Glenwood Springs, Colorado 1986

The old mountain towns of Colorado are rich in history, steeped in hardship and tragedy, and heavily populated by resident spirits. I don’t know of a single hotel that doesn’t boast of one or two - along with each old mine, several bars, a few cabins, a castle, all the bed and breakfasts, and a bookstore or two. Stay a week up there, and I’ll be surprised if you don’t return home sure you saw one yourself.

Most of downtown Glenwood Springs - an area extending about eight blocks square - was built in the 1800’s. It’s a charming neighborhood of mostly old Victorian buildings and narrow tree-lined streets, and after a while, you don’t notice the rotten egg aroma of the sulphur anymore.

But not every house is decked out in gingerbread trim, and some of them obviously started out as single-room dwellings that were added to, one lopsided room at a time. The living room might be forty years older than a bedroom, sixty years older than a bath, and a hundred years older than a skylight. There may be two or three inches of difference in height from one floor to the next, or it may slope as much twenty degrees. They look as precarious as a house of cards, and that’s the way mine was.

I was fond of the house. The only source of heat was a woodstove in the living room, but it wasn’t very big. Quaint, and older than Doc Holliday’s ghost, it sat back on the lot, high on the hill, to the side of a bigger older house, and afforded a great view of the spires rising from the historic train station half a block away. The house would have been twice as big if I could have used the somewhat-aboveground basement it tottered on, but the only entrance to it was from outside.

While basements have never been high on my list of places to visit before I die, my curiosity always gets the best of me. I can’t stand knowing there’s vacant space in my house and not know what’s in it, so I went exploring. It was cold and dank down there, probably thirty degrees cooler than the rest of the house, even in summer, and I credited it with the goose bumps that rose on my skin and the hair that prickled the back of my neck. Sadly, I found nothing worthy of taking to the Antique Roadshow. The entire space contained little more than a dark niche where old mason jars teeming with botulism were entombed on a shelf. I was afraid to even touch them.

I don’t know how many nights later I woke from a nightmare, sure that someone stood at the foot of my bed watching me. Though I saw nothing, it was impossible to go back to sleep.

A couple months later, a cute little Victorian house down the block became vacant and I watched diligently to see if it would go up for sale or rent. Finally there were signs of life inside again. The man inside was middle-aged, thin, professionally dressed in painter’s whites, and an altogether decent looking fellow who graciously allowed me in to have a look inside. It was going to be sold, he said, but hinted I might not want it.

“Why not?” I asked, as I came back down the stairs. I thought it was a darling little house.

“It has a functional obsolescence,” he replied, stretching to cut-in near the ceiling with his paintbrush.

“What’s that?”

He paused, pushing up on the brim of his hat. “Where’s the only bedroom?” he asked.

I looked behind me. “Up there,” I answered.

“Uh huh. Where’s the only bathroom?”

It was behind the kitchen. “I see what you mean. What a shame.”

“That’s the case with a lot of these old houses around here,” he said, gesturing with his brush. “I used to live just down the street myself, twenty years ago.”

“Really? In which house?”

“One on the other side of the street, there. The one that sits way back on the lot, beside the big yellow gingerbread. A few houses shy of the corner. A woman hung herself in the basement there, back in the 40’s they say. Every once in a while, I used wake up with the feeling she was standing at the foot of the bed watching me sleep.”