Spooky stuff abounds in Colorado later this month. When it comes to ghost stories, our state is hard to top in terms of atmospheric locations, lurid history and interesting denizens – some of whom, quite frankly, deserved to die.
Here are three: These tours and events sell out quickly, so make sure to call before you go.
Glenwood Springs: Seventh annual Historic Ghost Walk. Meet Doc Holliday and other famous dead people as you tour Glenwood Springs’ Linwood Cemetery. Tours meet at the trail head at 12th Street and Bennett Avenue in this Colorado River town. There’s a half-mile uphill walk to the graveyard, the oldest in Glenwood Springs, where the ghosts will meet and greet.
Tours go out Friday, Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 20-22, and again Oct. 27-29. On Fridays and Saturdays, they leave at 7, 7:45, 8:30 and 9:15 p.m.; on Sundays, they’re at 7, 7:45 and 8:30 p.m.
To reserve tickets with a credit card, call the Frontier Historical Museum at 970-945-4448. Tickets may also be purchased in person at the museum or at Through the Looking Glass Bookstore. They’re $10 for historical society members and $15 for everybody else 3 or older. Tickets are nonrefundable.
Bring a flashlight or lantern, or purchase a lantern for $10 at the start of the tour. Dress for the weather, including good shoes. If you’re bringing young children, the 7 p.m. tour is suggested. And if you’re infirm, stay home or you could be one of the dead people entertaining visitors next year.
Pueblo: Fifth Annual Dia de los Muertos Parade y Fiesta. Down in Mexico, All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days (Nov. 1 and 2) are celebrated by, well, celebrating the dead – munching on bone-shaped cookies and sweets, building candlelit altars, decorating grave sites and hanging out with the dearly departed. To guide the spirits home for their brief visit, people play their dead loved ones’ favorite music and prepare their favorite foods. They would do the same for you, after all.
The Pueblo fiesta starts at 5:30 p.m. Oct. 27 when a coffin parade leaves the Latino Chamber office, 215 Victoria Ave., and travels to El Pueblo Museum around the corner at 301 N. Union St. At the museum, catch traditional music and food and decorate a sugar skull ($1 each) to put on the traditional ofrenda (altar) which will stay up through Nov. 3.
The museum will no doubt host plenty of spirits – it was a busy multicultural community and trading post from 1842 until Christmas Eve 1854, when the Utes and Jicarillas lost their patience and slaughtered everybody. The trading post was abandoned. As Pueblo grew, it was paved over and forgotten about until the late 1890s.
These days, the Colorado Historical Society has created a reproduction of the original pueblo to commemorate an important crossroads of the Southwest. You want to see a downtown that’s coming back from the dead? Pueblo’s the place.
Greeley: If you’ve had enough of dead people, why not round up some children and spend an evening channeling the spirits of a gentler time, when it was safe for kids to roam the streets and soaping windows was about as outrageous as Halloween got?
On Oct. 27 and 28 from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m., young children and their families are invited to Centennial Village Museum in Greeley to trick or treat between the houses, which range from an 1872 Union Colony home to a German Russian shanty from the sugar beet fields.
Centennial Village is at 1475 N. A St., not far from Island Grove Regional Park, where the Greeley Independence Stampede takes place every year. With 45 historical structures on 8 acres, the village aims to recreate the atmosphere of Greeley as a plains settlement between the 1860s and the 1920s.
The village will be decorated with corn stalks and jack-o’-lanterns, and kids can play games and toast marshmallows. Come dressed as a hobo or a ghost in a bedsheet. Call the Greeley Museums at 970-350-9220 for more information.
Lisa Everitt is a freelance writer who lives in Arvada. Contact her at lisaeveritt@comcast.net.
