A Haunted History of Denver's Croke-Patterson Mansion

Ann Alexander Leggett, Jordan Alexander Leggett

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781609493127
• eBook ISBN: 9781625841100
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Step into this nineteenth-century Colorado landmark and discover its paranormal history . . . Photos included!
 
An ominous air hangs about Capitol Hill's historic Croke-Patterson Mansion. Rumors of spirits and strange events have cast a shadow across its elegant Gilded Age facade. The lonely halls are haunted with stories of a doctor's wife who committed suicide and the ghostly figure of a young woman who appears to visitors. Tenants of the building have also claimed to hear the cries of children, and dark specters in the basement prevent even the hardiest souls from staying for too long.
 
In this fascinating book, authors Ann Alexander Leggett and Jordan Alexander Leggett explore the mysteries that have plagued this Denver mansion for over a century.

GHOSTLY ENCOUNTERS

KATE

She approached slowly, taking the formidable stairs one step at a time. Upon reaching the top of the worn steps, she looked straight up and took in every piece of the house, shifting her gaze from left to right. Seemingly finished with her visual assessment, she closed her eyes and stood still for a moment. Then her eyes opened, and she seemed to brace herself for the words that would fall from her determined lips. “I’m back, you son of a bitch. You win. What do you want from me?”

This was my first meeting with Kate, but it obviously was not her first visit to the mansion. She had come to the Croke-Patterson Mansion this time at the request of Kevin Samprón, owner of Spirit Paranormal Investigators, and it was clear that she was intensely nervous about being back. After hearing the details of her history with the house, her anxiety was understandable.

In October 1993, Kate and her mother had visited the mansion on a haunted house tour of Denver. During that first visit, every room brought a different feeling, some mild and calming, some terrifying. Kate vividly remembers walking down the stairs to the basement and suddenly feeling physically ill. Up on the third floor, as people on the tour stooped to enter the infamous tower room, Kate stepped back, feeling dizzy. Negative energies seemed to swirl around and close in on her. She was overwhelmed. The dark energy she sensed in the house haunted her, and the discomfort of that visit would stay with her for years.

Kate considers herself to be a sensitive, or an empath, meaning she is deeply perceptive of emotions and psychic energies. Sensitives are spiritually attuned and often experience the emotional state of another person as if it is their own. To varying degrees, they may even have the ability to sense emotional energy across time, picking up on occurrences from the past. This ability, according to Kate, is both a blessing and a curse. In the case of her time in the Croke-Patterson, it was the latter.

The ways that Kate would become so connected to the Croke-Patterson Mansion are strange enough, even without her empathic nature. After her initial visit on the haunted house tour, she couldn’t get the house out of her mind. She replayed the experience over and over again. The energies took root and wouldn’t leave her thoughts. She says her first take on the house was that it held a very dark energy and was full of sadness. She couldn’t figure out why the house would affect her so. A series of coincidences, if we can call them that, would lead to her next visit to the mansion.

A few months after that October night, Kate enrolled at Denver’s Art Institute. She was trying to find a nearby place to live when she happened on an apartment online that caught her fancy. There was a long waiting list, and yet for some reason she felt she had to live there; she signed up and prepared to wait. Eventually, a unit opened up, and she signed a lease. It was not until after she moved in that she realized that she was only two blocks from the Croke-Patterson Mansion. How had she not known? What were the odds that she would find an apartment in Capitol Hill, so close to the very place that would not leave her thoughts? She found herself avoiding driving or walking by the place. She would catch a glimpse of one of the dark turrets while driving up the street, and she would shudder. But this was only the beginning.

In the mid-2000s, Kate went out on a date with a man she met through an online dating site. “We went out and had a nice dinner,” Kate says. “And we got to talking about where we lived. When I told him about my apartment, he said, ‘Oh, really? I just live a few doors down. You know the Croke-Patterson Mansion? That’s where I live.’ Needless to say, I was shocked. Our relationship didn’t continue much beyond that point.” She couldn’t believe the coincidence.

Kate says she has always been into ghost hunting, mainly to try to find the root of why she is so sensitive to energies in homes that are supposedly haunted. Eventually, she got in contact with Kevin at Spirit Paranormal Investigations and asked if she could become a part of his team. She still remembers the phone call she had with him. “I’m up for investigating any place,” she said, “except I don’t think I can ever go back into the Croke.” It was agreed, and she was part of the team.

She’d been with the Spirit team for less than a month, and in the field for only one investigation, when she got the call. “Kate, you are never going to believe this,” Kevin said. “An author just called me. She is writing a book on the Croke-Patterson, and she wants us to do an investigation.” Once again, the coincidences seemed too close for comfort.

According to Kate, it took a tremendous amount of courage just to step foot into the house again. But she says she felt compelled to go. “It has made me physically ill and has haunted me so badly for nearly twenty years, yet I felt like it wanted me to come back. It was trying to draw me in. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to help it or what. I was either supposed to go or never go back.”

Coming full circle, there she was at the front door again, issuing her personal challenge to the house. The team members were conducting a pre-investigation walk-through, hurrying around figuring out where to set up their cameras. It was interesting to observe Kate as she walked from room to room. She was in her own world, and at times she turned her head as if to listen to things the rest of us could not hear. She was calm and reserved but also seemed to be on the verge of tears.

After so many years, it was the third floor that still held the most emotion for her. She admitted that she’d had nightmares about the “nursery” room with the little tower room attached. Her dreams were of a young girl crying and pounding on the door. With some urging, she agreed to enter the tower room and sat on the floor trying to keep her emotions in check. “I feel a woman or a child is here,” she said. “She is in tremendous pain. I feel she may have died here mourning the loss of a child.”

With the visit over, we stood in the front yard, and she expressed her relief at being able to face her fears. She gazed up at the house once again, and a small smile came over her face. “I did it,” she said. Her relief was painfully short-lived. The phone call that came to us two days later was shocking, to say the least. Upon returning home from the mansion, Kate had found her beloved seven-year-old collie dead in the backyard. Understandably, she was devastated. “Was it the house?” she asked us. “I shouldn’t have gone back. It has taken something from me that I love.”

This terrible event notwithstanding, Kate was faced with the difficult decision to go back to the mansion one more time, as the actual paranormal investigation was to take place three days later with the Spirit Paranormal Investigations team. Her mother, also a sensitive, pleaded with her to stay away. But she did return for the investigation, for just a few hours, leading the team through what she felt were areas where energies were strong. Kate said that for the most part, she’d been able to convince herself that her dog’s death was a horrible coincidence and that neither the house nor the spirits in it were “punishing” her. On her return to the mansion, she tried to replace her antagonistic attitude with a more compassionate tone.

She would face even more strange events that night. She had the same overwhelming feeling of fear and sadness that she had experienced on her previous visits, but this time she also sensed an evil presence in the basement, a space that had not bothered her previously. All in all, it was a rather uneventful night, and she was relieved to finally be leaving the mansion at the end of her shift. After she said goodbye to the investigation team and started to leave, however, she felt something or someone suddenly grab her arm. When she arrived home, the babysitter reported that strange electrical interferences had occurred in Kate’s house, and Kate found the family’s pet fish floating dead in its bowl. Another coincidence? Even more disturbing were the four red marks on Kate’s arm that looked like fingerprints. A doctor could not make a conclusive diagnosis, and yet the marks remained for five days.

Kate says she will never go back to the Croke-Patterson Mansion.

LEIGH

Kate’s mother, Leigh, accompanied her to the investigation partly to witness the event but mostly to watch over her daughter. During their tour of the mansion in 1993, Leigh had felt a sense of being unwelcome in the mansion from the minute she entered. “There was a pain that speared through my heart, and I immediately felt that the inhabitants had experienced unbelievable agony and desolation, the likes of which most of us could only imagine,” she said.

As we went up the grand staircase I was certain I should turn around and leave immediately, but not wanting to scare the others I followed until we reached the small tower room. I couldn’t move as waves of nausea and fright held me almost incapacitated. I had to leave the house and I was horribly ill. Several of my friends on the tour felt the same things and they left as well. Over the next few days, nightmares, depression and uncontrollable crying plagued me. It took three weeks for things to get back to normal.

Leigh continued to be concerned for Kate, whom she could see was connected to the house. She felt the mansion was definitely trying to lure Kate back, and she vowed to not let her return without being there to watch over her. Both Leigh and Kate had found places that were impossible to walk through, as if invisible walls were making hallways impassable to them. The sensation of being unable to breathe hindered them both, and Leigh felt physically and mentally unable to remain in the house. “It felt as though the whole place was weeping,” she said. “It felt black and hopeless.”

Leigh believes the Croke-Patterson Mansion holds many mysteries. “This is one of those places that have a horrible form of darkness or evil that is best left alone. There are places that have secrets that are not worth unlocking, and I truly believe this house to be one of those.”

DAN

It started out as an assignment for Dan: learn about paranormal research in preparation for a potential acting role in a movie about ghost hunting. The Croke-Patterson Mansion was the perfect location. Dan came into the Croke as a skeptic, a total non-believer. That would not be the way he left.

Interested in doing some live research on the subject, Dan contacted Kevin Samprón, owner of Spirit Paranormal Investigations, and the next thing he knew he was in the mansion on a ghost hunt. A man of a large stature, Dan doesn’t seem the type to be easily frightened, and clearly he wasn’t when he entered the house for the first time. On the contrary, he was actually trying to get something to happen—anything. “I was trying to make it mad,” he recalled. “I was sitting on the main staircase by myself, as others were setting up upstairs, and I was yelling ‘C’mon, let me hear from you!’” With that challenge, Dan proceeded to bang on the stairs two times, only to be met with two matching thumps coming from the empty basement. He pounded again, this time three times in succession. Three thumps came from the dark basement below. He then looked up at the infamous mirror, only to see the images in its reflection warp and twist before his eyes.

Standing in the main level of the mansion, Dan describes his unnerving experiences in the house. Photo courtesy of Jane Carpenter, March 2011.

His experiences that night grew in intensity. He and a cameraman looked out toward the front door at one point and saw a head in the lower corner of the sidelight, just inches above the ground. They also saw a head with indistinguishable features in the main stained-glass window that rises above the front entry room. But the most terrifying event of the night happened on the stairs, where so much of the spirit activity seems to be centered.

“There was a reporter in the house and one of the owners of the mansion as well,” Dan told us.

The owner and I were sitting on the bottom of the main staircase, and the reporter was standing at the top of the basement stairs when all of a sudden a huge dark cloud moved in front of her and actually covered her legs. Her legs just disappeared from view. We screamed, and she ran back over and sat on the stairs next to us. I then looked up to see a huge head and shoulders, rising above us to our left, leaning over the stairway railing toward us. I couldn’t make out any features.

The event—or their reaction to it anyway—was caught on tape by one of the investigation cameras set up to catch activity on the stairs. Though the right-hand portion of the staircase where the apparition appeared is not in the frame, Dan can be seen looking up and yelling in response to the sight of the head coming down upon them, as the two women scramble to get off the stairs.

According to Dan, the Croke-Patterson is indeed haunted. “I may not have believed it at first, but I do now. There are lots of spirits here, but there is one in particular that’s in charge. There’s no question about it.” He feels the apparition on the stairway that chose to frighten them that night may in fact be that dominant spirit. “It was very angry with me. I think if you came in here and provoked the spirits, you would get results. I sat on those stairs and basically said, ‘Come on, be a man! Show yourself!’ Well, it did.”

MELODEE

Over her seven-year stay in the house, the paranormal experiences that Melodee had were too numerous to count. In talking with us, she would often say, “Oh that happened so many times, countless times.” Basically, she learned to live with the spirits and felt that the majority of her encounters were peaceful. Peaceful, but unnerving at times. Melodee and her veterinarian husband owned the mansion from 1998 to 2005. Strange occurrences started almost from day one. Her husband did not believe the mansion was haunted, but Melodee knew otherwise.

Probably the most common haunting was by the young woman who would float down the main stairway and disappear through the sliding wood doors off the left side of the main entryway. Eerily similar to Krista’s observation, Melodee recalled, “She looked to be about eighteen or nineteen years old, and she always wore a white apron and a nightcap of sorts. She seemed meek and sickly. She never said anything; she floated by on that same path, time and time again.” Throughout our interviews, we would often hear about the apparition of a woman on the stairway. Accounts of her appearance varied, but most agreed that the woman seemed very ill.

Melodee’s husband kept cats in the “cat room” on the third floor, a room that to this day seems to make most people extremely uneasy. According to Melodee, the room on occasion also made the cats uneasy. “One night we heard the cats start to shriek and howl. When I opened the door, they were literally climbing the walls.” Her husband’s office on the third floor always seemed to be teeming with paranormal activity. “He kept his desk drawers locked,” Melodee said. “But there was a couch in the room, and we would sit and watch the drawers open and close by themselves, over and over. If you got up and tried to open the drawers, you would find them to be locked. We would also watch the doorknob turn on the small closet door in the same room.” During our own visits to the mansion, we had found the opening within that closet and access to what may have been a narrow passageway beneath the steep roof of the mansion. Of that closet, Melodee said, “This was the door that we always had trouble opening.”

The oddly shaped “cat room” on the third floor has had many strange occurrences happen within its walls. Photo by Ann Alexander Leggett, January 2011.

Probably the most profound event occurred when Melodee was in the later stages of her pregnancy with triplets. “I was in bed and was very uncomfortable, and it was difficult to roll over. I looked up to see the apparition of a woman. We actually spoke to each other without words. She told me her name was Kate, and with that she held out her hand to help me. It took it, and it felt as solid as anything else around me. I was able to sit up and turn over, and she dissipated. It was a very loving exchange.” Could this have been the spirit of Thomas Patterson’s wife, Katherine?

Melodee’s triplets were keen observers of the spirits in the house, and even though the basement was a playroom, they disliked one particular corner. “They didn’t like sitting in the ‘reading corner’ in the northeast corner of the main basement room,” Melodee recalled. “They said there was a man there who always stared at them. I never had a good feeling about being in that corner either. I always got the creeps, but it made sense once they told me about him.” Even though Melodee’s children were too young to talk about it at first, they would stare quite a bit at that one spot and cry. “Once they were able to verbalize what was occurring, they told me he was very tall, very thin and dressed in a top hat and old gray-black colored clothing,” Melodee said. “A vest, spats, coat—the full formal thing of an era gone.”

Upon moving into the mansion, Melodee began to hear more of the folklore associated with it. “I heard about the baby buried in the basement in the ashes of the coal furnace. I even sent the ashes out for extensive testing, but there were no huma...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• And So It Begins
• What Lies Beneath
• The Renaissance Man
• The House on the Hill
• Babies in the Basement
• A Good Trade
• Something Wicked This Way Comes
• The Good Doctor
• The Rubber Alligator
• A Scientific Approach
• Ghostly Encounters
• Whispers in the Night
• A Lonely House No More
• Appendix: Building Floor Plans
• Bibliography
• About the Authors