Lore 230: Gilded

This is the story of the one.

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He's been around for 85 years, so I'm just going to assume that everyone knows who I'm talking about when I mention Superman.

You can probably close your eyes and conjure up an image of him in your mind, that red and blue costume, those touches of yellow, and that long, billowy cape.

Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, yada, yada, you get the idea.

But back in 2008, a team of archaeologists discovered an artifact that probably made them wish for another of the Man of Steel's powers.

His X-ray vision.

You see, they'd uncovered an ornate 12th century pendant in a medieval garbage layer beneath the German city of Mainz, but it was so corroded and damaged by time that they didn't want to risk opening it up to see what was inside.

Yes, doing so would give them an answer, but it also meant that the pendant, which was sort of like a painted gold, cross-shaped box, would be destroyed forever.

So they used a Superman-like technology known as prompt gamma-ray activation analysis, which essentially shoots neutrons at an object, and then when the materials it's comprised of bounce them back, it measures the ways in which those particles are now different.

And that information told them what was hidden beneath the golden outer layer.

Human bones.

Finger bones to be precise.

And while the team of researchers had no way of knowing who the bones belonged to, their best guess was that it was some sort of saintly reliquary.

And it teaches us all an important lesson.

Even the prettiest of containers can hold something much more dark and grim.

All around us are objects, buildings, and entire cities that seem to be home to one sort of thing.

But if we look deep enough, we're bound to discover the shadows that lie beneath.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore.

They named it for the color.

When the earliest Spanish explorers arrived in the area on the southeastern edge of the Rocky Mountains, they noticed the red stone along the river, and they gave the region the name it's had ever since, Colorado.

What they didn't know at the time was just how rich the history of the area already was.

With human occupation going back at least 12,000 years, there was once a time when the original inhabitants of the land hunted animals that would leave us all stunned today.

The mammoth were there, as were bison much bigger than today's modern buffalo.

There were even camels back then, and sloths as big as a bear.

Those Paleolithic people stuck around.

They settled in and built a powerful culture.

About a thousand years ago, these ancestral Puebloans, also known as the Anasazi, reached their golden age.

You've probably seen photos of the incredible city they left behind in what is now the Mesa Verde National Park, a sprawling complex of mud-brick buildings constructed beneath the massive ledge.

And yes, fans of the X-Files will probably hear the name Anasazi and associate it with images of burnt alien corpses inside a buried train car.

As a guy who watched that episode when it was brand new almost 30 years ago, I am right there with you.

By the time the Europeans arrived in the area though, Colorado was home to more than just that culture.

The Ute, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Apache, and Shoshone peoples were all there in various parts of the region, and had been for a very long time.

But right from the very beginning of European involvement, the history of the region has been painted in a golden light, and that's left us with folklore that people still still whisper about today.

In the 1500s, Spanish explorers heard stories about golden cities like Sibyla and Cuvira.

These mythical places though were products of a bit of misunderstanding.

Sibyla was real enough, but it was more of an economic hub for the indigenous peoples, rather than a city literally built out of golden bricks.

Cuvira turns out to be a completely made-up place though.

It seems that the Spanish invaders were causing so much trouble, death, and destruction that the local people invented a golden golden city far off in the wilderness, told the Spanish about it, and then watched them march off in search of it.

Honestly, you've got to love the creativity of it all, right?

A lot's happened since then.

The area that is Colorado today would eventually become part of the French territory that spanned much of the central part of modern North America, what they called Louisiana.

Then, in 1803, the United States bought most of that territory, which is why it's called the Louisiana Purchase.

Now, for a long while, the United United States didn't really want much to do with the Colorado region.

It was just a whole bunch of useless desert as far as they were concerned.

It wasn't nearly as good for farming as the middle of the Midwest, so the native peoples living there were left alone.

That is, until 1858, when something was discovered that suddenly made Colorado worth stealing from them.

Gold.

Now, the first American gold rush had been in California.

It started back in 1848.

But by 1855, it was over, and people were looking for a new get-rich-quick scheme.

The Colorado gold rush gave them exactly that, and with visions of wealth and fame in their minds, people flocked to Colorado by the thousands.

To help folks prepare for the journey, some people in the Midwest set up supply shops where gold seekers could buy wagons, supplies, and even oxen.

There was a time in the winter and spring of 1859 where towns along the Missouri River were recording upwards of 400 people a day passing through on their way to a better life.

It was a true migrant caravan in the literal sense.

Now we've all heard about mining towns before.

Wherever a bunch of people flocked to a place to dig in the ground, towns would spring up around them.

They typically existed to serve the needs of the gold seekers.

So things like boarding, alcohol, gambling, and supply stores, that sort of thing.

And one of those outfitting stations was a little place called Denver.

It started out as a dusty little supply town, and it wasn't really better or more special than any of the others that I can tell.

One newspaper in November of 1859 called Denver an unimportant place and not everyone made it rich.

In fact, a good majority of that white American migrant caravan that flocked to the area ended up leaving soon after because gold mining was hard work and they were just looking for a quick easy buck.

For the few who did find the shiny stuff though, their wildest dreams came true.

That gold changed their lives, and all of that left its mark on the town that would someday become the Mile High City.

But as you might expect, not everything was perfect.

Beneath all that glittering wealth, there was also a layer of darkness.

In a city as big as Denver, it's impossible to cover everything.

Thankfully, there are a handful of places that seem to play host to a bit more of the shadows than most others.

So that's where we'll focus today.

Places like the Crook-Patterson Mansion.

It gets its name from a guy named Thomas Crook, who worked as a merchant in the city, eventually going on to become a state senator.

And according to the bio on the mansion's website, he also maintained a hobby as an, and I quote, experimental plant breeder, which, I mean, sure, it's not a tabletop role-playing game, but apparently he loved it.

The mansion he built there went up in 1891.

It's crafted of red sandstone from the region and was designed to look like a French castle from the 1500s.

That's what rich people did back then, of course, use new money to copy old things and buy a sort of false history.

Crook, though, didn't stay in his castle long, selling it just two years later to Thomas and Kate Patterson.

Thomas also had a political career of his own, starting out as a territorial delegate back in 1874, all the way up to time as a U.S.

senator in the first decade of the 1900s.

After that, the home passed on to their daughter Margaret Margaret until 1924 when it was sold and converted into various businesses, like a music school and a radio station.

After that, it took on a life as an apartment building before finally getting converted into a boutique hotel about a decade ago.

And while that's a lot of mundane history, there's a lot that can happen in a place over the course of 130 years.

Stories get told, rumors are whispered, and things are experienced.

Things like the death of a woman named Tulene Soudan back in 1950.

According to the stories, she took her own life after suffering through a difficult miscarriage by sealing up her third-floor room and filling it with a cyanide-based pesticide gas.

And ever since, there have been reports of all sorts of sightings that seem to have their root in her story.

Over the years, many people have spotted the ghostly figure of a sad, mournful woman in various parts of the building.

Some people passing by on the street have glanced up to see her standing in one of the third floor windows, staring blankly toward them.

Others have heard the sound of a crying baby in the distance, but have never been able to track down the source.

Then there's the Brown Palace Hotel.

Built in 1892 in the Italian Renaissance style, it uses more of that same red sandstone and granite that makes up the bones of Colorado.

But one thing it wasn't made of was wood.

Wanting to avoid the various hotel fire tragedies that had plagued other cities, the builder, Henry Brown, used only iron and concrete for the structure, hoping it would make the place fireproof.

But while you can plan for specific things like fire, the hotel quickly became home to something a lot more unpredictable, human nature.

And in 1911, that manifested in the form of a deadly love triangle.

Isabel Patterson was a local woman married to a businessman named John Springer.

But rather than spend time at home, she had a suite of her own right there at the Brown Palace Hotel, where she she entertained not one, but two different lovers.

One of them was her husband's business partner, a guy named Frank Henwood, and the other, I kid you not, was a balloon pilot and adventurer named Sylvester von Phuhl.

Seriously.

Now, I don't know the finer details, like whether or not the lovers knew of each other's existence, or whether Isabel's husband John suspected anything.

Honestly, the fact that his wife used a suite at the Brown probably served as a big clue, but who knows?

But what I do know is that at some point in 1911, the balloon pilot Sylvester visited the husband John and showed him the love letters that Isabel had written for him, and then tried to blackmail him.

John confronted his wife and told her to take care of it.

So Isabel enlisted her other lover, Frank, to get the letters back.

Those two lovers met one evening at the bar downstairs in the Brown.

I would assume they were there to discuss the situation and maybe hand over the letters.

But instead, Frank pulled a gun and handed Sylvester a bullet, killing him and another innocent bystander in the room.

The subsequent trial might have seen Frank get convicted for murder and then saved from execution by none other than Isabel's husband, John.

But it's the stuff that's happened since the murder that people talk about the most.

Stories of unexplainable experiences that have filled the hearts of various guests there with fear.

Many stories talk about how lights in the hotel have a tendency to turn on and off on their own.

At least one person has seen what they could only describe as a shape beneath the carpet slowly crawling toward them.

And some guests have spotted the ghost of someone in an unusual uniform walking through the hall on the ground floor that's close to where the old railway ticket office once stood.

Back in the 1940s, one of the regular residents of the hotel was Louise Crawford Hill, a wealthy socialite who moved into room 904 after her husband passed away.

She lived there well into the 1950s before passing away herself and then years later the entire floor was renovated, which involves stripping each of the rooms down to the studs and clearing everything out, including room 904.

During the construction though, the switchboard operator there in the hotel began to report mysterious phone calls.

At first, it was probably just annoying.

They would hear the ringing, go to answer it at the switchboard, and there would be nothing on the other end of the call but static and bits of silence.

But the most frightening thing of all was where the calls appeared to be coming from.

According to the lights on the switchboard, they could be traced back to one specific place in the building in an area that should not have guests because of the construction.

The calls were coming from room 904.

It was created out of necessity.

If you remember from earlier, there was a long while there where the United States government didn't really have a use for Colorado, so they left the indigenous peoples alone.

A lot of Denver, it seems, was Arapaho land, used primarily as their winter homeland.

But as I said before, when gold was discovered in 1858, all of that changed.

That same year, the folks in the Denver area realized that they needed to bury their dead, so they set up the Mount Prospect Cemetery.

This wasn't a little plot behind someone's house, though.

No, Mount Prospect was a massive 160 acres.

Maybe they expected a lot of dead, or perhaps they were just planning for the future.

I don't really know.

A few years later, 40 acres of that land was sold off to become a Catholic burial ground known as Mount Calvary.

And then in 1872, the federal government sold the land to the city of Denver with the stipulation that the land there only ever be used as a cemetery and nothing else.

And for the next decade or so, that's what it was, a burial ground for the many dead of the city, reaching around 5,000 graves in total.

But remember, this was a big plot of land, covered in trees and shadows, and it quickly became haunted by the outlaws looking to take advantage of folks who passed through it.

Many of the city's poor and unhoused began to set up camp there too, and this was a problem that the neighbors who lived around the cemetery wanted to fix.

Why?

Because they were rich and they didn't like like looking at the lower class.

So they used their wealth and power to have Congress change the restrictions on the land, and in the early 1890s, it was done.

They decided that they would use the space as a park instead, something the rich folks could enjoy from their windows, and so the city set about moving all 5,000 burials to another place, nearby Riverside Cemetery.

They started by mailing letters to living family members telling them that they had a couple of months to dig up and transport their dead loved ones to Riverside.

Honestly, can you imagine getting that letter?

I have a hard enough time with the 30 days they give me to remember to pay my electric bill.

These folks though had to move Grandma's grave.

A lot of the bodies though weren't claimed and so they hired a man named E.P.

McGovern to move the rest.

He was a local undertaker which probably qualified him and they paid him the equivalent of about $30 per body.

So in 1892 he got to work.

Except, well, he saw his own get-rich quick scheme taking shape.

Instead of moving one body out and collecting 30 bucks for it, he brought in extra coffins and then divided body parts up among them, essentially multiplying his profits.

He and his crew did this for months until he was caught and exposed by the local paper, the Denver Republican.

The headline on March 19th of 1893 was, The Work of Ghouls, which, as you'd imagine, ignited a firestorm of outrage.

McGovern was fired, but instead of replacing him, the city just sort of called the job done and moved on with their plans for the park, which left as many as 2,000 graves beneath the topsoil.

And today, that's where they remain.

So if you ever visit the beautiful Cheeseman Park, named for a pioneer of the city, Walter Cheeseman, just remember that you're never really alone.

And that's how people have felt over the years.

Even back while it was still a graveyard, people were reporting unusual activity.

One gravedigger claimed that he was inside a new grave, shovel in hand, when a ghost literally jumped onto his shoulders.

He apparently left immediately and called in sick the next day.

And honestly, who could blame him?

Since the park's construction, though, a number of people have reported feeling like they are being watched there.

A few have reported physical altercations with invisible forces that want to push them toward the ground.

Others have heard disembodied voices that seem to whisper up through the grass, and a whole menagerie of ghostly figures have been spotted throughout the park.

Maybe the most frightening of all, the folks who have lived lived in the homes that surround the park have also reported strange things over the years, as if the spirits are migrating into other parts of the city.

Some residents have claimed to hear spirits knocking on their doors and windows at night, and even unexplainable events that have taken place inside their homes.

Clearly, rest in peace isn't a slogan that accurately represents Cheeseman Park, and it goes beyond that.

Even the smaller Catholic cemetery, Mount Calvary, eventually converted into something else as well, Denver's Botanic Gardens, and a good number of the bodies there were left in the ground as well.

Heck, as recently as last year, workers who were replacing a pond lining stumbled upon a human arm bone.

It's no wonder that people there still report phantom visions, odd smells, and the occasional touch from an invisible hand.

It seems that we can cover up the past, but the shadows never really go away.

The past is complicated.

No matter where you go or what culture you dig into, there are stories that both delight and disgust.

Like a gilded box containing human bones, the places we live tend to be pretty worlds built on shadow.

Denver represents the best and worst of Colorado.

It plays host to evidence of all the wealth and success of those early pioneers who came there over a century and a half ago, their massive mansions dotting the landscape like big reminders of a bygone era.

But the fact that it exists at all, right there on land taken away from people who originally lived there, is also a sad monument to the dangers of human ambition.

The story of Cheeseman Park is probably the best example of that duality.

Sure, it's gorgeous.

Who doesn't love a big open piece of nature in the middle of a sprawling city, right?

But knowing the dark deeds that took place along the road to its construction has a way of leaving a bad taste in our mouths.

It's beautiful and built on death.

And it's a legacy that has made an impact far beyond Denver, too.

Back in the 1960s, a man named Russell Hunter moved into one of the old homes situated along Cheeseman Park and almost immediately began to experience violent, unexplainable activity.

In fact, according to him, it was the house's haunted past that allowed him to get such a good deal on the rent there in the first place.

Now we probably need to take the stories with a grain of salt.

I imagine the neighbors all helped repeat the old stories, keeping them alive for a new generation, so it's not hard to imagine Hunter hearing them after moving in.

Which parts are pure imagination and which parts are truth?

That's better left for you to decide.

Hunter described how the house would often be filled with loud crashing noises that he could never track down.

Faucets, lights, and doors all seemed to take on a life of their own.

He even reported that sometimes the very walls of the house would vibrate as if a massive train were passing right by on the street.

There's one story Hunter told about finding a secret staircase that led to a forgotten bedroom.

In there, he said he found a child's diary that mentioned being very sick and playing with a favorite red rubber ball.

Days after discovering this macabre space, Hunter claimed that a red rubber ball materialized out of thin air and dropped from the top of the spiral staircase in the house.

There were more violent experiences too.

Hunter reported that a glass door exploded right in front of him, cutting his arms and face so deeply that he needed surgery.

Even the ceiling over his bed seemed to suffer some supernatural destruction.

Russell Hunter eventually moved out and years later found himself working on a script for a psychological horror film called The Changeling.

As he helped write it, he began to include elements from his frightening stay in that Denver mansion beside Cheeseman Park, using those stories to flesh out the supernatural horror elements of the film.

And he left a little signpost in the script for future generations to follow.

If anyone is in doubt about where the inspiration came from, all they have to do is look at the name of the house the film's main character lives in.

They called it the Cheeseman House.

Denver is more than just the mile-high city.

I hope today's tour through Colorado's dark history has helped you see the nuance and complexity of everything that's come before.

I know it's made me look at green public spaces in a whole new light, that's for sure.

But our tour today isn't finished just yet.

There's one more character from Colorado's past that needs mention, partly for their legacy, but also because of the rumors that still persist.

Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it.

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Margaret was born in 1867, back in the early days of the Colorado Gold Rush and the transition to silver that followed it.

Her parents were Irish immigrants who settled in Missouri and started a family in the 1860s, which is where Margaret was born, but her story would take her to so many other places.

Fun fact, she was born in the Missouri town of Hannibal, the same place Mark Twain was born and raised about three decades earlier.

Maybe that's why she believed that regular people could do amazing things.

After all, it had already been modeled for everyone in town.

At the age of 18, she moved to Colorado, to the mining town of Leadville.

It had started less than a decade earlier as one of the prime spots for the silver mining industry.

So by the time she arrived in 1885, it was already buzzing with excitement.

Margaret herself later said that she went looking for a rich husband.

Instead, she found Jim, 13 years her senior, who was dirt poor, and the couple fell in love and soon married.

In the tug of war between love and money, Margaret picked love, and you have to respect her for that.

Thankfully, the money showed up later.

It seems that Jim's engineering skills were key to discovering a massive seam of silver ore at a local mine, and soon enough, his employer awarded him a huge stock bonus and a position on their board of directors.

Almost overnight, Margaret and Jim went from poor miners to high society.

She never let it get to her head though.

She frequently worked in the soup kitchen that served the poorest of the mine workers.

Yes, they bought a massive house, and yes, they also bought a summer home.

But she didn't sit around in the lap of luxury.

Instead, she gave lots of their money away and fought for the rights of women in her community.

In 1912, she was on a vacation in Paris when she received word that one of her grandchildren was deathly ill, so she booked passage to return as quickly as she could.

Tragically, that ship encountered trouble and sank before reaching the east coast of America.

But Margaret somehow survived.

More than that, that, she fought to pull survivors into her lifeboats and even managed fundraising for the poorest of the survivors before a rescue ship could even arrive.

She managed to collect the modern equivalent of close to $300,000, all because she cared for the people around her.

Today, her home is a museum dedicated to her accomplishments, which include fighting fiercely for women's suffrage.

But those who have visited the place have spotted other things that are less encouraging.

It seems that many have seen the ghostly figure of a woman in a Victorian dress wandering the halls of the mansion.

Caretakers over the years have found furniture in the house mysteriously rearranged and light bulbs that have been found unscrewed and removed from their lamps.

Some visitors have even caught the scent of pipe tobacco, something that's blamed on Margaret's husband, Jim.

Back in 1960, a Broadway musical took to the stage, written and composed by Meredith Wilson, best known for the music man and the holiday song It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas, and its title gave Margaret a nickname that she never had in life.

And while a lot of the story is fictional, it highlights her survival of that devastating shipwreck, the sinking of the Titanic.

Oh, and the name of the musical about her life?

The unsinkable Molly Brown.

This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research by Cassandra De Alba and music by Chad Lawson.

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