Colorado

Denver

Bradmar Mansion

The haunting of this Tudor mansion began when an exposed ceiling beam was split by a ghost. The thirty three room mansion was built in 1920
by department store owner George Gano. When he died, Hubert Work bought the house and married Gano's widow Ethyl. For may years before
her death, Ethyl told friends and relatives that when she died she wanted to lie in state in front of the fireplace. She promised that on the night she
would split a certain exposed cross beam on the ceiling above her coffin. The beam split just and she predicted. After Work's died, no one lived in
the house until 1962, when it was purchased by Dr. Robert Bradley, a nationally respected obstetrician. Soon after moving in, the Bradleys
experienced ghostly presences, levitating objects, overwhelming odors, unexplained footsteps, and moaning sounds. Heavy chandeliers in the
house jumped around "like cork bobbers in water." Jewelry mysteriously disappeared and turned up later at a different location. Dr. Bradley
consulted the nation's foremost psychic at the time, Arthur Ford. The medium visited Bradmar and identified the spirits as Hubert and Ethyl Work.
Their experiences convinced the Bradleys of the reality of spiritual forces, and Dr. Bradley wrote a book, Psychic Phenomena: Revelations and
Experiences, dealing his personal theories. Bradley sold the house in 1980. The people who bought it could not tolerate the paranormal activity
and moved out after only a few months.

Chessman Park

This innocent looking city park is built on top of a graveyard. The Mount Prospect graveyard, which came to be known as Boot Hill, was created in
1858. In 1873 officials renamed the place City Cemetery but buried only criminals, transients, and epidemic victims there. In 1893 the city gave
notice that all bodies had to be removed within ninety days. Needless to say, most of the graves remained untouched. The city hired an
undertaker to dig up the six to ten thousand remaining bodies, put them in one foot by three and a half foot pine boxes, and deliver them for burial
at Riverside Cemetery. It was a horrifying sight. Workers broke corpses into pieces to get them to fit into the mini-caskets, body parts littered the
ground and got mixed together in the process. Many of the graves were looted by the men digging them up. During the work, psychics warned
workers the dead would return unless a short prayer was uttered for each casket, but no one listened to them. One worker, removing valuable
brass from the coffins, ran hysterically from the graveyard saying a ghost jumped on his back. People in neighboring horses reported confused
spirits wandering through their homes or appearing in mirrors. A huge scandal erupted, and Mayor Platt Rogers ordered all work halted while an
investigation was conducted. No one was able to sort out the mess the workers left behind. The remaining bodies were plowed under, and grass
and trees were planted. Today, psychics detect and undertone of sadness and confusion at the site, and some say they can hear a low moaning
sound coming from the restless ground.

The Catholic section of the original cemetery was removed in an orderly fashion by church members and is now occupied by the Botanical
Gardens. The Jewish section was also completely cleared and is now called Congress Park. Chessman Park, named for a prominent citizen, is in
central Denver, in the Civic Center area. The park is bounded by 8th and 13th avenues, near University boulevard.

Bibliography: Hauck, Dennis. Haunted Places: Ghost abodes, sacred sites, UFO landings, and other supernatural locations. New York: Penguin
Book, 1994.