Badly bleeding body came to tortured life; one of its hands darted out to grab the startled mortician while the other reached up to feel the remnants of its mangled face.
By Rob Carrigan, rcarrigan1@gmail.com
It is easy to dismiss the idea of a ghost or spirit in the light of day.
Alone, under the stars or in the dim lighting of an ancient building, among the night sounds of creaky floors, unknown varmints, sagging ceilings and the frightening history of a once violent 100-year-old mining camp, it can be an entirely different deal.
Maybe it is that sudden unexplained draft in the room, or the feeling of not being alone, or the dog’s low growl and raised hair on her back. Or perhaps the fleeting image (at least you think you saw it) of young girl, dressed in the old fashioned garb and saddest of looks, at the foot of the stairs -- that convinces you to reconsider.
The Dunn Building, at 213 Victor Avenue, in Victor, Colorado, has all the pre-described elements that might make such a statement.
The building was once the prosperous business address of one Thomas F. Dunn, undertaker, who also lived with his wife in the upstairs apartments above the busy funeral parlor. By some accounts, Dunn was an artist at patching up bodies that had been shot, stabbed, dynamited, buried in ruble, fallen from great heights, entangled in machinery, or otherwise twisted and torn in rigors of the gold camp mines, saloons and brothels.
But death eventually catches up to us all, and T.F. Dunn passed from this world before the turn of the century. As surely as we all will pass some time.
Mrs. Dunn, surviving her husband by many years, of course was left to cope. To do so, she converted the upstairs apartments into a boarding house taking on tenants.
In the 1983 book “Ghost Tales of Cripple Creek,” by Chas Clifton, then owner of the Dunn building Skip Phillips is quoted, “I love my ghosts,” and says he has felt Mrs. Dunn presence and referred to her as his caretaker.
“Not only does ‘Mrs. Dunn’ manifest as the usual footsteps, Phillips says but an earlier tenant is said to have seen a women dressed in black leaning over his bed upstairs in what had been one of Mrs. Dunn’s eleven rental rooms. The man also told Phillips of a ‘crying’ sound in the building all the time,” according to Clifton’s book.
“Phillips tells how he and other persons have felt ‘watched’ in particular parts of the building, especially around the rear door, and where the stairway comes up from the basement, a point he jocularly refers to as the ‘haunted stairwell.’ Several psychics have told him that ‘something really sad’ happened in an upstairs bedroom, others that they could feel the concentrated essence of sorrow distilled from all the mourners who visited the undertaker decades ago.”
But perhaps it had something to do with Thomas F. Dunn actions before his own death. For that, has become a legendary tale in the district.
“For the longest time, people just assumed the spirits of those bitterly departed that once went in and out of the funeral parlor were responsible for the goings-on in the Dunn building. Until 1899, that is, when a man who had been one of Mr. Dunn’s assistants spoke up about a disturbing incident that took place in the funeral home in 1893,” wrote Dan Asfar in his 2006 book “Ghost Stories of Colorado.”
“According to this man’s story, it happened while Dunn was working on the corpse of a miner who had been badly mutilated in a cave in. He had just begun preparing the miner for burial when the supposed cadaver suddenly twitched on the embalming table. A moment later, the badly bleeding body came to tortured life; one of its hands darted out to grab the startled mortician while the other reached up to feel the remnants of its mangled face. It was an undertaker’s nightmare come true: the dead man at the table wasn’t quite dead yet,” writes Asfar.
“The realization hit the mortician, his assistant and supposed-to-be dead miner with equal force. As Dunn took a few horrified steps backward, the man on the table let out a blood-curdling wail and tried to sit up. Although the miner did manage to get up, it quickly became obvious he didn’t know which way to go; he couldn’t see a thing through his one remaining eye.”
According to legend. Dunn and his assistant administered morphine to quiet the man, and upon evaluation and consideration of what a doctor might be able to do for the man, more morphine was used to put him to his final rest.
“Dunn himself administered the lethal injection and hardly waited at all before resuming his work on the miner. The young assistant couldn’t help noticing that the miner was still producing a faint pulse while he was being prepared for burial,” according to Asfar’s account.
It is said that the badly mangled miner’s spirit haunts the Dunn Building to this day.
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For more Ghosts, see following links:
Ghost Hang out at the old school
Gottlieb Fluhmann's Ghost
Maggie and other ghosts in the building
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5 comments:
May I correct a bit of info on the Dunn building? Mr. Dunn was my step great-grand father. He married my great grandmother after her husband was killed in a mine collapse in Victor. My grandmother was a young girl when they married and moved into the rooms above the undertaking (coffins and cabinet making) shop area on the first floor.
My grandmother spent her youth caring for Mr. Dunn's mother, who was wheel-chair bound. They lived in the higher floors.
My family and I met the owner of the building in the 1900s and toured every apartment visiting with each tenant who all wanted to talk to us and tell use their stories. One tenant couldn't be there, but told the owner exactly what to tell us.
Only one person had a bad experience, very unlike the others and only once. It did scare them a lot.
All the rest was either things being moved, or the sound of thumps, not footsteps coming down the stairs. They could never see anyone and lots of people heard them. They described the sound as a thump, pause, thump, pause... Not one person knew a thing about the wheel-chair bound woman,whose chair made those thumping sounds when she was being brought down the stairs.
Upstairs, Mr. Dunn's mother, (the main ghost) doesn't like men with mustaches, and will tickle them while they sleep, which amused the tenants, but not so much their guests.
Some things would move around, be found in odd places. But other than that the only other thing was under the building where the owner was digging out the crawl space to make an apt. One of his guests was in an area being worked on and felt someone grab his ankle. He never came back.
I have never heard one word of the story about the miner waking up. But, who knows, things were rough then and odd things can happen. I never heard a bad word about Mr. Dunn.
There are still bullet holes in the building's exterior from when a gang shot at Teddy Roosevelt from the train station across the street.
My step great-grandfather also saved a few miners during the mining strike by hiding them in empty coffins and sneaking them out of town on the train before they could be tarred and feathered.
The story of this haunting has been wrong for many years, so I thought I would take this chance to correct the record. She is a nice ghost. My grandmother loved her!
We live in this building and can definitely say it's haunted. Not scary haunted, though. She likes to mess with my husband
I grew up in the 3rd building over (the Undertakers' building is attached to another building that shows in the photo, and the one I grew up in was attached to that one, so they're all kind of one big building, in a way, and there used to be secret entrances between them, that've long since been closed).
I heard an entirely different version of this story that went something like this:
The miner had been drilling holes into a wall inside one of the mines to place dynamite. As he was drilling, the wall imploded (which is uncommon, but does happen sometimes, when there's an old air pocket). The suction from the equallization of pressure tore off the man's shoulder, pulled his jaw completely out of the socket, and sucked out one of his eyes.
He seemed to have been killed in this horrible event, so they hauled him to the undertaker. The undertaker put him in a room where his corpse would wait until morning to be prepared. From this, I gather that it'd either been a busy day, or this occurred in the evening, but that's speculation on my part.
In the middle of the night, there was a horrible rasping, choking sound coming from that room (likely what's commonly known as a "death rattle", but worse in a way. You'll understand why in a moment). The undertaker was awakened by the awful noise and went to investigate. When he got to the room, he discovered that the man was still alive (though, of course, beyond helping in that day and age. There was nothing a doctor could've done that the undertaker didn't do), and the sound was coming from a hole in the man's throat.
The undertaker did the only thing anyone could have to help. He injected the man with a large dose of morphine to minimize the pain as well as possible, and stayed with him until he truly did pass away.
I do hope the person who wrote about being the step grandchild of Mrs. Dunn sees this, and if so, I'd appreciate seeing a comment about this version of the story. We most likely know one another, too. I just don't know who the person who wrote that is. It'd be nice to get in touch, either way, though.
Now, as for the ghost of this poor man, a friend of mine and I saw it when we were about 7. We were in the building I grew up in, and in the back portion of the main floor. We'd come down from the back steps, and into what at the time was a large, unfinished room that was used for storage of various things, including toys for my brother and I, that we'd collected over the years. My friend and I went down there to get dolls to play with, but when we reached the bottom of the stairs and turned to the doorway to that room, we both saw something that frightened the living heck out of us both. I froze for a moment and just stared. She was halfway up the stairs already before I turned and ran.
When we got back to my bedroom, she started to describe it and I shushed her as fast as I could. I don't know how or why it occurred to me to do this, but I told her I wanted to find out if we both saw the same thing, without influencing one another by telling what we saw. So I got out some paper and crayons, and we each sat on opposite sides of the room (so we couldn't see each other's drawings) and drew. What we each drew was as close to exactly the same thing as two 7-year-olds possibly could've drawn.
It was a very large skull, floating there near the wall that faced the next building. Deep red, with the blackest black where the eyes should be, and the same where the mouth should be.
Though I'd gone back into that room a couple of times to try to see if maybe there was a stain on the wall or something hanging from the ceiling or similar to make us think we saw something we didn't, I couldn't find anything to explain it. Nevertheless, I convinced myself, over time, that it couldn't have been real.
When I was 13, Skip (who owned the undertakers' building by that time and had for some years... and as far as I know still does own it with his wife) came by for supper. During supper, he started telling stories of the various ghosts he'd seen, heard and heard of from his tenants. I listened with interest, but none of it bothered me. None of it, that is, until he got to the story about a woman in one of the apartments lying in bed and waking up to a horrible rasping noise. She opened her eyes, and there was a large, red skull floating there, with black holes where the eyes should be and a black hole where the mouth should be. He went on to tell the story of the miner I shared in the post above, to the best of my recollection.
My dad couldn't help but to notice the color run out of my face as Skip's story went on. I'd told him what I'd seen so many years before, so he knew what was up. That night, I didn't turn off my bedroom light. I laid in bed staring at the wall, with the blankets pulled up and breathing as shallowly and slowly as I could. I was scared out of my wits. It hadn't been my and my friend's imaginations after all!
Sometime during the night, I must've dozed off. I woke suddenly after my light went out. I looked around and saw a shadowy figure in my doorway and tried to scream, but my vocal cords were frozen in fright.
Several seconds later, after the figure disappeared down the hall, I realized it was my dad. He'd come in to shut off the light, since I'd dozed off.
I never did see the ghost again, but I'll never forget it, either.
I’m either the great great granddaughter of Ms. Dunn or the great great great granddaughter (need to go back to the family tree). I hope someday I can visit this building.
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