BOULDER — Unless your new house was built atop a cemetery a la the original “Poltergeist” movie, it takes an old house to be labeled “haunted.”
And just about every long-standing neighborhood has one: A big, dark, brick facade, often in need of repairs. Neighbors murmur about seeing muted figures lurking in its darkened windows, hearing eerie sounds from within when no one should be home and, when walking alone through the place, feeling inexplicable bursts of cool air as though someone else is stirring there, too.
That may sound scary, especially with Halloween around the corner. But people who claim to regularly commune with ghosts say it shouldn’t.
“Hollywood teaches us to be afraid of spirits, but most of them are gentle,” Mary Bell Nyman from Boulder’s Psychic Horizons Center said recently.
She is one of several psychics who, along with history buffs in period costumes, will help attendees of Historic Boulder’s “Ghost Walk Ghost Talk” tour sense the spirits occupying the Highland Lawn neighborhood and nearby Columbia Cemetery.
“Some spirits hang out” in the old houses and buildings on the Boulder tour, said Hope Hewetson, director of Psychic Horizons. “Some show up just for the event.”
To ready themselves for the task of spending an entire weekend with one foot in the physical world and the other in the metaphysical world during the “Ghost Walk” event, three Psychic Horizons clairvoyants recently previewed buildings on the tour.
One was the stately but dilapidated Hannah Barker House at 800 Arapahoe St.
Barker was a teacher, civic leader, businesswoman and land developer before her death in 1918. The house where she lived for 41 years served as a command center of sorts for this early Boulder trailblazer.
Most recently apartments and then vacant, it fell into disrepair and was donated last year to Historic Boulder for rehabilitation. (Read more about the Hannah Barker House, its history and its restoration at .)
When the psychics first visited it, contractors had just shored up its roof. But the building looked every bit like the proverbial haunted house with uneven flagstone, chipped paint and bricks, a falling down storm drain and boarded-up windows.
Inside, the house was gutted. But according to the psychics, it was far from empty.
“There is a ghost over there, and it’s male . . .”
Mary Bell Nyman passed through the first floor of the Hannah Barker House, her hands held over her head, palms open as though she were about to catch a basketball from above.
“He died of something, I think it was TB,” she continued. “He was mad because he died so young. He wanted to protect” his family.
Longtime Historic Boulder board member Chuck Saunders then told Nyman the story of Ezra Barker, Hannah’s husband. He was a ranching and mining speculator who bought this house in 1877 and lived here with his wife for six years before dying of consumption, or tuberculosis.
“He was a businessman; she was a schoolteacher,” Saunders said.
“He was more eccentric, kind of like an Einstein type,” Nyman added. “Very bright.”
One firsthand account
Down the street, 575 Arapahoe St. is another house on the “Ghost Walk Ghost Talk” tour. It is a French Second Empire-style home built in 1880.
Here, the psychics picked up on spirits that encourage creative expression. Could that be why the house is warmly and eclectically appointed by its current owner with a mix of contemporary art work, modern furniture and period accents?
The house seemed to invite the group to settle in for an old-fashioned ghost story.
Saunders, an architect, just happened to have one.
He lives in Boulder now, but his personal experience with haunted houses began years ago when was restoring an old home in New Orleans.
There, on several occasions, Saunders says he observed a spectral woman dressed in white. She sometimes sang lullabies to his young children.
Saunders later learned that during the 1800s, the house had been owned by a single woman — very rare for the Victorian-era South.
“Her house had been a falling-down wreck, and we were restoring it to its period look,” Saunders recalled. “I think she felt like I was a friend, and I came to think of her as our guardian spirit.”
Expect to hear many more ghost stories like this one at next weekend’s “Ghost Walk Ghost Talk” event.
“Ghost Walk Ghost Talk”
Historic Boulder’s seasonal house tour is Oct. 22-23. Tickets are $5-$15; kids under 6 can take the tour for free. For tickets, call 303-444-5192 or visit .
