I grew up in Guthrie, but I live in Denver. I came out here for college and ended up staying. One of the things that keeps me here is the city’s complex history, much of it buried or unknown to those of us who didn’t grow up here.
When I started writing White Trash Warlock I was living near a hospital in the process of demolition, and that certainly helped inspire the story, but beyond that, other pieces of Denver history crept in as I researched them. (It doesn’t help that my best friend is 72 and has lived here her entire life).
Denver is full of ghosts, or at least ghost stories, and frontier history that creeps in here or there.
A close read of Warlock by a city resident will hint at places that don’t exist, at least not anymore. You’ll find conspiracy theories and a few easter eggs about Denver’s history, what is real and what used to be.
Here are a couple of my favorite haunted locations from the Mile High City, some of which show up in the book:
1. Cheesman Park
Cheesman backs up to the Botanic Gardens. It’s a green patch in the city with a cool pavilion and runners paths. Like the gardens, the park used to be a cemetery, and before that, an Arapaho Indian burial ground. I’d heard the stories for years but a trip to the historical society gave me the chance to verify it.
In the 1900s the cemetery was full of squatters with people living in the crypts. A fire destroyed much of the neighborhood, leading the city to evict the living and the dead. They shifted the graves to two other cemeteries (see Riverside below), but the contractors either failed or couldn’t remove all of the bodies. The Gardens often find bodies when they engage in new construction*, and the story says that if you walk through Cheesman at the right time, you can see the rows of graves. I’ve walked the park at dawn and under a full moon, but I’ll never be able to say if what I felt or saw was my imagination or the ghosts haunting the green.
One piece of history that I was able to verify is that there were restrooms beneath the park pavilion which have since been filled in with earth and sealed away.
If you want to learn more about Cheesman haunts or the neighborhood around it, The Ghosts of Denver: Capitol Hill by Phil H. Goodstein is a popular book on the topic.
*https://www.denverpost.com/2008/11/07/old-grave-halts-work-at-denver-botanic-gardens/
2. Lakeside Amusement Park
Lakeside is a fascinating place, a fading wonderland worth a day of exploring and a few dollars of support. The park is full of history and signs of its regal past fill every corner. The art deco snack bar was originally part of Union Station. The tragic death of a patron haunts the Wild Chipmunk, but I rode it on a dare, banging around a metal bullet with two little padding. It was definitely a thrill, and I’ll always long to visit the funhouse, which sadly no longer exists.
David Forsyth’s Denver’s Lakeside Amusement Park: From the White City Beautiful to a Century of Fun is an excellent study of the park’s origins, history, and decline. For some pictures and a briefer history, here’s an article from the Westword, our local community newspaper:
https://www.westword.com/arts/lakeside-amusement-park-has-survived-110-years-of-ups-and-downs-10547881
If you’re ever in Denver when Lakeside is open, definitely take the time to explore it.
3. Riverside Cemetery
Many of the gravestones and bodies from Cheesman were migrated to Riverside Cemetery. The place is since abandoned and neglected, though volunteers work to keep it free of trash. Unfortunately in recent years people have taken to stealing statuary and prying off metal plaques, leaving Riverside in a sad state. The lack of watering due to recent droughts has killed most of the trees, adding to the abandoned air.
The style of the gravestones is fascinating, with a combination of Egyptian obelisks, log cabins, and the occasional weeping angel. Its proximity to power plants, a sewage treatment plant, and a salvage yard break the illusion of peaceful rest, but the place is worth a walk if the wind is blowing in the right direction. As the you study the graves and explore the city, note the names. You’ll see streets named after them, more hints of the past peeking through.
4. LoDo (Lower Downtown)
LoDo is a popular spot for drinking and dining, especially among the young. The brick buildings put the city’s public history on clear display, but there are unseen layers beneath the futuristic Union Station.
A ghost tour of LoDo introduced me to some of the area’s history. There are tunnels between Union Station into some of the older buildings, supposedly for the purpose of landowners being able to visit the downtown brothels without being seen.
As I dug deeper I found evidence of a more tragic history, namely an anti-Chinese race riot that destroyed the city’s Chinatown in 1880, something many of the native Denverites I spoke to hadn’t known about either.*
*https://www.cpr.org/2019/09/02/on-halloween-nearly-150-years-ago-an-anti-chinese-riot-broke-out-in-denver/