13 OCTOBER 23-29, 2025 westword.com WESTWORD | CONTENTS | LETTERS | NEWS | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | CAFE | MUSIC | Mile High Haunts DENVER’S MOST CELEBRATED SPIRITS AND SPOOKY SITES. BY TEAGUE BOHLEN Denver ain’t afraid of no ghosts. In fact, it’s a city built on its legends to a signifi cant degree: from Soapy Smith to the Smaldones, Molly Brown, Baby Doe Tabor, Mattie Silks, Emily Griffi th, the Elitch family, the Coors dynasty and many more, the Mile High City is full of personalities perhaps too power- ful to fade, too boisterous to go quietly into that good night. With all that history, is it any wonder that sometimes, if you listen hard enough, the shadows of the city seem to speak? And when they do, who you gonna call? A good option is the Rocky Mountain Paranormal Research Society, which was formed in 1999 to apply a scientifi c approach to the exploration of paranormal phenom- ena. One of the leaders of that group is Bob Lewis, who describes himself as having “an overactive sense of curiosity.” That’s borne out by his impressive list of university degrees: biology, English, math- ematics and psychology, with a minor and some grad work in astrophysics. Does all that training offer him some sort of certifi cation to be a ghost-hunter? Not at all, he stresses, pointing to a warning on the RMPRS web- site: “If you are working with a team that claims that they have credentials or some kind of paranormal certifi cation, check for the validity of the claim because there are no experts or certifi cations in this fi eld.” “That’s our approach,” Lewis says. “Open minds, but very scientifi c. It’s got to be an honest examination, or it’s just entertain- ment — which is fi ne if you’re making a TV show, but not so much if you’re wanting to fi nd the truth.” Lewis remembers one of the most memo- rable and impactful experiences RMPRS had at the now-shuttered Brook Forest Inn in Evergreen, built in 1909 and reportedly haunted by many ghosts, including Nazi mapmakers who visited before World War II, doing advance recon on the United States. “We were there recording,” recalls Lewis. “The only people there. Even the caretaker had left for the pub. In the middle of the night, we heard the front door slam open, and a party wander in. At fi rst, we were like, ‘Dammit, the caretaker brought the bar back with him,’ but when some of us went downstairs...there was nothing there. Wandered outside, and despite the snow falling that night, no footprints. When we went back upstairs, those who’d stayed behind asked what happened — the noise of the party, for them, had just stopped when we came back up. The whole time, half of us were downstairs, hearing nothing, fi nding nothing — those left upstairs had still been hearing whatever that was. We’ve got the audio from that night, so we can prove that the audio happened. But we can’t begin to explain what it was.” That Brook Forest Inn story was re- counted in Case Files of the Rocky Moun- tain Paranormal Research Society Volume 2. Authors Lewis and Bryan Bonner have just released Case Files of the Rocky Mountain Paranormal Research Society Volume 3, avail- able now from Polymath Press. We sat down with Lewis to talk about this city’s most ghostly haunts, those places that linger in our city’s memories much like the shadows that still (sometimes emphatically, sometimes not) call Denver home. Here’s our list of the top ten: Cheesman Park 1599 East Eighth Avenue No haunted-Denver list would be complete without a mention of Cheesman Park, a place so replete with legends of various spooky sorts that it’s said to have inspired not one but two major American fi lms. The most famous is Poltergeist. Steven Spielberg’s mas- sive early-’80s horror smash borrowed some details from the story of Cheesman’s origins, when the park took the place of what was originally a cemetery; as the people hired by the city moved the headstones, they weren’t all that careful to move all of the bodies. And that much is verifi able — bodies have been unearthed, and bones still sometimes work their way back to the sunlight after being long-buried and abandoned. Which is why some say they see shadows lurching through the park, or claim that if you lie down in the grass, an unseen force may hold you down. One story that RMPRS investigated had to do with a lesser-known legend about the park: the ghost of an innocent man who was hanged on one of the trees; supposedly, that tree casts no shadow to this day. Lewis says their investigation found that there is a historic record that one of the fi rst bodies interred in the cemetery had indeed been hanged, but his innocence was questionable. As for the tree? Well, after combing through satellite imagery, tree by tree, the team found that all of them cast shadows. “Paranormal investigation is less glamorous work than the TV shows might suggest,” Lewis says. Cheesman Neighborhood In and around the area bounded by Colfax and Eighth avenues and Josephine and Downing streets Lewis suggests that the palatial homes sur- rounding constitute a separate category from the park proper, as CULTURE continued on page 14 KEEP UP ON DENVER ARTS AND CULTURE AT WESTWORD.COM/ARTS Haunted box at Elitch Theatre. MONIKA SWIDERSKI RMPRS
