Spirits, real or imagined? What's the difference?

The spirits might be outward, visible signs of an inward fear.  Maybe they are a part of us, of our future, or of our history. Real or imagined?  What is the difference? As Henrik Ibsen wrote in Ghosts  in 1881, "I'm inclined to think we are all ghosts – every one of us. It's not just what we inherit from our mothers and fathers that haunts us. It's all kinds of old, defunct theories, all sorts of old defunct beliefs, and things like that." Regardless, the tales of their exploits are everywhere.

Ghost town of Gothic, Colorado
The massive, craggy face of Gothic Mountain, (12,625 feet) looms over the town of Gothic with its few dilapidated log and frame buildings, in Gunnison County. Possibly Garwood Hall, Judd's (last resident after the boom) cabin shows an automobile and a horse. Mining boom town from 1879 to 1884; bought in 1928, by the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory for plant and animal research.

Please click on the following for more:
• Ghost from fire across the street?
• Victor Hotel spirits in Bird Cage, down the hall.

Halloween or not, blame it on the moon

The lunatic is in my head.

The lunatic is in my head

You raise the blade, you make the change

You re-arrange me 'til I'm sane.

You lock the door

And throw away the key

There's someone in my head but it's not me.

__ Pink Floyd

The word itself, "Halloween," actually has its origins in the Catholic Church. It comes from a contracted corruption of All Hallows Eve.

November 1, "All Hollows Day" (or "All Saints Day"), is a Catholic day of observance in honor of saints.

Prior to the 5th century BC, in Celtic Ireland, summer officially ended with the lunar cycles but when the Romans introduced their calendar to the Island, the celebration was shifted to always fall on October 31. The holiday was called Samhain (pronounced sow-in), which means "end of summer", the Celtic New year.

2020 was the last year a full moon fell on modern Halloween. A full moon on Halloween is a rare event, happening about once every 19 years. The last one occurred in 2020 and was also a Blue Moon (the second full moon in a single month), and the next will be in 2039.  

The moon itself, especially a full harvest moon, can create its own trouble.

Please click on related stories:

• Is that wild woman still wailing?

• Once in a Blue Moon Fear.

• Badly mangled miner haunts the Dunn Building.

For more Ghosts, see following links:

Ghost Hang out at the old school

Gottlieb Fluhmann's Ghost

Maggie and other ghosts in the building

In celebration of the Celtic New Year

According to ancient Celtic custom, the date corresponding to Nov. 1, was the beginning of a new year. The ancient Celts celebrated the end of one year and the beginning of another with their largest festival known as Samhain (pronounced Sah-ween). It was during this time that they believed the souls of those who had died in the previous year travel to another world, but at least temporarily, could intermingle with the living.

Ghost, on the other hand, has Germanic origins, deriving from “gast” in the language that became modern German. “Gast” originally identified a terrifying rage but later came to mean the disembodied spirit of someone who has died.

With a deep-seated tradition of story telling in both the cultures, and strong percentages of Irish and German coursing through my own veins, I have chosen to celebrate the upcoming holiday with story. Some are old favorite stories that you have heard from me before. Others may be new and different to each of us.

But like the Irish Halloween tradition of Barmbrack, the ‘speckled loaf’ of sweet, yeasted (skimmed from the top of fermenting beer) bread, you may find more than raisins and sultanas in your loaf.  The Halloween “Brack” traditionally functioned also as a fortune telling mechanism, as various objects were baked into the bread and when it was dispersed, fortune was told by what object was found in your particular piece. The pea found in your portion signified that you would not marry that year; the stick, “to beat one’s spouse” told of an unhappy marriage or continuous disputes; a rag or cloth marked a person with bad luck and poverty; a small coin (usually a silver six pence), on the other hand, tabbed the recipient for riches and good fortune; and the ring meant that you were to marry within a year.

My stories, by contrast, may, or may not contain elements from which to determine you own fate in the upcoming year. You, and you alone, can be the judge of that. The loaves are often served toasted with butter and cup of tea in the afternoon. Feel free to pick out the raisins if you don’t like them, or discard the whole thing. But in the spirit of the season, I’ll offer you at least one a day until the traditional Celtic New Year.

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Please click on the text below to read the first:

• Badly mangled miner haunts the Dunn Building.

Badly mangled miner haunts Dunn Building

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

Ghosts hang out at the old school

You must feel a presence

By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

I know where the ghosts are. They hang out around the old school. Maybe they don’t live there — but that is where they hang.
Henrik Ibsen suggested as much in his 1881 text “Ghosts.” Ibsen said, “I’m inclined to think we are all ghosts — everyone of us. It is not just what we inherit from our mothers and fathers that haunts us. It is all kinds of old defunct theories, all sorts of old defunct beliefs, and things like that.”
Maybe you, as I, have felt them on several occasions. As you wait in crowd to ascend the steps to Ute Pass Cultural Cultural Center in Woodland Park,. you think back to its days as gymnasium — the days in which Friday night crowds waited on the same set of steps for entry to a basketball game.
Or maybe when you read the chalk board messages in the guest rooms of Carr Manor in Cripple Creek. The building, built to serve as the high school and later used for K-12, is the only one of the five original schools in Cripple Creek to survive.
The view from that corner classroom, er... I mean guest suite, how could any student keep there mind on the three Rs?
If you rush down the stairs, past the fountain that now sports a plant in it, and into the Grand Ball Room, you can feel it. ... It’s the same rush, and sounds, and sights and texture of a feeling that thousands of students from the turn of the century, all the way through to 1977, could feel as they rushed to class. The ghosts, we know are there.
Driving by the lonely white one-room building, complete with bell tower and weed-choked playground, out on the Wyoming plains you must feel a presence.
Or in the meeting room of a South Dakota park that was converted from a similar one-room school — yes ghosts. And in the museum in Keystone, S.D. that is housed in the old school where the first class was the largest. The parents followed their lust for gold, the students followed the parents, but the gold ran out and soon, so did the students.
Even in your memories of the Mrs. Denby’s first grade, or of the coat rooms behind each of the class rooms in grade school, and as you wander down the halls in the old High School with all the students from previous classes staring down at you from the class portraits on the walls above.
As you see the rolled up maps that once allowed a teacher to pull down the world, and in the abandoned biology texts, or the old-fashioned desks with the ink well hole in the top near the center edge, or ...
That’s where the ghost are. They hang out at the old school.
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Maggie and other ghosts in the building

Stories of Maggie have swirled at least since the 1960s

 By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

For years, Oscar Lampman took care of the dead in Cripple Creek. And it is a wonder more ghost don't hover around 300 E. Bennett, the one-time base of operation of the basement undertaker.
Legend says it was here, in his funeral parlor, where Pearl DeVere's sister, coming to collect Pearl's body, noted the dyed auburn hair and found out her sister was no dressmaker but, instead, employed as madame at the Old Homestead brothel. The high-minded sister turned tail and caught the first train back East.
"Cripple Creek can bury its own dead," editorialized The Cripple Creek Times then. Indeed, and let he [or she] who is without sin, cast the first stone.
It was here that gold mining magnate Sam Strong's body lay, with much of his hard head blown away from a shotgun blast.
Countless other bodies, their owners whom suffered the violent deaths of violent times, underwent embalming in the lower level of the building.
Also for years, the Manhattan Barber Shop, with eight porcelain tubs for baths, occupied the first floor, and you would think some of the hanger-on, hang-around crowd would hang at such a popular place - even in an afterlife.
But oddly enough, a comforting ghost apparently haunts the premises of the old Fairley Bros. & Lampman Building.
A lilted voice, singing high in the scales and steeped in the accent of the Emerald Isle, a faint wisp of rose-scented perfume, the clackety-clack of old manual typewriter, are offered as evidence of the presence of "Maggie."
Stories of Maggie have swirled at least since the 1960s.
Noted Western artist Charles Frizzell, who ran an art gallery in the building then, and Katherine Hartz, who had the Sarsaparilla Saloon in the building beginning in 1968 and eventually purchased it, both related stories for Chas S. Clifton's 1983 book, "Ghost Tales of Cripple Creek."
"That was during the good old hippie days and a lot of people coming through town would be looking for a place to 'crash' for the night," Frizzell is quoted in Clifton's book.
But when the Frizzell's allowed visitors to stay in unused portions of the upper two floors, ghostly commotion centered in what used to be a ballroom on the third floor usually quickly drove away "crashers" before a second night.
"At times, Frizzell says, mysterious blue lights danced down to the second floor, the living quarters. He and his wife tried to stop them by shutting the twin doors on the staircase, but someone else seemed to want that door open," wrote Clifton.
He quotes Frizzell: "We would tie them shut with a twisted coat hanger because we could not lock them. We could go downstairs in the gallery and know there was no one upstairs, but we'd come back and find the hangers untied and the doors open."
Hartz had an even more finite visit from Maggie.
Also from Clifton's book quoting Katherine Hartz: "I was walking down the hall on the second floor. As I walked I heard sounds like someone was upstairs with high heels on, walking above me. I realized that in order to do so, whoever it was had to be walking through the walls upstairs."
According to the account, when she investigated, she encountered a woman in her late 20s or early 30s, tall, good-looking brunette, with her hair in a "Gibson Girl" roll, wearing a white shirtwaist, ankle-length dark brown print skirt and high-heeled boots.
Later, in the 1970s, having trouble with small unexpected electric bills and reports form police and nearby shop owners of late night lighting of the upstairs rooms, the
Hartz expected to find evidence of squatters but found instead, the building locked and undisturbed with electricity turned off at the fuse box.
But even after the advent of gaming and the building's conversion to Colorado Grande Casino, the sightings have continued.
"Some have reported that singing and dancing is sometimes heard emanating from the old ballroom, as well as the sounds of Maggie's lilting soprano voice heard singing an Irish accented concertina," reports "Legends of America Newsletter" owner and editor Kathy Weiser.
"At the casino, security guards have often reported seeing
Maggie along with a gentleman friend playing the slot machines after hours. She has also been caught on tape by the security cameras. However, after being viewed and stowed away, the tapes mysteriously vanished," reports Weiser.
Today, a café named in honor of Maggie resides in the building along with the casino.
Over the many years, tenants in the building in addition to those previously mentioned - included The Central Drug
Store on the northwest corner of the first floor. The upstairs on the second floor was occupied mostly by professionals with five attorneys and four doctors leasing space in 1902 and 1903.
"On the third floor, B.P.O.E. 316 - a very influential organization in the city - had their meeting hall [the location of the ballroom]. The Elks were pleased to lease this space, but they were looking for a permanent home.
They found this in 1911 when the Elks purchased The Gold Mining Exchange Building," according to "Cripple Creek: City of Influence," a 1994 book by Brian Levine.
Perhaps Maggie, and other ghostly friends never noticed the party had relocated.
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