a common door. This room also had its own outside entrance and was once occupied by a woman named Norma, who had long since gone away. The door leading outside had long warped shut and we were too little to force it open. Even my dad had a time opening that door, and it made a horrific squeak when he did. Feeling this was a safe place to keep us from wandering outside, my parents made the room into a playroom for us for a time. But the room was big, and creepy, and our voices seemed to echo loudly in there, so we soon abandoned it. Even after that, we could often hear movement in there and, sometimes, voices.

Once, I was playing out a Bugs Bunny cartoon by myself and snuck up to the door to that room to peek through the keyhole. The door once held a lock for a skeleton key, but this had been removed and enabled me to look into the room. Imagine my horror when I peeked through the keyhole – and saw an eye looking back at me. A whole new, never-before-heard scream came out of me as I booked my little butt to the living room in search of my mom. I don’t know how many times she would open the door with me to show me nobody was there, but the noises and voices convinced me otherwise.

Of course my parents tried to comfort me and convince us that there was nothing scary going on. But even my mother could not deny that something was off when she began dreaming that on the other side of our French doors in the dining room was a mirror replica of our house with thousands of mirrors throughout the rooms. And the day that, upon returning from a visit with Mrs. Milligan, we found that the fringe on Mom’s chenille bedspread had inexplicably caught fire and was burning its way onto the mattress. Or the time my sister wished for a black cat, and one mysteriously appeared under our bed. And even my ever-logical dad had to admit something was definitely amiss when Norma herself paid a special visit.

It was summer, and our expansive kitchen was sorely in need of a paint job. Mr. Reynolds made a deal with my folks: he would pay for the paint, but they had to do the job themselves. So here were my young parents, disassembling the kitchen and applying the new paint, all the while complaining about the lazy Mr. Reynolds. “If we had a $100 bucks,” they were joking, “we’d get out of here and go to Vegas for the weekend.” (And that was back when you could indeed spend a couple of days in Vegas for a C-note.)

My dad was on the floor, next to a pile of pots and pans, and painting the inside of a cupboard when he found an interior shelf above the door. Feeling around, he pulled out an old shoebox. It was full of delightfully vintage Christmas cards from generations ago. Dad put the shoebox on the table as he and Mom started picking through the cards and admiring their pretty designs. About halfway through, Mom opened a card to read it, and out fell a hundred dollar bill. Inside of the card was the spidery handwriting of long ago. “Go out and buy yourself a new pair of stockings and have fun,” the card said. “Love Norma.”

More Ghost Stories from Cripple Creek, Colorado: The Ghost of the Palace Hotel

c 2022 by Jan MacKell Collins

Portions of this article originally appeared in the Colorado Gambler.

For years, the prominent Palace Hotel at the intersection of Bennett Avenue and Second Street has been an important piece of Cripple Creek history, and folklore. For over 50 years, the Palace has been said to be haunted by the apparition of Kitty Chambers. The lady’s appealing form has appeared to visitors and owners alike for decades. Both legend and rumor have combined with a bit of fact to make Kitty the ethereal epitome of romance. But is Kitty really the soulful, ghostly woman who can be seen waving a genteel hand from the upper floors of the Palace, especially late at night?

The story of the Palace begins in 1893, when Dr. William J. Chambers leased offices at what was first known as the Palace Drugstore. The drugstore was one of a chain of businesses bearing the name of the Palace, and was affiliated at that time with Cripple Creek’s original Palace Hotel directly across the street. In 1893, the Palace Drugstore was a two-story wood building, housing a pharmacy on the first floor. Local physicians, including Dr. Chambers, leased offices on the second floor. A man of considerable wealth and reputation, Chambers and his first wife, Ellen, quickly became well-known in Cripple Creek’s upper-class society. Newspapers mentioned the couple often for the next several years.

Following the devastating Cripple Creek fires which burned the Palace and most of the downtown area in 1896, the new Palace Block was built of solid brick and towered three stories high. The all-new Palace Pharmacy re-opened on the first floor, and rooms were rented on the third floor. Dr. Chambers leased suites 1-3 of the Palace Block, on the second floor. But if the good doctor’s business was booming again, his personal life was not. In 1899, Ellen L. Chambers  divorced William J. Chambers and disappeared. 

Dr. Chambers recovered from his divorce quite nicely. Just three months after the divorce was final, the January 25, 1900 edition of the Colorado Springs Gazette reported that Dr. W.J. Chambers had gone to New York to marry a Miss Catharine Howard. “Miss Howard is a very esteemable young lady who was employed as clerk and stenographer for O.E. Yeak, the insurance man, up to a short time ago when she resigned her position and went east,” the newspaper explained.   

Catharine Howard Chambers, whose name is host to a variety of spellings in court records, was as resilient as her new husband. Together, she and William purchased the Palace Block in its entirety just a short time after their marriage. Catherine was well liked and accepted by Cripple Creek society, and became known by her playful nickname, Kitty. But the Chambers were not destined to remain in Cripple Creek, nor was their marriage a happy one. The couple moved to Los Angeles and are believed to have been divorced by 1902. Kitty was able to retain her half interest in the Palace Block, which she sold to her ex-husband in 1910.

Contrary to local legend, Kitty remained in California and died in 1908. There is no evidence she ever returned to Cripple Creek, nor is there anything to support the idea that she enjoyed living in the raw, frontier town. Yet somehow, the ghost of Kitty Chambers is identified as the ethereal woman who haunts the Palace to this day. They say she died, in Room 3, in 1918. But historic fact has made the possibility of Kitty’s spiritual existence less and less plausible.  Who then, is the ghost of the Palace Hotel?

 Historians say that folklore often evolves around true stories, elaborated upon with time. The death of a woman at the Palace in 1918  probably happened. If that tale is true, the real ghost could be Mrs. Mary B. Hedges, a Teller County clerk who resided in and managed the furnished rooms on the third floor of the Palace beginning in 1912.  She stayed at the Palace until 1918, when her name disappears from city directories.  Was Mary Hedges enticed to abandon her comfortable station by death? The answer, at this time, is unknown.

What is known is that, after Mary Hedges’ disappearance, the Palace Block continued to offer furnished rooms. But by the 1920’s, Cripple Creek was in the beginning throes of a slow death.  Mines were playing out and people were moving away. The pharmacy continued to operate while the upper stories of the stately Palace Block slowly fell to disuse. Dr. Chambers, who had retained his ownership all this time, finally sold the building in 1928. A succession of owners followed, including Gertrude Coffin and her sister-in-law, Maude Playford, who purchased the Palace in 1941. The former Palace Pharmacy moved across the street to the Bi-Metallic Building, while Gertrude and Maude opened “The Girls’ Cafe” on the first floor (on a couple of side notes, Gertrude Coffin Diehl was the great-aunt of famed musician Stevie Nicks. She and Maude, certain folks say, ran a brothel of sorts from the Palace and other places during the 1940s).

In 1945, Gertrude and Maude sold the Palace Block. A bar opened on the bottom floor, while renters continued living in the upstairs rooms. One of them was Vitus M. Neelson, a blind man who played piano and was one of Cripple Creek’s many colorful characters during this era – 1952, when he apparently tripped and was found dead at the bottom of the stairs. While Vitus Neelson’s body rests in Mt. Pisgah Cemetery, his after-life aura is said to haunt the Palace to this day.

Vitus apparently lived alone during his time at the Palace, or at the very least, the other lodgers moved out after he died; old-timers of Cripple Creek would remember the building being boarded up for a few years before it was sold in 1956 for back taxes and eventually returned as one of three prominent watering holes in town. Then, in 1976, Robert and Martha Lays purchased the building and moved in with their five children, and reopened the Palace as a hotel. Among other things, the Lays were told there were ghosts in the building.  One was a female, presumed to be a former owner of the hotel.   

The Lays immediately saw why the Palace was said to be haunted. Mysterious lights played a large part in the ethereal activities around the Palace. Lights were seen in Room 3 when the power was off. A retired couple who was hired to care for the hotel resigned after several incidents involving the light in Room 3. The bed covers in that room were occasionally turned down by an unseen hand, and a family friend of the Lays reported seeing the apparition of a woman standing in the window up there when the hotel was empty. Other residents and even a former Cripple Creek sheriff saw her as well. Hastily-conducted research brought forth the name of Kitty Chambers, and that is what the ghost was so-named.

Although members of the Lays family lived in the hotel, it was not until 1983 that any of them experienced the ghost, who chose her victim carefully. The Lays’ son, Bob, was alone in the hotel one night, cleaning on the third floor.  “We’d closed for the season,” he related in a 1996 interview, “and I was the only one in the whole state to have a key.  Around 5:45 p.m., I walked down to the dining room and there was a lit candle on one of the tables.” For the first time in Bob Lays’ practical life, there was no rational explanation for what he saw.

The irrational activities at the Palace were just beginning. Late one night, out of the corner of his eye, Bob spotted a woman moving through the lobby. She had straight, dark hair. A long white nightgown with long puffy sleeves and a lace-neck collar graced her figure. It was hard to see any facial features, but Bob got the impression the woman was in her mid-30’s. She was definitely not one of the four guests who had checked in that night. Bob said she seemed to be heading out the front door or up the stairs, both of which unusually gave forth an audible creak. Yet no noise came forth. “It startled me,” Bob said. “It was a couple minutes I stood and listened.” But there was no sound.

After that, lighted candles were found two to three times a week in the dining room by various family members. The candles appeared only on specific tables and seemed to follow a cycle as to when and which one would light by itself. For a time, the candles patterned themselves in a circle around the room. The electric lights also played havoc, coming on at odd times by themselves, in front of different witnesses.

In about 1985, the Lays moved the Palace bar into a vaudeville theater which had been constructed in the building sometime in the late 1960’s. Once, while closing the theater, Bob noticed a light at the bar and found a lit candle sitting on the beer cooler. On another night, Bob returned from a much-deserved late evening out. Entering the Palace’s front door, he found another lit candle waiting for him in the dining room. “I like to think she did that one just for me,” he said with a smile. After a time, he also got in the habit of saying goodnight to Kitty before blowing out the candles and retiring for the night.

Once news leaked out about ghost at the Palace Hotel, curiosity seekers besieged the building. They ranged from historians to reporters to psychics. The latter claimed there were three spirits altogether: the mysterious young woman, the ghost of Vitus Neelson, a nameless young boy. The lady, of course, remains the most intriguing since various visitors who saw her offered up almost identical descriptions of her in her white gown. One couple claimed that their shower water unaccountably shut off, shortly after they discussed the ghosts known to haunt the hotel.  

In the 1996 interview, Bob Lays said that he last heard from his ghost in about 1989. He wasn’t sure why. Even after the city of Cripple Creek legalized gaming in 1991, the spirits of the Palace remained unseen as the hotel was remodeled and the first floor evolved into a casino, bar and restaurant. In spite of their silence, Bob said he still found himself speaking to the invisible lady aloud now and then. The idea of Mary Hedges, instead of Kitty Chambers, haunting the Palace intrigued him. “No wonder she wouldn’t answer me,” he muttered thoughtfully.

It has been some years since Century Casinos, which owns the buildings adjacent to the Palace, purchased the building from the Lays family. Plans have been made on several occasions to install offices in the building or, most recently, turn it into a boutique hotel. At least fears that the historic building would be torn down have been alleviated, for now. But the Palace remains vacant, save for the occasional paranormal investigation. One day, the building will hopefully reopen and a whole new generation can experience the spirits who linger there still. Odds are, they can wait.