Haunted Longmont

INTRODUCTION

It has been over one hundred years since the level of popular interest in the subject of ghosts and the paranormal has been as high as it is today. The American public has long been fascinated with stories of haunted houses, haunted objects and—yes—haunted people. With Ghost Hunters and Ghost Adventures garnering massive ratings on television and movies such as The Conjuring ruling at the box office, it appears that we are surrounded by the spirits of the unquiet dead, seemingly lurking out of sight within every dark corner.

Sharing in this passion for the paranormal, I began to investigate claims of ghosts and haunted houses back in the mid-1990s, when the only public awareness of such things came via the publishing world. I am also a transplanted Englishman, who relocated to the United States in 1999. Longmont turned out to be a friendly, welcoming sort of place, and I have made my home there and put down roots.

After a brief stint with a local paranormal organization, I split away and decided to found my own. Along with my wife, Laura, I co-founded the Boulder County Paranormal Research Society in 2006, with a view toward tracking down the ghosts of Colorado’s Front Range. Particular emphasis was spent on my adoptive hometown, whose historic buildings and back streets have provided an endless source of fascination and discovery.

For every storied historic building and public facility that my team and I have investigated, such as the beautiful Dickens Opera House and Tavern, there have also been calls for help from everyday folks living in everyday houses, some of whom are scared half out of their wits by paranormal activity taking place right in their own homes.

Collected within the pages of this volume are stories of the ghostly and the macabre. You will encounter the spirits of those who died peacefully and may have returned to visit places that they loved during their mortal lifetimes. You will also find those who met tragic—often violent—endings and whose spirits tend to manifest themselves in equally disturbing ways.

Researching the paranormal can be a murky field of endeavor at best. Particularly when one tries to look backward in history over more than a few short decades, sources of information can be at variance with one another or difficult to pin down exactly. Because ghost stories are so often found in the realm of urban legends and myths, passed on from person to person in the age-old tradition of oral storytelling, facts become blurred and distorted in the same way as they do during a game of Telephone. I have gone to great pains to research the cases that are recounted in this book, in as thorough a manner as was possible, but inevitably, one or two small factual errors may have crept in. These are almost certainly attributable to me and not to any of the people who generously gave up their time to be interviewed.

When writing this book, my intent was to cover a broad spectrum of cases. Some of them are grounded a little more firmly in cold, hard fact than are others. This is partly because, in my role as director of the Boulder County Paranormal Research Society, I have actually spent many hours overnighting in some of the buildings mentioned, working diligently with my colleagues to investigate the claims of ghostly occurrences. But I have not had the opportunity to do so in every instance. For example, although I have been fortunate enough to personally investigate the haunting of the Dickens Opera House and Tavern, its counterpart (the Dickens Manor Apartments) is now a series of private dwellings and is therefore not open to conducting an overnight ghost hunt. I have interviewed witnesses personally where possible.

And so, this book runs the gamut between fact and fable but tries to stick to the established facts where they were available. Many of the places about which you are soon to read happen to be open to the public, and I strongly encourage you to go and check them out for yourself.

Lastly, my sincere thanks are due to you, the reader. In parting with your hard-earned cash for this book, you will hopefully be happy to hear that 10 percent of the royalties for this book are being donated by the author to the Longmont Humane Society. Thank you for helping the animals of Longmont to stay safe and well.

I hope that you are sitting comfortably, with a glass of your favorite beverage close at hand. Close the curtains and turn on the lights to help keep out the darkness. I would like to thank you for choosing to join me on this guided tour through the haunted history of one of Colorado’s most colorful cities.

It’s time to go and introduce ourselves to the ghosts of Longmont.

Chapter 1

STAN, STAN, THE SANITATION MAN

THE OLD CITY SANITATION BUILDING, 103 MAIN STREET—CURRENTLY CHEESE IMPORTERS

Sitting on the northwest corner of the intersection between First Avenue and Main Street, directly facing what was once the city’s turkey processing plant, is an unassuming building that is currently home to a company named Cheese Importers. Hundreds of Longmont residents pass by along Main Street every day, with many of them giving little or no thought whatsoever to the colorful backstory of this fine old brick structure.

Cheese Importers is a homegrown Colorado family business, ever since the day in 1976 when Lyman White and his wife, Linda, both veterans of the natural food industry, decided that they could provide better cheese to the public than what was currently available, the vast majority of which was artificially processed.

The company took off, outgrowing its premises and requiring a little more operating space as the demand for its product grew. It took quite a while to find the perfect location, but time and circumstance came together, and the perfect place soon became available in the form of 103 Main Street.

After some negotiation with the powers that be, the Whites were fortunate enough to obtain a long-term lease on what was formerly the old City of Longmont museum storage facility.

Cheese Importers at 103 Main Street was formerly a city facility and is said to be haunted by the ghost of a former employee. Author’s collection.

Despite Lyman’s tragic death in a motorcycle accident, Cheese Importers has remained a family business, with the managerial baton being passed to the custodianship of the White children, Samm and Clara Natasha, with Linda still retaining an active role in guiding this very successful commercial enterprise.

Built in 1931, 103 Main Street was originally a diesel-fueled power plant that used five massive generators to supply the city of Longmont with electricity up until the late 1960s. The city sanitation department took it over in 1979, which is when the stories of ghostly activity began to appear.

In an article titled Familiar Haunts, journalist Matt Reed of the Longmont Times-Call newspaper reports that Sanitation Department workers who were alone in the building at night would often hear their names being called out in an unidentified man’s voice—despite the doors being tightly locked and a motion sensor–equipped alarm system being in operation at the time.

The metal doors of lockers used to store personal effects and clothing were known to slam open and shut repeatedly, despite there being nobody within touching distance. The clanking of chain links moving is another sound that employees grew familiar with, and most believed the sound came from a chain-link hoist that was suspended from the ceiling. The article quotes Sanitation Director Tim Lucas as saying, It’s distinctly coming from inside the building. That doggone hoist is a regular occurrence.

Intrigued by the ghostly tales, I visited the building at 103 Main Street back in 2008 when I had just recently founded the Boulder County Paranormal Research Society and was actively seeking out potential cases to investigate. At that time, it was still home to the overflow storage of the Longmont Museum. That doggone hoist to which Tim Lucas refers is a metal chain and pulley hoist, which is mounted high up on the bay wall inside. The museum staff confirmed to me that the chains are often heard to clank and squeal, as if being pulled by unseen hands. I inspected the pulley-and-chain setup, and the thing that struck me at first glance was that it would be extremely difficult to reach without setting up a ladder first.

There’s a difference between the normal settling sounds a building makes and the strange noises you hear in here, says Tim Lucas at the conclusion of Matt Reed’s article. I don’t think you’ll catch any one of my crew coming down here at night.

That sounded like just the sort of thing I was looking for. To my surprise, city officials gave me permission to conduct an overnight investigation (with the caveat that I didn’t write about it so long as the building was a museum storage facility), and I jumped at the opportunity. We were blessed with an overabundance of personnel: a total of fourteen investigators and three staff members from the City of Longmont.

My first question to the staff members who were present at the time was: Who do you think the ghost is? They told me that former city sanitation workers still dropped by the place from time to time, and almost every one spoke of the resident ghost with something close to affection. The prevailing theory seemed to be that he was the ghost of a former sanitation worker who loved his place of employment enough to want to revisit it after his death, a theory that is quite plausible. No records could be found of a death occurring on the property itself, so the city workers had gone ahead and given their spook a fond nickname. They called him Stanley.

Investigating the property turned out to be quite the challenge. It was crammed to the roof with some of the