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Haunting tales
By Joe Garner, Rocky Mountain News
Published: October 31, 1988
If you've ever wanted to meet ghosts, you'll find plenty of them lurking around Colorado -- and not just at Halloween.
"Traditionally, anyone who died a violent death came back as a ghost, and, in the old days, there was a lot of violence, especially, the mining camps," said MaryJoy Martin, author of Twilight Dwellers: The Ghosts, Ghouls and Goblins of Colorado.
"You can connect a lot of ghost stories with drinking alcohol," she said, "but there are other stories people have a hard time explaining away."
In Breckenridge, a lovely young woman with long hair sometimes appears floating through the walls of the Prospector Restaurant. She even rearranges objects in an upstairs apartment.
"They say she doesn't bother things, she just moves them around, " said Russ Toepfer, restaurant manager. "Tourists say they've seen her, but I haven't and neither has the owner."
He said the explanation for the apparition is that the young woman, burned in a fire across the street years back, died in the restaurant building, then a house.
At Denver's Union station, a ghost called The Lieutenant was blamed for rattling dishes and stirring winds as he prowled empty platforms in his World War II uniform.
He is believed to be one of the thousands of soldiers who left Denver on a troop train and never returned.
On the eastern plains, John Fagan and his horse sometimes are blamed for destroying property and crops.
"John Fagan was a soldier at Bent's Fort," Martin said. "When a patrol was out scouting for Indians, John Fagan rode ahead of the group. When they found him, they thought he had frozen to death, so they buried him in a hurry because the Indians were nearby. Then they began to worry that they had buried him alive."
In revenge for his premature burial, Fagan gallops his horse across the plains, venting his wraith on the living, she said.
Carol Mitchell, an English professor at Colorado State University, said malevolent ghosts such as Fagan rage through the decades because their stories are recorded in newspaper and books. But many other, less-publicized ghosts are benevolent ones who return to help the living.
"It may be a grandfather who reappears after death to reassure the family, 'You don't have to worry about me. I've gone to a better place,' " Mitchell said.
Such a benevolent ghost is Laura, who, with her two children, occupies a Victorian home in Fairplay with Brian Woodyard, deputy assessor of Park County. The house was built for a woman named Laura Paul.
"You walk into certain rooms of the house, and you feel someone is watching you, although I've never seen her," Woodyard said. "I personally believe, if anything, she adds warmth to the house. But I'd just as soon leave her alone and have her leave me alone."
Other such benevolent spirits are Tommyknockers, originally fairy tale creature akin to leprechauns. A jolly crew, the Tommyknockers protected men who worked underground, as close to being inside one's own tomb as a person could be.
In time, a Tommyknocker came to be the ghost of a miner killed in the shaft who returned to the place of his death -- sometimes to warn other miners of the danger that had befallen him but other times to repeat his tragic death.
Martin said research for her book located more than 500 Colorado ghost stories, many of them variations on tales first told in Europe. Like all good stories, they entertain and fascinate, but also illuminate humankind's most profound concerns: life, love and the grave.
"I can't find too many young people today who believe in ghosts. Young people today believe only what technology can prove or disporve, and that's a mistake," Martin said.
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