"They're here!"
Haunted Boulder rounds up bold spirits from the foot of the Flatirons
by P.W. Miller
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(buzz@boulderweekly.com)

You're feeling energy all the time," psychic Mary Bell Nyman explained.

On the second floor of the Harbeck House-home of the Boulder History Museum since 1985, and Haunted Boulder: Ghostly Tales From the Foot of the Flatirons' release reception on Thursday, Oct. 17-she and her Psychic Horizons colleague Krista Socash were helping others explore their own powers. Volunteers closed their eyes and felt each other's auras in this, Boulder's "Original Haunted House," at 12th and Euclid. Meanwhile, one floor below, local authors and fellow CU alums Roz Brown and Ann Alexander Leggett busily signed paperback copies of Haunted Boulder, a first-of-its-kind blend of local history and parapsychology exploring Boulder's haunted houses and otherworldly legends, old and not-so old.

Using spider web and radio frequency analogies, Nyman explained how some are more tuned-in to the vibes of the spirit world than others. Then, she encouraged skeptics and budding psychics alike to feel the warm presence of a masculine ghost apparently lurking in the corner of an adjacent room.

"What the hell."

After winding through antiques and reaching the corner, I hastily waved my palm through the air. "Nothing," my cool hand surmised. I stepped back, chuckled.

Truth be told, though, I wasn't all that ready to shake hands with spirits in the material world.

"You have to suspend what we refer to as a Western reality kind of thing," says Brown, an award-winning broadcast journalist, freelance writer and staff writer for Ball Aerospace and Technologies. "You have to suspend your idea, your notion, of reality, and maybe think that there is another plane of activity going on right next to you that you could be unaware of."

Built in 1899 by wealthy New York businessman and stockbroker J.H. Harbeck as a summer home, the Harbeck House sporadically housed a family living on a plane not too unfamiliar to some contemporary Boulderites. Mrs. Katherine Harbeck, fearing illness, covered her face in public, and the Harbecks treated their three dogs (Beauty, Jim and Rover) like royalty.

"When the dogs died, they were treated to expensive funerals, complete with caskets, hearses, and headstones," writes co-author Leggett in Chapter 5. "The dogs were buried in a plot in Katherine's garden on the southwest side of the house."

Mr. Harbeck died in 1910, but his wife hired a caretaker-one fond of ghost stories-to maintain the property.

"The house was closed up," Brown adds, "but she wouldn't sell it because her pets were buried in the backyard. They didn't have any children, so their pets were like their children. She didn't want somebody to come mess with the graves of the pets, so she just kept the house for 30 years and lived in New York."

Mrs. Harbeck never returned to Colorado. A revolving door at her New York City hotel home crushed her in 1931, according to Haunted Boulder. Older generations recall strange sightings, and some psychics feel a feminine, or the aforementioned masculine, presence to this day. (Others at the signing later noted strange occurrences associated with the electricity.)

Time's scythe has trimmed the terror of the book's older and better-known stories, but Brown and Leggett have rehashed and revealed recent hauntings that provide a contemporary edge, and balance, to Haunted Boulder. On the older material, Brown says, "The houses had more history. People really knew those stories well, or a lot of people had lived in those houses that had some experiences. We made those into the longer chapters in the front, and then the stuff in the back was pretty much, 'That's as much as there is.'"

Some notable stories include:

• The Ghost of William Tull (Boulder Creek near Broadway bridge): Lynched for horse theft on a cottonwood tree in 1867, the Arapaho Indians-raised Tull, still quite unhappy, was apparently seen by several reputable creekside strollers in the 1940s.
• The Mystery at Macky (Macky Auditorium, CU Boulder): In the summer of 1966, 20-year-old organ student Elaura Jaquette was beaten to death in Macky's west tower by Longmont custodian Joseph Dyer Morse, currently serving life. Screams and organ music have been heard coming from the isolated, fourth-story room.
• The Obsessive Boy Scout (Boulder Historical Society museum): Uniform-obsessed outcast Clinton Dumm (b. 1892, d. 1970) joined the Boy Scouts as a middle-aged man. Power problems and strange disruptions apparently followed his merit sash and scouting uniform from a Scout commissioner's house to the museum.
• The Woman in White (Chautauqua): According to legend, a content woman in a long white dress carrying a parasol and gloves has been seen roaming the more than 100-year-old Chautauqua Park for years.
• Divine Intervention (Boulder's Spanish Towers): In 1983, Sid Wells, the boyfriend of CU student Shauna Redford-Robert Redford's daughter-was shot in the head in his Towers apartment. College students living in the complex in the late '90s reported strange occurrences to psychic Hope Hewetson, who says of the relatively unknown haunting, "The spirit in the apartment was worried about where he saw the boys going with their lives. He believed they were involved in drugs and was fearful for them... "
• Grandpa in the Tuff Shed (Nederland): Four Boulder psychics visited Nederland's cryogenically frozen Bredo Morstoel in 1996. "Some of the psychics said there's nothing here, and then some of them said-what they say in the book-that he was neither happy nor unhappy, but he thought it was a real waste of time," Brown adds.

Whether open to the energy or not, a believer that ghosts find people or people find ghosts, or just a bitter skeptic who's yet to be goosed by a spirit in the stairwell, this Halloween (Samhain, All Hallows, Spirit Night) season Haunted Boulder is the faithfully researched, sometimes hilarious ("The Obsessive Boy Scout"), sometimes truly freaky ("Haunted Hotel") guide book to Boulder and the beyond. And in this materialistic, youth-obsessed community it's good to toy with the idea that you just might live forever without having to obsessively Roller-blade up and down the Creek-especially when Boulder's possibly only known lynching victim might be lurking nearby.

Meanwhile, obvious, and internationally known, locations of recent terror will likely comprise Boulder's ghost stories in decades to come. But what about the rest? What other newer buildings will join the creaky architectural gems of haunted Boulder?

"Are we going to have the Table Mesa suburbs haunted next?" Brown laughs, also tossing out the idea of aging school buildings. "I don't know. At some point they'll be enough souls that pass through those houses that I suppose we'll have suburbia legends."

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