Lori Juszak - Ghosts of Fort Collins

Published by Haunted America

A Division of The History Press

Charleston, SC 29403

www.historypress.net

Copyright 2012 by Lori Juszak

All rights reserved

First published 2012

e-book edition 2012

ISBN 978.1.61423.583.5

print ISBN 978.1.60949.519.0

Library of Congress CIP data applied for.

Notice: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. It is offered without guarantee on the part of the author or The History Press. The author and The History Press disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book.

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CONTENTS

PREFACE

Even a wooden coffin and six feet of earth cant hold back a story if it needs to be told. Some people believe that when a man dies, his spirit has a choice to rest or one last chance to finish old business. In a quiet little old frontier town in northern Colorado, just an hour north of Denver, the people of Fort Collins may have paid too high a price to try to maintain their peaceful small-town reputation. All through the small shops of what is now called the Old Town area, there are unexplained and disturbing events that remind the folks of Fort Collins that things were not always as they are now. From pictures flying off walls, to particular books that never stay on shelves, to spatulas flying out of pots and spectral beings passing through solid brick, the spirit world in Fort Collins is very active.

Wandering down dark passageways under the city, I began to think about what was next for the ghost tour. We started a family business earlier in the year that first focused on guided hikes but quickly evolved into a business focused on walking tours in Fort Collins. There were several kinds of ghost tours we offered, but the Fort Collins Ghost tour was the first and the most popular. It attracted hundreds of locals and visitors from all over. One of the things we considered early in the development of the tour was the expectations of folks who would attend the tour. Most folks have never been on a ghost tour and probably would not know what to expect. Others might expect a dry lecture on local history and hearsay legends passed down through the generations. Others might even expect more of a Halloween haunted house experience incorporating props and employees dressed as zombies jumping out at them around each corner.

The ghost tour was neither a dry lecture nor an intellectually empty horror ride. It incorporated the best research we could find but also personal accounts of dozens of unexplained activities that have occurred throughout Fort Collins history. Along the way, we sometimes got more than we bargained for. The best Fort Collins research tends to come from old newspapers, especially from articles written in the late 1800s. The most spectacular stories tend to come from firsthand experiences as old-timers and shop owners share their personal accounts, from the odd to the horrifying. But sometimes we think the stories want to tell themselves. While many activities of ostensible poltergeists in Fort Collins have been terrifying shop owners for decades, little historical documentation exists to help explain these restless spirits. What is clear is that there are a lot of unexplained activities under the city of Fort Collins and a lot of stories lost foreverunless someone or some thing is hell-bent on telling the story, irrespective of their status in our world.

I was ahead of the tour helping out that night as an assistant to the tour guide. I wasnt really needed, as we tended to have good coverage between our main tour guides and their assistants. But I liked to come along occasionally to get a feel for how things were going and to provide feedback on how we could improve the tour. On that night, I was considering the possibility of incorporating a few carefully placed props to add to the drama of the tour. I headed toward an old underground utility room rumored to be a busy passageway for spirits between our world and some other place. The supposed spiritual passageway was through a manhole that provided access to a creek that ran under the city. As an assistant to the tour guide that night, my job was to get ahead of the tour, secure access to the room and ensure that there were no safety hazards.

As I got closer to the room, I remembered some of the stories I had heard. One of my brothers and my mom had stories of seeing things in the room resembling a person (which they sometimes talk about on the ghost tour). Several tour attendees had also reported uneasy feelings and other strange sensations after visiting the room. However, I personally had never had any experiences that were out of the ordinary after visiting the room dozens of times on various tours. The room didnt bother me, and I suspected most of the feelings folks got from the location were directly attributable to the fact that it was a dark, old and strange place. Anyone might feel a little uneasy in that roomespecially in the context of attending a ghost tour where some folks might hope to have an encounter of their own.

Within a few feet of the door, I heard a quick shuffling noise in the room, so I stopped. Obviously, somebody was in the room, and I didnt want to run into them in the doorway or surprise them. Then I heard footsteps that sounded like somebody quickly walking away from the door. I figured this was either one of my brothers planning to give me a little scare or one of the workers from the ice cream shop above tending to some maintenance of the equipment in the room. Either way, I proceeded forward, announcing myself as I entered the room (not wanting to surprise anyone myself).

Strangely, the lights were off, so I thought for sure it was one of my younger brothers hiding in darkness, hoping to jump out and scare me. Not amused, I flipped on the light and quickly turned my head from side to side to scan the room. There wasnt anything large enough to hide behind, so I was a little perplexed to discover that I was alone. Then I quickly looked behind the door. There was nobody there, either. As I felt adrenaline quickly releasing in my body, a slight panic came over me, and I found myself unable to cope with the fact that somebody had obviously been there a few seconds ago but was not there now. Could I have imagined the shuffling sounds or the footsteps? I thought about stories I had heard about people seeing a large shadowy figure in and around the general vicinity of the room. However, I was convinced there had to be some real person hiding in that room in some clever way.

Not willing to retreat or question myself on what I had heard, I stubbornly scanned the room one more time. The only other possibility was the manhole that was filled with water from the underground creek. If someone had climbed into the manhole, it would have been hard to imagine. It could be done, but the hole was very narrow, and it would have taken some time to climb in and lower ones self into the water belowand then who knows what one would do from there. It was inconceivable to imagine any sane person submerging themselves into a pitch-black underground creek for any reason, never mind the fact that they would likely drown. Nevertheless, I inched toward the manhole with a flashlight in one hand and my other hand tightly clenched (half imagining something would lunge out at me from the hole). A strange thought occurred to me that we were under Walrus Ice Cream, a strange name for a shop hundreds of miles from any ocean. And here we were, with the only plausible explanation of a person disappearing being that they were retreating into the water below. Whatever this Walrus Man really was, he appears to live in the creek that passes under Fort Collins and is seen occasionally by folks in the dark passageways beneath the city.