From the old gold-mining towns of Summit County to skiing destinations in Breckenridge, eerie and true tales of life and loss in the Wild West abound in this corner of Colorado. The spirit of mutilated miner William Goodwin is said to haunt Blue River, warning of the dangers lurking below. Some say that the ghost of the widow Sylvia, who died destitute and alone at a boarding house on Main Street, still haunts the building today. Coldblooded killer Dr. Condon took revenge on his stalker and killed the town's favorite barkeeper.
In this fascinating book, tour guide and author Gail Westwood explores the area's most haunted buildings and introduces the ghastly characters who seemingly never left.
From the old gold-mining towns of Summit County to skiing destinations in Breckenridge, eerie and true tales of life and loss in the Wild West abound in this corner of Colorado. The spirit of mutilated miner William Goodwin is said to haunt Blue River, warning of the dangers lurking below. Some say that the ghost of the widow Sylvia, who died destitute and alone at a boarding house on Main Street, still haunts the building today. Coldblooded killer Dr. Condon took revenge on his stalker and killed the town's favorite barkeeper.
In this fascinating book, tour guide and author Gail Westwood explores the area's most haunted buildings and introduces the ghastly characters who seemingly never left.
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Overview
From the old gold-mining towns of Summit County to skiing destinations in Breckenridge, eerie and true tales of life and loss in the Wild West abound in this corner of Colorado. The spirit of mutilated miner William Goodwin is said to haunt Blue River, warning of the dangers lurking below. Some say that the ghost of the widow Sylvia, who died destitute and alone at a boarding house on Main Street, still haunts the building today. Coldblooded killer Dr. Condon took revenge on his stalker and killed the town's favorite barkeeper.
In this fascinating book, tour guide and author Gail Westwood explores the area's most haunted buildings and introduces the ghastly characters who seemingly never left.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781625853875 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The History Press |
| Publication date: | 10/20/2018 |
| Series: | Haunted America |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 115 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
THE LADIES' STORIES
Katie Briggle: Breckenridge's Leading Lady
In 1896, Kathleen Briggle arrived in Breckenridge from Ohio. Katie, as she was best known, was a dark-haired Irish girl, born in Canada to immigrants from Ireland. She left her home and moved to the United States, where she met her future husband, William Briggle, from Canton, Ohio. William moved the newly married couple to Breckenridge at the request of his brother-in-law, George Engle, to manage the bank Engle had just founded, the Engle Exchange Bank. Katie was a talented musician and spent her time teaching local children to play the piano, organ and other instruments and organized social events for local sectors of the Eastern Star, the Breckenridge Musical and Dramatic Society and for church socials.
When Katie and William first arrived, they lived in a modest log cabin on the east side of town but soon enlarged the cabin extensively and created a luxurious home suitable for entertaining, which included a music room, parlor and dining room. This was one of the finest homes in Summit County at a time when most residents lived in one-room cabins. Katie liked the finer things in life, and everything she needed was either bought in Denver or ordered by catalogue and transported to Breckenridge by train. Her walnut piano, inlaid with ebony, was a birthday gift from William and had her initials engraved on it. It was the finest that money could buy and would have cost him around $1,200 back then. She set the precedent for etiquette in this town, and all other ladies followed. Her musical evenings were the talk of the county, and she often entertained sixty people in her home at one time. If it wasn't a musical evening, it might have been a card game of euchre or bridge.
Katie's dinner parties were renowned in the area, and what she served at the table, how she decorated the house and what the ladies wore were all reported in the personal column of the newspaper the following day. We think of Facebook as a new phenomenon of social communication, but the Victorians were way ahead of us!
Breckenridge grew into a very respectable Victorian town by the turn of the century, and Katie became its leading lady. However, Breckenridge was born out of a gold rush and depended on its minerals to keep the town thriving. Within four decades, placer and hydraulic mining had ceased, and the last gold dredge boat was forced to stop working in October 1942 when the War Board dictated that there was to be no more mining. All hands were needed for the war effort.
Local records do not indicate when Katie left the town, but we do know that, sadly, William had died of a heart attack in 1924, so it is likely that she left soon after that. At first, she spent a month or two away from Breckenridge. Sometimes she went to Denver to visit her sister, but for a longer trip, it was usually California. Her social life would not have been the same in Summit County without her husband.
The ghost tour of Breckenridge started in 2010. It is a walking tour of haunted downtown and tells stories of the spirits that are found there. When it first began to go into the Briggle House two years later, the house was not open to the public. Several years prior to that, when operated by the Summit Historical Society, the Briggle house had been manned on a regular basis as a museum. Visiting the house, you would find it set out exactly the way it was during Katie's time. For example, in the parlor there was a piano, an organ and other instruments, together with a chaise longue and other pieces of period furniture. However, stories emerged of it being visited by the ghost of Katie Briggle. Guides who worked in the building reported feeling cold drafts blowing past them and doors opening and closing by themselves. Safe to say, it was not the most popular docent job.
One of the first documented incidents that occurred in the house involving Katie was a report from people who were taking a historic walking tour of town and were taken through the Briggle residence to get a feel for domestic life at the turn of the century. The tour group included among its guests a psychic, a fact that was unknown to the guide of the group at the beginning of the tour. Despite the fact that this tour took place during the day, the psychic, Elaine, was unwilling to enter the bedroom belonging to Katie and William. Elaine reported that Katie was actually present in the room at that time. Elaine fully described the deceased Katie in her Victorian outfit and then told the guide that Katie made it known to her that the tour was not welcome in the bedroom. The tour moved out into another room, but Katie followed, hovering around the group. The guide thought this was a unique opportunity to ask Elaine a few questions about Katie and find out more about her as the former owner of the house. She told Elaine about her plans to create a living history tour as Katie Briggle and asked what the reaction was to that idea. Katie replied through the psychic that she would be delighted to have the tour created about her. Katie was asked whether she minded people walking through her house, and she responded that she did not mind as long as the groups were respectful. The next question concerned the year represented by the tour, and when asked if 1910 might be appropriate, Katie vehemently replied that it was not suitable. This encouraged the guide to carry out extensive research to find out what bad fortune had befallen the town of Breckenridge during that year that would have so upset Katie, but even after several attempts, she could not find anything. After one last try at solving this puzzle, she was able to find an obscure article in the local newspaper about a fire that had occurred in the Briggle house in March 1910. The fire had not only burned Katie's prized ebony piano, one of her many prized possessions, but it also nearly razed the house. In fact, the only room left intact was the dining room, which was Katie's favorite room, and if this had been reduced to ashes, she would have abandoned the house. As it was, this room was unharmed. This article was unknown to the locals of present day and came as a surprise. Now the guide had her answer — Katie would not have wished to be reminded of that disastrous year.
Several months after the above incident took place, there was a second startling encounter with Katie. During another daily walking tour given by the same tour guide, Katie made her presence known to the guide while she was in the pantry. This small room was set up the way it would have looked at the turn of the century, and cans of fruit and vegetables filled the shelves. Upon entering that room, the guide was startled when she witnessed one of the cans fly off the shelf, up into the air and then crash down at her feet, narrowly missing her head. One of the guests on the tour observed that it was a deliberate act. The guide admitted that nothing like this had happened before but thought she might know the cause.
A few days before, she had given one of her living history tours as Katie Briggle and, as usual, had served tea and cake in the dining room. Normally, she would have cleaned all the cups and plates and put them away, but on this occasion, she had to leave the house in a hurry and left the dirty dishes on the table. She planned on returning the next day to clear up but was not able to do so. She realized that Katie was extremely annoyed at having had her kitchen left in such a mess and wanted to make sure the guide was aware of her displeasure.
Other events have taken place, including a cake tier, which always sat in the center of the dining table, appearing in the middle of Katie's bed one day. Just before a tea tour was to commence on another day, it was found that one of the teacups, turned over in its saucer, held the broken shell pieces from a bird's egg. The guide herself had placed the upturned cup in the saucer just hours earlier and knew that there was nothing underneath it then. During a ghost tour on another occasion, Katie was observed by a psychic sitting on the chaise longue in the parlor. She was drinking a cup of tea.
On a date close to Halloween in October 2012, paranormal investigators were invited into the house to conduct an investigation. During the day, a psychic was also invited there and told the group that Katie was actually entertaining guests at that moment. Katie informed the psychic that she was agitated about the investigators being there and wanted them to leave immediately. That evening, all the usual equipment, including EVP and EMF recorders, as well as white noise detectors and flashlights, were used. The investigators had the greatest success in the bedroom and made contact with the spirit of Katie using the above tools.
Until 2012, it was not known where Katie had been buried after she left Breckenridge, or even what year she had died. The same guide searched the records and, with the help of a fellow guide, was finally able to locate Katie resting in Crown Hill cemetery in Wheat Ridge, Colorado. After visiting the grave site, the guide found that Katie had died in a Denver hospital in 1946. From there, the guide found the obituaries in the Denver newspapers and discovered that Katie had moved to Denver to be with her sister and finished out her final years in the city. She had also been an invalid for the last ten years of her life following a bad fall, so her time in Denver was not a happy one.
The guide concluded that the happiest years of Katie's life were spent in her Breckenridge home and that was the reason for her continued visits, where she can carry on entertaining her friends and anyone else who happens to drop by.
Minnie Thomas: The Playful Ghost
The personal column of the local newspapers around 1900 would have told you everything you needed to know about what was happening in town. It gave a full report of the whereabouts of each local and visitor, reporting on his or her train or car rides to Leadville, Denver or farther afield. The paper reported on who was visiting and why, and even reported details of each guest's attendance at a social gathering.
Some well-known characters of Breckenridge's past are remembered simply for being outstanding citizens in a time when every resident knew one another. Minnie Dusing Thomas was one such resident. She came to live in Breckenridge with her family when she was six years old and remained there for the rest of her life. During the winter of 1913, she visited her married sister Lizzie one night. Her sister lived in Frisco, and the only way to get there was by sleigh. Minnie joined a group that was going to attend a dance given at the Frisco Hotel, and there she met her future husband, Bill Thomas, who owned a successful dairy ranch near Frisco. They were married shortly after on December 24, 1913, and lived on Bill's ranch, a 145-acre ranch that had been left to him by his mother. It may have been the size of the ranch or the hard work that Minnie was unaccustomed to, but the marriage wasn't a huge success. Minnie wasn't inclined to be a homemaker or a ranch hand, and perhaps another reason she struggled in the marriage was that it took her away from her two passions: hiking and skiing. The failure of the marriage might also be due in part to the fact that Bill was a heavy drinker and often came home drunk in the early hours of morning. There are many stories of Bill taking all night to return back home to the ranch after he had been at the bars of Frisco's Main Street, just a few blocks away. Although he was a very popular figure in Frisco, he was also considered a little eccentric, going so far as to think that Minnie's underwear would make great insulation for the chinking in their cabin. It didn't matter whether she had finished with the item or not; he would go right ahead and steal it out of her drawers.
They started to lead separate lives and were divorced several years later. This was quite a rare occurrence in Summit County in the days when women stayed in marriages just for the security of having a roof over their heads. Minnie returned to Breckenridge, to the cabin she had lived in with her mother when she was a girl, and lived there for the last chapter of her life, hiking in the summer with her camera to capture the wildflowers and animals that she admired and, in the winter, skiing her way around Summit County. Minnie was really ahead of her time and would have fit in with today's lifestyle without anyone batting an eye.
In the late 1960s, Minnie went out of the cabin to visit the outhouse in the yard one day, as she had never had indoor plumbing installed at the cabin. Unfortunately, she slipped on the ice, breaking her hip. From then on, she was moved to a rest home for the elderly in the picturesque Twin Lakes area. After she had become too infirm for the owners of the rest home, they moved her into a nursing home in Leadville, where she passed away in 1970. All her belongings were handed over to local friends, including a huge collection of postcards, photos and memorabilia.
An inviting gift shop now resides in Minnie's cabin at 202 South Main Street. It specializes in carved wooden statues, mostly animal figures. The shop is called Creatures Great and Small and was started by Jan and Scott Magnuson in 1986. When they first moved in and started their business, they felt Minnie's presence immediately. First, they were aware of the sound of footsteps coming from the attic, a tiny room used for storage in the rear of the store. In Minnie's day, her prized collection of photographs and postcards was kept up there, and not surprisingly, the other noise they heard resembled the sound of someone rifling through a box, desperately looking for a lost item. They always knew where Minnie was by following the trace of an old-fashioned scent that smelled like roses. When plates started flying off the wall but not breaking, the Magnusons were not surprised and assumed it was Minnie passing on her displeasure at having someone take over her home — a common occurrence for spirits who are unsure or displeased by new tenants of their home. The couple hung wind chimes from the ceiling in the store hoping to attract customers, only to have them spin frantically around and crash to the ground unexpectedly.
It is Jan and Scott's custom to use a doorbell to alert each other in case one of them gets caught in the store with an influx of customers. The doorbell is attached to the wall at the back of the shop and rings in the attic storage when one of them is up there getting new stock. The bell frequently rings from downstairs when Scott is by himself in the building. As you can guess, when Scott rushes down to assist, the shop is empty. Minnie, it seems, has a sense of humor.
In the summer of 2014, a family of four walked into the shop one day. While the parents were distracted at the rear of the shop, their two small children were crouched down on the floor looking at and picking up the carved wooden animals on display at the front. Suddenly, the children jumped up as a large metal cross that had hung on the wall above them flew off from its hook and landed on the floor between them. It had been hanging there for years, securely attached to a large hook. The children were startled, but no harm was done. Could it have been Minnie warning them that it's fine to look at the display but not to touch? This event was recorded on a security camera, which I was able to watch the following day.
A psychic who recently visited the store with me remarked that Minnie was a playful character and said she was aware that Minnie was present that day. She saw her watching us curiously, especially in the storage space upstairs. When we moved from there to the rear of the shop, she followed. At this point, a man in hobnailed boots joined Minnie, and the smell of beer was obvious. Had her ex-husband Bill come to visit her — or maybe taunt her?
When they first took over the cabin, Jan disclosed to me that she felt uncomfortable in the building, but as the years wore on, that feeling disappeared. Jan is now convinced that Minnie just wants to remind them of her presence, and the incidents that still occur today give evidence of that.
Bertha Welch: A Wasted Love
Lying in the tranquil setting of Valley Brook Cemetery is Bertha Welch, who has one of the few original wooden headstones that has survived from the turn of the last century. Looking at the simple headboard you wouldn't have any idea that her story was such a tragic one.
Bertha Cravath was born in San Diego, California, on June 9, 1882. She had a happy, innocent childhood, living with a close and devoted family. As a young lady, she met a soldier named James Welch, who came from Canada. They met in San Diego, where he was working as a conductor on a trolley bus, and she was instantly attracted to him. The relationship developed into love, for her anyway, and he easily won her heart. However, her father didn't approve of the former soldier, and the rest of the family joined him in trying over and over to dissuade Bertha from this unsuitable match. Her father had a much better match in mind for her, but Bertha was head over heels in love with Welch and wasn't about to end their relationship, so the headstrong couple eloped.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Haunted Breckenridge"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Gail Westwood.
Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Preface,
Acknowledgements,
Introduction. Breckenridge's Cemeteries: The Miners Who Couldn't RIP,
1. The Ladies' Stories,
2. Saloons,
3. Restaurants and Hotels,
4. Tragic Endings,
5. The Good Guy and the Bad Guy,
6. Mining Tales,
7. Strange But True,
8. Railroad Tales,
9. Children's Tales,
10. Bits and Pieces,
11. Out of Breckenridge,
About the Author,